Pumpkin Spice and Sweat book cover by Jace Wilder

Pumpkin Spice & Sweat — Bonus Chapter

An Exclusive After-Hours Scene
by Jace Wilder

🔥 Content Note: This bonus chapter contains explicit MM sexual content with praise kink and body worship. It takes place after the epilogue of Pumpkin Spice & Sweat. Intended for readers 18+.

This scene takes place after the epilogue. Gage and Milo have been together six months.

After Hours

The gym was empty.

Not the early-morning empty I’d gotten used to—that particular 5:00 a.m. stillness where the iron waited and the overhead lights hummed their warm-up frequency and the building felt like it was holding its breath. This was different. This was 9:00 p.m. on a Saturday, the last member gone two hours ago, the parking lot dark, the warehouse doors locked, and the only light in the building coming from the back office where Gage had been “finishing programming” for the past forty-five minutes.

I’d come to bring him dinner. That was my story and I was sticking with it.

The truth was more complicated and less noble: I’d been at the apartment for two hours, supposedly editing photos for the café’s spring campaign, and the entire time my brain had been replaying the thing Gage had said that morning. We’d been in bed—lazy Saturday, sheets tangled, his hand tracing a slow circuit from my hip to my ribs and back—and I’d asked him what he was thinking about.

“You,” he’d said. Which was already enough to make my chest do something structural. But then he’d shifted, rolled half on top of me, and his mouth had found the spot below my ear that made my spine dissolve. “Specifically, I’m thinking about the sounds you make when I tell you you’re doing well.”

And then he’d gotten up. Showered. Gone to the gym. Left me lying in bed with my heart rate in triple digits and a full-body flush I couldn’t blame on the blankets.

That was four hours ago. I’d been useless since.

So here I was, walking across the dark gym floor in the clothes I’d put on without thinking about it and then thought about extensively—jeans that fit right, a henley he’d told me once did something to him that he’d declined to specify. The takeout bag in my hand was the alibi. Everything else was premeditated.

“Gage?”

No answer from the office. I set the bag on the front counter and walked toward the back, past the squat racks and the deadlift platforms and the row of kettlebells that caught the emergency-light glow and threw it back in dull iron curves. My sneakers were quiet on the rubber flooring. The gym smelled the way it always did after hours—clean, underneath the chalk and the rubber, like effort that had been wiped down but not erased.

The office door was open. He was at his desk, laptop casting blue-white light across his face, reading glasses on—the ones he wore when he’d been staring at screens too long and refused to admit his eyes were tired. Black t-shirt. Gray joggers. Forearms bare, the geometric tattoo work catching shadow and light in patterns I’d traced with my mouth enough times to have memorized.

He looked up. The reading glasses made his gray eyes look bigger, and the expression behind them when he saw me was the one that still, six months in, made me feel like I’d walked into a room I’d been looking for my whole life.

“Brought food,” I said.

“You brought yourself.”

“Package deal.”

His mouth did the thing—the corner-lift that wasn’t quite a smile, that he rationed like it cost him something. He closed the laptop. Took off the glasses. Pushed back from the desk in a way that was casual and deliberate at the same time, the way everything Gage did occupied both registers—the controlled surface and the current underneath it.

“Come here.”

Two words. The coaching voice, except lower. The one that bypassed my brain entirely and landed somewhere south of my navel, a direct line from his mouth to my nervous system that I’d stopped pretending wasn’t hardwired.

I went. Crossed the small office in three steps. He caught me by the belt loops when I was close enough, pulled me between his spread knees where he sat in the chair, and looked up at me with an expression I’d learned to read the way he read bodies—desire, first, always, but layered under it something more patient. Assessment. The slow, thorough evaluation of a man who didn’t rush anything that mattered.

“How long have you been thinking about this morning?” he asked.

“Define ‘this morning.’”

“Me. In bed. What I said about the sounds you make.”

“Since you said it.” No point lying. He could read me like a barbell—every compensating shift, every held breath, every place I was carrying tension I hadn’t earned.

His hands slid up the backs of my thighs. Slow. The callused drag of his palms through the denim, thumbs pressing into the inner seam, and I felt my breath stutter the way it always did when he put his hands on me with intention.

“You drove across town at nine o’clock on a Saturday night because of something I said in bed this morning.”

“I walked. It’s four blocks.”

“Milo.” His grip tightened. Not hard—commanding. The difference between a correction and a constraint, and my body knew which one it wanted. “You’re deflecting.”

“I’m nervous.”

“I know.” His thumbs traced circles. “You don’t have to be.”

“And yet.”

He stood up. The chair rolled back and hit the wall and the sound of it was the last ordinary thing that happened for a while, because when Gage stood from that position, he rose into me—his chest against mine, his hands moving from my thighs to my waist, his height and his breadth filling every inch of space I had left, and the size of him, the sheer physical fact of being enveloped by someone who could lift twice my body weight without effort, did something to my nervous system that I’d spent twenty-nine years not knowing I needed.

