🔥 Bonus Chapter: “The Fridge Note”

Room for Rent, Room for Us — Exclusive Bonus Content

by Ames Willow

⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains explicit MM sexual content, graphic language, shower sex, dirty talk, and scorching heat. Intended for readers 18+ only. Takes place two weeks after the epilogue.

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The Fridge Note

Riley

I found the note at 6:47 a.m. on a Sunday.

I know the exact time because Micah’s coffee timer had gone off at 6:45 — the precise, pre-programmed gurgle that meant the pour-over was ready and that somewhere in the apartment, a man who believed spontaneity was a personality flaw was already awake, already showered, already in clean joggers and a henley with his glasses on.

Except he wasn’t at the island. The laptop was closed. The coffee was poured into two mugs — mine with cream, his black — and both were on the counter, steaming, untouched.

The note was on the fridge.

Not a sticky note. A full sheet of paper, folded once, taped to the fridge door at eye level with a single word on the outside in Micah’s precise, editor-neat handwriting:

Riley.

I pulled it off. Unfolded it. Read it standing barefoot in the kitchen in Micah’s boxers with Potato chewing a sock at my feet and Biscuit asleep on the couch.

The note read:

One year ago today, I posted an ad for a roommate. The ad was designed to ensure that no reasonable human being would ever respond to it. You responded in five minutes. You were forty minutes late. You brought a dog.

I have been trying to write this note for three days. I have drafted it eleven times. Every version has been inadequate because the thing I’m trying to say is too large for a single sheet of paper and too important for anything less than precision.

Here is what I know:

Before you, I was organized. After you, I am alive. These are not the same thing, and I spent thirty-three years confusing them.

Before you, the apartment was quiet. After you, it is loud and messy and full of dog hair and paint and half-finished sketchbooks on every surface and music from a speaker I once considered a noise violation and now consider essential infrastructure.

Before you, I slept alone and called it peace. After you, I sleep with your arm across my chest and your face in my neck and a forty-pound dog on my feet and a fourteen-pound disaster on my head, and I call it the only arrangement I ever want to wake up to.

I’m not defending anymore. I’m not quiet anymore. I love you. The coffee is ready.

— M

P.S. Don’t look for me. I’m in the shower. The door is unlocked. The bathroom schedule has been suspended for the day. Make of that what you will.

I read the note twice. Three times. My vision blurred on the fourth because my eyes were doing the thing they always did when Micah said something true and precise and devastating in writing.

I set the note on the counter. Left the coffee steaming. Walked down the hallway toward the bathroom, where the sound of running water was audible through the closed — but unlocked — door.

The bathroom schedule has been suspended for the day.

A year ago, I’d barged into this bathroom without warning and seen Micah Calloway stepping out of the shower, and the sight had short-circuited my nervous system so completely that I’d touched myself thinking about it forty minutes later and felt guilty for approximately thirty seconds.

I was not going to feel guilty today.

I opened the door.

The bathroom was thick with steam. Through the frosted glass, I could see him — tall, lean, the dark hair, shoulders under the spray. He was standing with his back to the door, head bowed under the water. A man who had left breadcrumbs and was waiting to see if they’d been followed.

“Nice note,” I said.

He didn’t turn around. “You read it.”

“I read it four times. I cried on the third. Potato ate the corner while I was crying.”

“Potato eats everything.”

“Potato has good taste. That note was delicious.” I pulled my shirt over my head. “You said the schedule was suspended.”

“Are you going to keep narrating, or are you going to get in?”

I got in.

The water was hot. The steam was thick. The shower was not designed for two grown men, and the addition of a second body turned it into an exercise in physics and desire.

Micah turned around. Water ran down his chest. Down the lean muscle and the pale skin and the line of dark hair below his navel. His eyes were on mine — gray-green, steady, bright with heat.

“Happy anniversary,” I said.

“You wrote me a love letter.”

“I wrote you an assessment of our cohabitation with emotional annotations.”

“That’s a love letter.”

“Fine. It’s a love letter.”

I closed the distance. One step, and we were pressed together — chest to chest, the water falling on both of us. My hands found his waist. His hands found my face. And the kiss was slow and hot and tasted like water and wanting.

“I’ve been hard since I finished the note,” Micah said against my mouth. His voice had dropped into the register I privately called the underneath. “Since I wrote the line about your arm across my chest. Since I thought about the first time I woke up with you holding me and didn’t pull away.”

