Bonus Chapter: Frequency

Straight Label, Crooked Line
by Jace Wilder

An exclusive bonus scene set after the events of Straight Label, Crooked Line. Contains explicit MM sexual content. Reader discretion advised.

Frequency

Eli POV — Three months after the epilogue

The Berry Hill studio was empty at midnight.

Not empty the way public spaces were empty — the lights-off, door-locked, absence-of-humans kind. Empty the way a church was empty between services: the room still holding the shape of what had happened there, the air still vibrating with residual sound. The converted church where they’d tracked Crooked Line retained its music the way old wood retained warmth. You could feel the songs in the walls.

Eli sat behind his kit in the center of the nave. Not playing — just sitting, sticks balanced across his thighs, looking at the stained glass windows.

The album had gone gold three days ago. Mason had set the phone down and looked at Eli across the counter and said: “The crooked line went gold.” Eli had kissed him over the cutting board. Got soy sauce in Mason’s hair. Neither of them cared.

Mason had texted him at 11 PM — Come to the church. Bring your sticks. — and Eli had come, because he always came when Mason called, and Mason had earned that through a year of showing up and staying and being exactly, imperfectly, stubbornly honest.

The studio door opened. Mason walked in carrying two beers and no guitar.

“No guitar?” Eli asked.

“I was told once that showing up without one is braver.” Mason set the beers on the console. “Also, I wanted your hands, not mine.”

“Play something,” Mason said. “Anything. I want to watch you play.”

Eli played. A groove. The deep, body-moving, hips-first groove that had always been his signature. The one that had started everything.

Mason watched. His eyes tracked Eli’s arms — the flex of the forearms, the roll of the shoulders. The way his thighs spread on the drum throne, braced and powerful, holding the rhythm in his body.

Eli saw Mason watching. Played harder. Deeper into the pocket, the groove slowing, thickening, becoming the kind of beat that belonged in a bedroom.

Eli stopped playing. “Come here,” he said.

Mason rounded the kit. Stood between Eli’s spread thighs. Mason’s hands came to Eli’s face. The gesture. Their gesture. Palm on jaw, fingers behind the ear.

“I want you,” Mason said. Simply. Without the terror that used to accompany the words. Just: I want you. A fact. A daily fact.

“Here. In the studio. Where we made the album.” Mason’s thumb traced Eli’s cheekbone. “I want to make something else honest here.”

“That’s a line.”

“I’m a songwriter. Lines are my medium.”

Eli pulled Mason down by the front of his T-shirt and kissed him. When Mason groaned against his mouth, the sound rose to the rafters and returned like an echo, and hearing his own desire reflected back at him made Eli’s cock twitch in his jeans.

Mason straddled Eli on the drum throne — knees on either side of Eli’s hips, the throne creaking under their combined weight. The position pressed them together from chest to groin.

“I’ve had this fantasy,” Mason said. “Since the first tour. You on the drum throne. Me in your lap. The kit around us like a frame. Like we’re inside the music.”

“Since the bus, when you worked the cramp out of my hand and I went to my bunk and almost put my fist through the mattress because I couldn’t touch you.” Mason rolled his hips. The friction dragged a groan from both of them. “I thought about riding you on the drum throne while the cymbals shook.”

“The cymbals are going to shake.”

“Promise?”

“Guarantee.”

Eli pulled Mason’s shirt over his head. Pressed his mouth to Mason’s sternum. Felt the heartbeat under his lips — fast, strong, the kick drum. Mason pulled Eli’s tank off, ran his hands over his shoulders, his arms, the tattoos.

“I want you inside me,” Mason said. Direct. No hesitation. “Right here. On the throne.”

Eli reached into his back pocket. Lube. Condom. The supplies of a man who planned for contingencies.

Mason laughed. “You brought supplies.”

“You texted me at 11 PM to bring my sticks. I brought all of them.”

“That’s the worst joke you’ve ever made.”

Eli shut him up with a kiss. His hands worked Mason’s jeans open. Mason braced his hands on the rack tom behind Eli’s head, and the drums hummed with the contact.