He kissed me. Not the hello kiss, not the goodnight kiss, the other one—the one where his hand went to the back of my neck and his mouth opened mine and his tongue found mine with the unhurried precision of a man who understood that control was not the absence of desire but the architecture of it.

I made a sound against his mouth. The sound. The one he’d been thinking about.

He pulled back just enough to look at me. His pupils were blown, gray irises reduced to thin rings, and his breathing had changed—deeper, slower, the deliberate rhythm of someone managing a response that wanted to be unmanageable.

“There it is,” he murmured. His thumb traced my lower lip. “That’s what I was thinking about.”

“Gage—”

“I want to take you apart.” Quiet. Certain. The way he said hold at the bottom or one more rep—not a suggestion, a statement of what was about to happen, delivered with enough respect to make it a question without changing the words. “Right here. On the gym floor. I want to hear every sound you’ve got.”

My knees actually went soft. I felt them buckle, a fractional give that he caught instantly—his arm around my waist, solid, holding me against him with the effortless stability of a man whose body was built to bear weight.

“Yes,” I said.

He walked me backward out of the office. Through the doorway. Onto the gym floor, dark and wide and empty, the rubber mats under our feet and the squat racks standing like sentinels in the dim emergency lighting. He guided me with his body—not pushing, moving with me the way he moved when he spotted someone, close enough that every step I took was braced by his presence.

He stopped us beside the stretching area. Mats stacked against the wall. He pulled one down—a thick black crash pad, the kind used for heavy Olympic lifts—and laid it flat on the floor. Then he turned back to me and his hands found the hem of my henley.

“Arms up.”

I raised my arms. He pulled the shirt over my head with a care that contradicted his size—fingers grazing my sides, palms skimming my ribs, the fabric clearing my face and leaving my hair wrecked. The cool gym air hit my bare skin and I shivered, and his hands were on me immediately, broad and warm, palms flat against my stomach.

“You’ve put on muscle.” His thumbs traced the lines of definition that three months of consistent training had carved. Not dramatic—I was never going to look like him, and neither of us wanted that. But the soft places had firmed, the lines had sharpened, and Gage catalogued every change with his hands the way he catalogued everything—thoroughly, precisely, with the focused intensity of a man who believed details were the only things that mattered.

“You’re staring,” I said.

“I’m assessing.” His mouth found my collarbone. Teeth, then tongue, then the slow drag of his lips along the ridge of bone. “You’ve been doing your accessory work.”

“I—” The word dissolved. His mouth was moving lower. Across my chest. The flat of his tongue over one nipple, a deliberate, devastating circle that sent a shock straight down my spine. My hips pushed forward involuntarily, finding his, and the hard length of him against my hip was confirmation that the controlled voice and the patient hands were costing him as much as they were wrecking me.

“Tell me what you want,” he said against my skin.

“I want you to keep—” I lost the sentence when his teeth closed gently over the peak. “—doing that. Telling me. What you see.”

He understood. Of course he did. He’d understood from the first time his mouth formed the word good in a dark gym and my entire body rearranged itself around the sound. The praise wasn’t a kink the way the internet defined kinks—neat, categorical, something you selected from a menu. It was deeper than that. It was the thing that happened when a man who rationed his words spent them on me. When the most controlled person I’d ever met let himself be specific about what he wanted, what he saw, what I did to him. Every sentence was a door he’d opened that he could have kept closed, and the sound of those doors opening—one by one, in the dark, in his voice—was the most erotic thing I’d ever experienced.

“Down,” he said, and I lay back on the crash pad, and he followed me. On his knees between my legs, still fully dressed, looking down at me with an expression that made me feel simultaneously safe and annihilated.

He undid my jeans. Pulled them down, and I lifted my hips to help, and his hands slid along the bare skin of my thighs with the attentive, unhurried quality of someone who believed the journey contained the point. My boxer briefs went with the jeans and then I was naked on a gym mat at nine o’clock at night, hard and exposed and shaking under the gaze of a man who was still wearing every stitch of clothing.

The power imbalance was deliberate. I knew that. He knew I knew. The asymmetry was the architecture—him dressed, me bare, his hands and his mouth and his voice the only points of contact, each one chosen and placed with intention.

“Look at you.” Low. Almost to himself. His hands on my thighs, pushing them wider, and I let him because the alternative was fighting gravity. “Every time. You don’t know what you look like when you stop performing.”

“I’m not—”

“You are. You’re always performing. For the café, for your mother, for everyone.” His thumb traced the crease where my thigh met my hip, close enough to where I needed him that my whole body tightened. “Except right now. Right now you’re just here. Just mine.”

The sound I made was involuntary and raw and exactly the one he’d been thinking about all day.

“That’s it.” His hand wrapped around me and the contact after all that patient, circling proximity was so intense I arched off the mat. “That’s so good, Milo.”

I gasped. His grip was firm, his strokes slow and deliberate, his thumb doing something devastating at the top of each pass. My hands found his forearms—the tattoos under my fingers, the tendons shifting under the skin, the sheer density of him under my palms.

“You have no idea,” he said, and his voice had lost its structure—the coaching register dismantled, the careful control eroded to something hoarse and undone. “The way you respond. Like your body’s been waiting for someone to pay attention.”