“Night two. Pillow wall on the floor. You were the little spoon.”

“I’ve never told you this, but I was awake. That second morning. I’d been awake for twenty minutes. I didn’t pull away because wanting to stay was the most dangerous thing I’d ever felt.”

“You absolute bastard. I lay there for thirty minutes trying not to breathe too hard because I thought you were asleep.”

“I could feel your heartbeat. It was going so fast.”

“Because you were pressed against my back with a hard-on and I was trying not to die.”

I kissed him harder. The steam was so thick the bathroom had disappeared. My hands slid down his back. Over the curve of his ass. Pulled his hips against mine, and the contact — both of us hard, slick with water — made us both groan.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I want you against the wall. I want to make you loud enough that both dogs leave the apartment.”

“Biscuit already leaves the room. You’ll have to work harder for Potato.”

He turned me around. Not roughly — firmly. My chest hit the tile — cool against the hot water, a shock that made me gasp — and Micah’s body pressed against my back.

His mouth was at my ear. “One year ago, you walked into this bathroom and saw me naked and I told you to get out.”

“You were terrified.”

“Because you looked at me. And your face said I want you. And that was the first time anyone had looked at me like that since I’d left Derek.” His hand slid down my stomach. Lower. His fingers wrapped around my cock with confident, unhurried grip. “Now I know exactly what to do with it.”

He stroked me. Slow. Deliberate. The maddening, agonizing pace that said I’m not rushing because you’re worth the time.

“Tell me what you want,” he murmured. “The unedited version.”

“I want you inside me. Right here. Against the wall. I want to feel you for the rest of the day.”

Micah made a sound against my neck — low, guttural. He disappeared for twelve seconds. Came back with the lube from the bedroom, water running down his chest.

“Hands on the wall,” he said.

I put my hands on the wall.

He prepped me with meticulous attention — careful, thorough, responsive to every sound. His fingers worked me open while his mouth traced my spine, hot kisses landing between my shoulder blades.

“More. I’m ready. Please.”

“Micah, if you don’t fuck me in the next thirty seconds—”

He pushed inside me and the sentence ended in a moan that bounced off the tile. The stretch was familiar and devastating — fullness, pressure, Micah’s body inside mine. His hands gripped my hips. His forehead pressed against my shoulder.

“Move. Please move.”

He moved. Deep, steady strokes that pinned me against the tile, water cascading over both of us. His hand came up to my chest, pulling me back against him — upright, my back against his chest, his cock buried deep — and the position was so intimate I heard myself making sounds I couldn’t control.

“That’s it,” Micah said against my ear. “Every sound. Don’t hold anything back. You taught me that.”

I let him hear me. His voice in my ear was filthy and tender in equal measure — my name and God and yes and you’re so good, you’re perfect, you’re mine.

His hand found my cock. Stroked in time with his thrusts. The dual sensation was more than my body could hold.

“I’m going to—”

“I know. Let go. I’ve got you.”

I came with his name in my mouth and his body inside mine, the orgasm tearing through me in waves that buckled my knees. Micah followed within seconds, the rhythm breaking, a deep groan against my neck. His whole body pressed against mine, shaking.

We ended up on the bathroom floor. Towels underneath us, legs tangled.

“I should tell you something,” I said. “The shower incident. When I barged in and saw you naked. I went back to my room and jerked off thinking about you. Forty minutes later.”

Micah was quiet. Then: “I know.”

“You know?”

“The walls are thin, Riley. I could hear you say my name.”

“And you never said anything?”

“I lay awake for three hours afterward doing the same thing.”

“You DID?”

“There is no spreadsheet category for ‘the most attractive man I’ve ever met is in the next room saying my name while he comes and I am losing my mind.’ I checked. It doesn’t exist in Excel.”

I was laughing. Full-body, stomach-aching, tears-on-my-face laughing. Micah was laughing too. The real laugh.

“We’re idiots,” I said.

“We’re idiots who are in love. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

We got dressed. Went to the kitchen. I picked up a pen. Wrote six words and taped them to the fridge under Micah’s note:

Room for rent: taken.

Room for us: always.

Micah read it. Didn’t add anything. He didn’t need to.

He made fresh coffee. I made eggs. We sat at the small table with our legs tangled underneath and two dogs at our feet and a year behind us and everything ahead.

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