Off the Itinerary — Bonus Chapter

Room Fourteen (Revisited)
by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place during Alex and Mia’s anniversary weekend, months after the epilogue of Off the Itinerary. Contains explicit sexual content. 18+ only.

The key card said Room 14.

Same room. Same converted carriage house at the far edge of the property, set apart from the main resort by the gravel path I’d walked a hundred times in my memory since the last time my feet were actually on it. Same sea grass bending in the offshore wind. Same wooden door with the brass number plate. Same everything.

Except me. Except him. Except the fact that the last time I’d stood on this threshold, I’d been a man holding his heart behind glass, and now I was a man who’d let someone shatter the glass and hadn’t bothered to sweep up the pieces because the person who broke it was the same person who held every shard.

I unlocked the door.

The room opened up around me like a scene from a dream I’d been having for six months—vaulted ceiling, whitewashed beams, wide plank floors, the French doors cracked open to let in the salt air and the low, rhythmic crash of the Atlantic. The clawfoot tub behind the half-wall, gleaming in the afternoon light. The loveseat in the corner that was still too small for a child, let alone two grown men.

And the bed.

The king bed. Center of the room. White duvet, mountain of pillows, the same mattress that had held us the first time Connor Hayes touched me and the first time I let myself hope and the first time either of us admitted that what was happening between us wasn’t practice and never had been.

Connor came in behind me, both bags in his hands because he’d insisted on carrying mine even though I’d told him I had two functioning arms. He set them down, looked around, and stopped.

“They gave us the same room,” he said, staring at the bed like it owed him a confession.

“I requested it.”

He turned. “You requested it?”

“When Mia sent the anniversary weekend details, I called the resort and asked for Room Fourteen specifically.” I dropped my bag by the closet—left side, his territory now, our sides established six months ago and never renegotiated. “I have a sentimental attachment to this mattress.”

“You have a sentimental attachment to what happened on this mattress.”

“I have a sentimental attachment to what’s going to happen on this mattress. Tonight. In approximately—” I checked my watch. “—however long it takes you to stop staring at the bed and start taking your clothes off.”

Connor set the bags down. Walked to the door. Closed it. Turned the deadbolt. The click echoed in the quiet room like the period at the end of a sentence.

“That’s a good start,” I said.

He crossed the room in three strides—not rushed, not frantic, with the measured, purposeful gait of a man who knew exactly where he was going and exactly what he intended to do when he got there—and kissed me.

Not the tentative, trembling kiss of six months ago. This was the kiss of a man who had been thinking about this specific room in this specific resort for weeks—planning it, anticipating it, filing it under one of his mental tabs—and was now executing with the focused precision of someone who had turned desire into a project and the project was me.

His hands found my waist. Pulled me flush against him, chest to chest, hip to hip. He was already half-hard through his jeans, and the evidence of his arousal pressed against my thigh sent a spike of heat straight through my core.

“I want to recreate it. The first night.” He pulled back enough to look at me, and his eyes were dark and intent, the pupils blown wide. “I want to walk you through it. Every step. But this time, I’m not the one learning.”

“I want to show you what it felt like. Being on the other side. Being the one who’s guided. You spent that whole night taking care of me. You were so busy leading that you never got to just—receive.”

The sentence landed in my chest like a key turning a lock I didn’t know was still closed. Because he was right. I was always the guide. The experienced one. Even with Connor—even after six months of the best sex of my life—I led. Not because he couldn’t, but because leading was how I stayed safe. How I controlled the vulnerability.

“Okay,” I said. My voice was barely there. “Show me.”

“First, I’m going to kiss you. And I need you to stop thinking.”

“You’re always thinking. You’re reading me right now—monitoring my reactions, calibrating what I need. Stop. You don’t need to perform for me. Just feel it.”

My own words. The exact words I’d said to him in this room six months ago, reflected back with the precision of a man who’d memorized every syllable because they’d changed his life.

He kissed me. And it was different—he wasn’t kissing me to start something. He was kissing me to take over.

“Let me.”

He undressed me slowly. His mouth following his fingers down—my jaw, the hollow of my throat, the notch of my collarbone. “You have a freckle here,” he murmured against my collarbone. “Right side. I noticed it the first morning. I spent the entire day pretending I hadn’t cataloged its exact location.”

“You cataloged a freckle.”

“I cataloged everything.” He pressed his mouth to the spot—a kiss, then his tongue, then a scrape of teeth that made my stomach contract.

He pushed my shirt off. His hands spread flat across my chest, and he looked at me with the focused, reverent expression of a man studying a body he’d been given access to and still couldn’t believe was his.

“Lie back.”

Connor undressed himself. Not rushed—deliberately, watching my face while he did it. Shirt off. Belt unbuckled—the metallic sound hitting my nervous system like a starter pistol. Everything else, discarded, and then he was above me, naked and hard, and I was lying on a bed in a room that had changed my life, and the surrender of it was the most erotic thing I’d experienced in thirty years of having sex.