“It was.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. “It was waiting for you.”

His hand stilled. I whimpered—actually whimpered, a sound I would’ve been embarrassed by if I’d had any capacity left for embarrassment—and he leaned down and kissed me. Deep, claiming, his clothed body pressing against my bare one, the texture of his t-shirt against my chest and the rough drag of his joggers against my inner thighs.

“I need—” I pulled at his shirt. “Off. I need to feel you.”

He sat back. Stripped the shirt over his head in one motion. The gym’s emergency lighting caught the planes of his chest, the definition across his shoulders, the dark hair that tapered down his stomach. Six months of this and the sight of him still hit me like a squat I wasn’t braced for.

He pushed the joggers down. Freed himself, and I reached for him—wrapped my hand around the thick, hot weight of him and watched his jaw go tight and his eyes go dark.

“Come here,” I said, pulling him down, and he came—settled his weight over me, forearms braced on either side of my head, his hips between my thighs. The first full-body contact, bare skin on bare skin, his cock against mine, the heat and the pressure and the weight of him pressing me into the mat, and I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him closer because closer was the only direction that existed.

He rolled his hips. The friction of him against me—slick now, both of us leaking, the slide obscene and perfect. I arched into it, meeting his rhythm, my hands on his back feeling the muscles work under his skin as he moved.

“You’re perfect.” His mouth against my ear. His hips driving a slow, devastating grind. “The way you open up for me. The way you sound. I think about this in the middle of coaching and lose my entire train of thought.”

“Good,” I breathed. “Now you know what you do to me every time you say ‘drop your hips.’”

He laughed—a real laugh, startled and warm, and the vibration of it against my chest combined with the roll of his hips made my vision go white at the edges.

He shifted. Reached between us. Took both of us in his hand—his grip big enough to hold us together, the pressure of his cock against mine inside the cage of his fingers, and he stroked. Long, slow pulls, his forehead against mine, our breath mixing, and I held onto his shoulders and let the sounds come without filtering them because he’d asked for every one and I was done being quiet about the things that mattered.

“Gage—I’m close—”

“I know.” He could read it. Of course he could. He read my body the way I read a morning rush—every signal, every shift, every threshold. “I’ve got you. Let go.”

“Tell me—” I couldn’t finish. His hand twisted on the upstroke and the world narrowed to a point of bright, unbearable pleasure.

“You’re so good.” His voice cracking. His hand moving faster. The slick sound of us together, the mat shifting under my back, his weight pinning me exactly where I needed to be. “You’re everything. You’re the best thing I’ve ever—”

I came. Hard enough that the sound tore out of me, my back arching, my hands digging into his shoulders, my body clenching and shaking under his. The orgasm rolled through me in waves—not a peak but a flood, spreading from the center of me outward until my fingers tingled and my toes curled and his name was the only word left in my vocabulary.

He followed. His hips stuttered, his hand tightened, and the sound he made was the one I lived for—the broken, uncontrolled sound of Gage Mercer letting go of every mechanism he’d ever built to keep himself contained. He came between us, hot and slick, his forehead pressed hard against mine, his breath ragged and open and completely, devastatingly human.

We lay there. The gym was silent except for our breathing and the distant hum of the HVAC system cycling through its nighttime program. The crash pad was warm under my back. His weight was on me—not all of it, never all of it, he was always conscious of the differential, but enough that I felt held in a way that had nothing to do with his arms and everything to do with intention.

“We need a shower,” I said eventually.

“There’s one in the back.”

“Of course there is.”

He lifted his head. His hair was wrecked. His eyes were the warm gray of woodsmoke—the post-sex version, the one that looked at me like I’d performed a miracle by simply being present and willing and loud about it.

“The food’s still on the counter,” I said.

“We’ll heat it up.” He kissed my temple. My cheekbone. The corner of my mouth. “I love you.”

“I know.” I grinned against his lips. “I brought you pad thai.”

“You brought yourself.”

“Package deal,” I said, and he kissed me again, and somewhere in the dark gym the barbells waited with their infinite patience and outside the October air turned toward November and across the street Cider & Steam was closed and quiet and when we finally stood and walked to the back shower, his hand on the small of my back, I thought about a word I’d spent twenty-nine years not saying and how the bravest thing I’d ever done was not saying it for the first time but saying it every day after, out loud, in the body that had finally stopped apologizing for what it wanted.

The shower was hot. The pad thai was cold. We ate it on the gym floor in our towels, cross-legged on the crash pad like a picnic no one had planned, and Gage told me about the programming he’d been writing and I told him about the spring campaign and we talked about nothing important with the ease of two people who’d already said the important things with their hands and their mouths and the sounds they made in the dark.

Later—much later, home, his bed, his arm across my chest in the particular heavy way that meant he was asleep and trusted the world enough to prove it—I lay awake and thought about admiration.

That’s what I’d called it, once. In a different season. Before I knew the word for what I felt or had the nerve to feel it out loud.

I pressed my face into his shoulder.

Admiration didn’t even come close.

Buy the Book

Back to Book Page