“The kit is singing,” Mason murmured.

“Sympathetic vibration.” Eli pressed a finger inside him. “Everything in this room is tuned to the same frequency.”

Eli worked him open. Slow, thorough. One finger, then two, then three. The sounds filled the church: moans that became the room’s own music, reflected and amplified, the architecture transforming human pleasure into something almost sacred.

“Now,” Mason said. “Eli, now. I’m ready.”

Mason rose on his knees, positioned himself, and sank down.

The hi-hat shivered.

Mason took him slowly. Inch by inch, the slide and stretch visible on his face — the moment when fullness tipped into pleasure and his expression went slack and the sound that came out was the most honest note either of them had ever produced in this room.

“Move,” Eli said. His hands on Mason’s hips. His voice barely holding. “Play me.”

Mason moved. He rose and fell with the controlled rhythm of a musician. Then faster. Deeper. The drum throne rocked. The kit rattled. The cymbals chimed with a delicate, persistent tss-tss-tss that was the percussion section’s unsolicited commentary on the proceedings.

Eli thrust up to meet him. Two musicians locking into a groove that no audience would ever hear. Mason was loud — every sound amplified by the room, the moans and gasps and fragments of Eli’s name bouncing off stained glass and returning as harmonics.

“Eli — fuck — right there —”

Eli adjusted the angle. Found the spot. Mason’s back arched and his hands flew to the crash cymbal for balance, and the cymbal rang out — a bright, sustained wash of bronze that filled the church like a bell.

“The cymbals,” Mason gasped. He was laughing and moaning simultaneously. “You promised the cymbals would shake.”

“I deliver on my promises.”

“Unlike — ah — unlike some people.”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just reference our worst fight while I’m inside you.”

“I’m referencing our worst fight because you’re inside me. Because we survived it. Because we’re here.” Mason’s hands found Eli’s face. “In a church. On a drum throne. Making an album that went gold. Together.”

He pulled Mason down and kissed him and moved inside him and the drum throne rocked and the cymbals sang and the church held all of it.

Mason came first. He came with a shout that the church turned into a chorus. His body clenched around Eli and Eli followed — his own orgasm arriving like a cymbal crash: sudden, total, reverberating.

They sat on the drum throne in the aftermath. Tangled, sticky, breathing hard. The cymbals were still ringing faintly.

Mason pressed his face into Eli’s neck. “We just had sex on your drum kit.”

“On the throne. Not on the kit.”

“The hi-hat will never be the same.”

“The hi-hat is fine. The crash might need recalibrating.”

“I am not explaining to Andy why the crash cymbal sounds different on the next record.”

Eli laughed. Full, warm, the laugh that shook both their bodies and made the floor tom hum in sympathy.

They cleaned up. Sat on the floor of the church — backs against the riser, legs stretched out, the stained glass dark above them.

“I have an idea,” Mason said.

“If it involves the floor tom, I’m out.”

“I want to open the first track of the second album with just drums. No guitar, no bass, no keys. Just you. Sixteen bars of you, alone, before anyone else comes in.”

“Because that’s how the story started. You walked into an audition and played, and I heard you, and everything changed. The album should start the way we started. With the drums.”

“Okay. Sixteen bars. Just drums.”

“Make it the best sixteen bars of your life.”

“Your best is everyone else’s impossible.”

“Hey, Eli?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“Even though I just referenced our worst fight during sex?”

“Especially because you referenced our worst fight during sex. It means we can laugh about it. And if we can laugh about it, we survived it.”

Mason turned his face into Eli’s neck. Breathed. Held on.

In the morning, they’d go home. They’d make coffee and argue about the shower ledge and sit at their facing desks and start the second album. The music would start the way it always started between them: with Eli’s hands, holding the rhythm, keeping the time, making space for the truth to come.

But tonight, they sat on the floor of a church in Nashville, drinking warm beer, surrounded by the instruments that had given them each other.

The frequency was theirs.

It always had been.

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