He moved down my body. Methodically. His mouth on my chest—tongue circling one nipple, then teeth, then the flat of his tongue again. He’d mapped this. Filed it. And now he was executing with devastating accuracy, and I was moaning openly because his mouth on me was making calibration impossible.

His hand wrapped around my cock. No preamble—just his fist, warm and certain, closing around me with a grip that was exactly right because he’d spent six months learning exactly right. He stroked me slow, long pulls ending with a twist at the head that made my toes curl.

He took me into his mouth, and the rest of my composure vaporized. Six months of practice had turned Connor Hayes into something I didn’t have adequate vocabulary for. His mouth was hot and tight and skilled, reading my body in real time, adjusting pressure and angle and rhythm based on my sounds.

He pulled off slowly. Looked up at me with swollen lips and dark eyes and a string of saliva connecting his mouth to me, and the visual was so obscenely beautiful that I had to grip the sheets to keep from coming.

“Do you know what you sound like?” he said. “When you stop controlling it?”

“You sound like a man who’s finally letting someone else hold the wheel.” His thumb pressed the spot just below the head—the one that made my vision swim. “You sound like the first time you kissed me, except the moan is yours now.”

“Not yet.” He released me. Sat back. Watched my cock twitch against my stomach, slick and straining, and the bastard smiled.

He brought me to the edge again. Pulled off just as the pressure peaked. “You edged me three times in D.C. At the reunion. I counted.”

“Three times. I’m returning the favor.” He brought me up again. Pulled away. The sound I made was somewhere between a sob and a curse.

The third time, he didn’t stop. He took me deep, his throat working, his hand cupping my balls with a pressure that was precisely calculated, and the orgasm that had been building through three rounds of denial hit me like a structural collapse. I came in his mouth and he swallowed all of it, his hands holding me down while my body tried to arch off the mattress.

“Tab Six,” he said.

“I hate you.”

“Your body is telling a very different story.”

“Turn over,” he said.

I turned. Face in the pillow, my ass in the air because I knew what was coming.

His mouth found the base of my spine. Kissed down. Vertebra by vertebra, a cartography of devotion. And when he reached the base, he didn’t stop. His tongue continued its descent, and I buried my face in the pillow and made a sound that the walls of Room Fourteen were absolutely not thick enough to contain.

He was meticulous. Thorough in the way that only Connor could be thorough—systematically exploring every angle, every pressure, his tongue pushing inside while his hands held my hips steady. I was hard again already. The recovery time was nonexistent because his mouth was still on me and the intimacy of it—the absolute, nothing-hidden intimacy—was the thing that undid me.

“Now,” I gasped. “Connor, now, I need you inside me—”

The snap of a cap. His fingers, warmed between his palms first because he always did that. One finger sliding inside with a slowness that made my spine bow. Then two, scissoring gently, finding the spot that made me grip the headboard. He pressed, and the sound I made was a register I hadn’t known my voice could reach.

“I need your cock inside me. Now. Please.”

He pushed in slowly. Inch by inch. I felt him fill me—the stretch, the fullness—and my mouth fell open against the pillow, and the sound that came out was his name, spoken like a prayer.

He moved. Deep strokes that I felt in my chest. His chest lowered against my back, his mouth on my shoulder, his hand reaching around to wrap around my cock. The dual sensation built a pressure in my core that was oceanic.

He found the angle. The one that made stars burst behind my eyelids. He drove into me at that angle, repeatedly, rhythmically, and the sound I was making was continuous now.

“I love you,” he said into the curve of my neck, his voice breaking. “I love you in this room and in our apartment and at three AM when you steal the covers and in every room I’ve ever been in with you and every room I’ll ever be in. I love you in the daylight. I love you.”

I came. The second orgasm crested from deep inside and rolled through me in waves. My ass clenched around him, my cock pulsed in his hand, and the sound that tore from my throat was raw and unfiltered and loud enough that the anniversary party probably heard it and I didn’t care.

Connor came. The final deep thrust, his arms tightening around me, the broken repetition of my name against my skin. Levi. Levi. Levi.

We collapsed. His weight on me—heavy, real, grounding. I didn’t want him to move.

We lay in the destroyed bed. The ocean a low rhythmic pulse through the open French doors.

“Best man,” I said.

“Don’t start.”

“Best man.” I rolled over. Faced him. “Better lover.”

“Better everything,” he said, and kissed me, and the ocean crashed against the shore indifferent to the two men lying tangled in Room Fourteen, because they had everything they needed between these four walls and this one bed and each other’s arms.

Like a beginning that never needed an ending.

Like home.

Loved Connor and Levi’s story? The full novel is available now.

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