Bonus Chapter: The Hardware Store
A Straight-Laced, Bent Over Bonus Scene
by Jace Wilder
⚠️ This scene takes place after the events of Straight-Laced, Bent Over. Spoilers ahead. Explicit content — readers 18+ only.
The Hardware Store
Trent POV — Eight months after the epilogue
The ring was titanium.
Not the washer — that was still in the nightstand drawer, kept the way you keep a blueprint after the building’s done. The ring was something I’d picked at a jeweler on Fourth Street who specialized in men’s bands and didn’t blink when I said I needed two. Simple. Brushed finish. A clean, unbroken circle that looked like something an engineer would design and a construction worker would build, which was roughly the intersection of the two men who’d be wearing them.
I’d been carrying it for three days. In my jacket pocket, in its small black box, the weight of it present and constant like a heartbeat in the wrong location. I touched it compulsively — on the jobsite, in the truck, at the hardware store where I’d gone to buy lag bolts and ended up standing in the fastener aisle staring at 5/8-inch washers and thinking about the night I’d proposed with one.
The practice proposal. The one that turned real because everything between Adam and me started as practice and ended as the most permanent thing in either of our lives.
I drove home. Our apartment — the one on Wicker with the good bones and the island kitchen and the closet big enough for a color-coded system and a hard hat. Adam’s car was in the lot. He was home early, which was unusual. Adam Keane did not leave work early. Adam Keane left work at exactly 5:00 PM with the precision of a clock that had been wound by someone who understood that time was a finite resource and wasting it was a form of fiscal irresponsibility.
He was in the kitchen. Making pasta. His back to me, sleeves of his button-down rolled to his elbows, glasses slightly fogged from the steam, stirring sauce with the methodical, measured attention he brought to everything. The radio was on — my radio, playing my station, classic rock at a volume that was three notches above his comfort threshold, which meant he’d turned it on for me. Because he’d heard me coming up the stairs. Because Adam noticed everything.
I stood in the doorway and watched him and felt the ring in my pocket and the weight of what I was about to do settled over me like the feeling before a controlled demolition — the moment when everything is wired and all that’s left is the detonation.
“You’re staring,” he said without turning around.
“I’m appreciating. There’s a difference.”
“Appreciating is staring with better PR.”
I crossed the kitchen. Put my hands on his hips. Pressed my mouth to the back of his neck — the spot, the specific spot where every truth I’d ever spoken had been deposited, the place where the cedar shampoo was strongest and his pulse lived closest to the surface.
“I got you something,” I said against his skin.
“If it’s another power tool I’m implementing a moratorium.”
“It’s not a power tool.”
He turned off the stove. Turned in my arms. Looked at my face with those green-up-close eyes that I’d been looking into for over a year and would never, not once, not ever, take for granted.
I pulled out the box.
His eyes dropped to it. His breathing changed — the specific, controlled shift that meant Adam’s internal processing system was running at capacity. He looked at the box and looked at me and his mouth opened and nothing came out.
“Last time I did this with a washer,” I said. “Eleven cents. From the fastener aisle at Henderson’s Hardware. You put it on and it fit because I’d measured your finger with a piece of string while you slept, which is either romantic or creepy and I’ve decided it’s romantic.”
“Trent—”
“This one’s real. This one isn’t practice.” I opened the box. The titanium caught the kitchen light — clean, simple, brushed to a matte finish that wouldn’t scratch when he typed and wouldn’t blind anyone in a meeting. “This is me asking you, for real, not for practice, to marry me. And I’m doing it in our kitchen because our kitchen is where we fight about the peanut butter spoon and cook dinner and wash dishes and stand in the exact spot where I went to my knees for you the night you got your promotion. Our kitchen is the most us place in the world, and that’s where this belongs.”
Adam looked at the ring. His glasses were fogging from the residual steam and he didn’t take them off and he didn’t push them up. He stood in our kitchen with sauce on the stove and tears tracking down his face and his hands at his sides and the full, visible evidence of a man whose walls had been down for months and who still couldn’t quite believe someone was standing on the other side of them, choosing to stay.
“Yes,” he said. “Obviously yes. Immediately yes. Yes since the first time you said it with a washer and yes now and yes tomorrow and yes for every day until —”
I kissed him before he could finish the sentence. The ring was still in the box and his mouth was on mine and the kiss tasted like pasta sauce and tears and the specific, irreducible compound of Adam that I’d been addicted to since the first night on the couch and would be addicted to until the structural integrity of my body gave out.
I slid the ring on his finger. Left hand. Fourth finger. It fit — because I’d measured, because I always measured, because precision mattered when you were building something that was supposed to last forever.
“There’s a second one,” I said, and pulled the matching band from the box.
He took it from me. Held my left hand. Slid the ring on with the precise, deliberate attention of a man who handled everything with care — spreadsheets, spice racks, the heart of the construction worker who’d moved into his apartment with three duffel bags and an espresso machine and never really left.
We stood in the kitchen with matching rings and matching grins and the sauce cooling on the stove and I said, “So. We’re engaged.”
“We’re engaged.”
“For real this time.”
“For real this time.” He looked at the ring on his hand. Turned it. The titanium caught light. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s supposed to be. It’s for the most beautiful man I’ve ever —”
“If you finish that sentence I will cry again and I’ve already exceeded my quarterly tear allocation.”
“You have a quarterly tear allocation?”
“Four per quarter. Rollover permitted. I’m significantly over budget.”
I laughed. He laughed. And then the laughing stopped because his hands were on my chest and my hands were on his waist and the energy in the kitchen had shifted from proposal to something older, something that had been running between us since the first massage on the couch and had never, not once, dimmed.
“The pasta can wait,” he said.
“The pasta can wait forever.”
“That’s not how pasta works.”
“I don’t care how pasta works.”
I lifted him onto the kitchen island. The butcher block I’d sanded and re-oiled, the surface I’d built for chopping vegetables and kneading dough and apparently, as of right now, for setting my fiancé on and standing between his legs and kissing him until neither of us could breathe.
His legs wrapped around my waist. His hands pulled my shirt over my head and then his mouth was on my chest, my collarbone, the hollow of my throat, his lips and teeth and tongue mapping the territory he’d memorized months ago and never stopped exploring. I stripped his button-down — buttons, one at a time, because undressing Adam slowly was a form of worship I’d perfected and refused to rush, even now, even with the ring on my finger and the adrenaline of a just-completed proposal hammering through my bloodstream.
“Counter,” he said against my neck.
“Counter.”
“You built this counter.”
“I refinished this counter. I’m about to ruin this counter.”
“You can refinish it again.”
I pulled his belt free. Opened his slacks. He lifted his hips and I pulled everything down and off and he was sitting on our kitchen island in nothing but his ring and his glasses and the specific, devastating vulnerability of a man who trusted me enough to be naked in a room with windows.
The blinds were open. He didn’t ask me to close them. That was the Adam I’d built — not built, unlocked. The Adam who’d decided that being wanted was not something to hide. The Adam who left the blinds up and the lights on because visibility wasn’t exposure anymore. It was power.
I dropped to my knees on the kitchen floor — the same floor where I’d knelt the first time, during the FWB phase, in a kitchen that was his and not ours yet. Now it was ours. The floor was ours. The counter was ours. The man sitting on it was mine and I was his and the possessive pronouns had never felt so good.
I took him in my mouth. Slow. The engagement blowjob, if that was a category — and if it wasn’t, I was establishing it. My mouth on his cock with the reverent, unhurried attention of a man who had the rest of his life to do this and intended to start every morning with the practice. His hand landed in my hair. His ring — the new ring, the titanium, the forever ring — was cool against my scalp and the sensation of metal on skin sent a bolt of possessive satisfaction through me that settled low and heavy.
“Trent — God — your mouth —”
I worked him deep. Tongue flat, cheeks hollowed, the rhythm I’d perfected over months of study — the specific combination of pressure and pace and depth that made Adam’s composure disintegrate in real time. His thighs shook against my shoulders. His hand tightened in my hair. The sounds he made filled the kitchen — raw, unmanaged, the sounds of a man who’d been told he was a filing cabinet and was currently being taken apart on a butcher-block island by a construction worker who thought he was the sexiest thing in the known universe.
I pulled off before he crested. Kissed up his stomach, his chest, his throat. Found his mouth and kissed him with the taste of himself on my tongue and his groan vibrated through both of us.
“Bedroom,” he managed.
“We’re not done with the kitchen.”
“We’re not — what —”
I turned him around. Gently — hands on his hips, guiding him off the counter, positioning him facing the island with his hands braced on the butcher block. I pressed against him from behind — still in my jeans, the rough denim against his bare skin — and his back arched into the contact and his head dropped between his shoulders and he said my name in a register that went straight to the base of my spine.
“Stay,” I said. The word I’d said the first night I stopped pretending. The word that meant everything. “Right here. Just like this.”
I reached for the lube we kept in the kitchen drawer — third drawer down, behind the measuring cups, because Adam Keane organized everything, including the location of sexual supplies, and the efficiency of having lube within arm’s reach of every horizontal surface in the apartment was, he’d argued, simply good logistics.
I opened him with my fingers while kissing the back of his neck. One, then two, slow and sure, feeling his body accept me with the practiced ease of a man who trusted me completely. His ring glinted on the hand gripping the counter. My ring glinted on the hand inside him. The symmetry was too perfect to be accidental.
“I love you,” I said against his spine. My fingers crooked and he gasped. “I love your lists and your labels. I love your quarterly tear allocation. I love that you put lube in a kitchen drawer and filed it behind the measuring cups because even your sex life has an organizational system.”
He laughed and moaned at the same time — the sound I lived for, the compound of joy and pleasure that only Adam produced, the sound that meant every wall was down and every defense was gone and the man underneath was exactly who he’d always been: funny and precise and devastating and mine.
I shed my jeans. Rolled on a condom. Pressed into him from behind, slow, my chest against his back, my arms wrapping around him, my mouth on the nape of his neck. He pushed back into me with a sound that was surrender and demand simultaneously — more, deeper, don’t stop, don’t ever stop — and I gave him everything.
I fucked my fiancé on our kitchen island with the rings on our fingers and the blinds open and the lights on and his voice filling every room in the apartment with sounds that the neighbors had long since stopped complaining about because the neighbors had adapted the way everyone adapted to Trent and Adam — with resigned acceptance and, probably, noise-canceling headphones.
He came first. My hand around him, my cock inside him, his back arched against my chest and his mouth open and my name on his lips and the titanium ring catching the kitchen light as his hand gripped the counter edge so hard his knuckles went white.
I followed. Deep inside him, my face in his neck, the orgasm rolling through me with the sustained, foundational force of something built to last — not a detonation but a settling, the final structural element finding its place, the building complete.
We stood in the kitchen. Breathing. His back against my chest, my arms around him, both of us leaning on the island that I’d refinished and was going to have to refinish again because the surface now bore the marks of something more significant than food preparation.
“The pasta is ruined,” he said.
“The pasta was always going to be ruined.”
“We need to eat dinner.”
“We’ll order in.”
“You proposed and then immediately destroyed dinner. That’s very on-brand for you.”
“Would you have it any other way?”
He turned in my arms. Kissed me. Soft, slow, the post-sex kiss that was less about heat and more about presence — I’m here, you’re here, we made it. His ring pressed against my jaw where his hand cupped my face and the metal was warm now, body-temperature, the titanium absorbing the heat of the man wearing it the way everything in Adam’s life absorbed his specific, particular, organized warmth.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
We ordered Thai. We ate it on the couch. His legs across my lap, my hand on his ankle, the rings catching light every time one of us moved. The apartment was quiet around us — the good quiet, the full quiet, the quiet that contained everything we’d built and everything we were going to build.
Ours. The word that meant forever. The word that started with a flooded apartment and an espresso machine named Lucia and ended here, in a kitchen that smelled like burned pasta and sex and cedar shampoo, with two titanium rings and a future that neither of us could have imagined and both of us deserved.
Ours.
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