The Bathtub

A Straight Man’s Exit Bonus Chapter
by Jace Wilder

Set three months after the epilogue. The new apartment. The bathtub Nate insisted on.

The Bathtub

Leo

The apartment smelled like candles and steam when I walked in at midnight.

Not the bodega candle — the good ones. The ones Nate had started buying since we moved in, the kind that came in heavy glass jars with names like “Amber & Dusk” and “Cedarwood Noir” that cost more than our weekly grocery budget and that he placed throughout the apartment with the strategic precision of a man designing a lighting scheme. Three in the living room. Two in the bedroom. And tonight, apparently, six in the bathroom.

I could see the glow from the hallway. Warm. Golden. Flickering against the tile in patterns that moved like water.

Because it was water. The tub was full. The tub — the bathtub with jets that Nate had insisted on, the bathtub that had been the single non-negotiable item on his apartment requirements list, the bathtub I’d said was unnecessary and that had since become the most-used fixture in the apartment — was full of steaming water, and Nate was in it.

He was leaned back against the porcelain, arms stretched along the rim, head tilted against the wall. His eyes were closed. The candlelight painted him in gold and shadow — the brown skin of his chest above the waterline, the dark curls of his hair damp at the temples, the line of his jaw, the column of his throat. His reading glasses were on the sink. His leather watch was on the counter beside them. He was completely, unselfconsciously naked in warm water, and he looked like something out of a Renaissance painting if Renaissance painters had known about good lighting and the specific beauty of a man who’d spent thirty-one years hiding and was finally done.

I stood in the doorway and watched him. The way I’d watched him the night he moved in — except now, watching wasn’t a guilty secret. It was a privilege. It was the thing I got to do, openly, without shame, because the man in the tub was mine and I was his and the watching was mutual and welcomed and very much the point.

“You’re staring,” Nate said without opening his eyes.

“How did you know I was here?”

“Your keys are loud. Also, you smell like the bar.” He opened one eye. That soft, dark, amused eye that saw everything. “How was the shift?”

“Long. Busy. Dev says hi.” I leaned against the doorframe. “You set up candles.”

“I ran you a bath.”

“You ran yourself a bath.”

“I ran us a bath.” Both eyes open now. The amusement replaced by something warmer. Something that was amusement’s older, more dangerous brother. “Get in.”

“I should shower first. I smell like—”

“Citrus and smoke and a little bit like gin. I know what you smell like after a shift, Leo. I’ve been smelling it for six months.” He sat up slightly, water moving around him, catching the candlelight. “Get in the bath.”

I started undressing. Shirt off, dropped on the floor. Belt. Jeans. Socks. Nate watched — the way Nate watched everything now, with that focused, unhurried attention that used to be reserved for design work and was now applied liberally to the project of looking at me. He watched me strip and didn’t look away and didn’t blush, and the fact that he didn’t blush — that the man who used to go red at accidental elbow contact was now watching me undress with open, unapologetic hunger — was its own kind of foreplay.

I pulled off my boxer briefs. Stood there. Naked, in the candlelight, in the bathroom of the apartment we shared.

“Get in,” Nate said again, and his voice was lower. Rougher. The voice that meant the bath was a beginning, not an end.

I got in.

The water was hot. Not scalding — Nate calibrated everything, including bath temperature — but hot enough to make my muscles unclench, to make the tension of a twelve-hour shift dissolve into steam. I sank in facing him, our legs tangling underwater, the tub exactly big enough for two if both people were willing to be close.

We were willing to be close.

“Come here,” Nate said.

Not toward him. He reached for me and pulled, rearranging, until I was turned around and leaning back against his chest — my back to his front, his arms coming around my waist under the water, his chin on my shoulder. The position we slept in every night, translated into warm water and candlelight.

“This is nice,” I said.

“This is the bathtub I told you we needed.”

“I never said we didn’t need it.”

“You said, and I quote, ‘a bathtub is a large bowl for sitting in water you’ve made dirty.'”

“I was wrong. I’m man enough to admit that.”

“You were very wrong.” His mouth found the back of my neck. A kiss, slow and warm, lips parting against the skin just below my hairline. The spot. My spot — the one he’d discovered early and weaponized immediately, the one that made my entire nervous system rearrange itself. “You were wrong about the bathtub. You were wrong about 2% milk. You were wrong about Gerald being ‘just a plant.'”

“Gerald is just a plant.”

“Gerald is family.” Another kiss. Lower. The knob of my spine where my neck met my shoulders. His tongue traced the ridge and I felt my body go liquid — more liquid than the water, boneless, the specific dissolution that only happened when Nate’s mouth was on my skin. “And you were wrong about one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You said I’d fall asleep in the bath.” His hands were moving now. Under the water, flat against my stomach, sliding upward over my chest, then down again, long, slow strokes that covered the full territory of my torso. “You said I’d ‘pass out in the tub like an old man and you’d have to fish me out.’ Do I look like I’m falling asleep?”

I looked down. His hands on my chest, brown fingers against my skin, moving through warm water that caught the candlelight in golden ripples. Below the water, visible through the surface, my cock was already responding — thickening, rising, the reflex that Nate’s hands triggered regardless of context or circumstance.

“You don’t look like you’re falling asleep,” I confirmed.

“Good.” His right hand slid lower. Past my navel. Through the trail of hair below it. Into the warm water where my cock was waiting, hardening, and his fingers wrapped around me with the confidence of a man who knew exactly what he was holding and exactly what to do with it.

“Nate—”

“Shh.” His grip tightened. Stroked. Slow, under the water, the liquid making everything slick and smooth, reducing the friction to a glide that was maddening in its gentleness. “You worked all night. Let me take care of you.”

Let me. The words that were ours. The password. The two-syllable contract that had been negotiated on a couch six months ago and had been honored every night since.

I let him.

His hand moved. Slow, deliberate strokes, root to tip, his thumb finding the head on every pass and pressing in a way that made my hips roll forward into his fist. The water moved with us — small waves, candlelight fracturing across the surface. His other hand was on my chest, palm flat over my heart, feeling it hammer.

“I love this,” he murmured against my neck. “I love that I can do this to you. That my hand on you makes your heart go like this. That your breathing changes. That you say my name when you’re—”

“Nate—”

“Like that.” I could feel his smile against my skin. “Exactly like that.”

His hand sped up. Tighter. More purposeful. The water was sloshing now, small waves cresting over the side of the tub, hitting the tile with soft slaps. Behind me, I could feel him — hard against my lower back, his cock pressed between our bodies, and the knowledge that touching me was making him hard, that my pleasure was his arousal, was a feedback loop that had been running since our first night and showed no signs of diminishing.

I turned my head. Caught his mouth over my shoulder. The angle was awkward and I didn’t care. I kissed him while his hand worked me under the water, tasting his tongue and breathing his air and feeling the double sensation of his mouth and his fist doing coordinated, devastating things to my body.

“I want you,” I said against his lips. “Not just your hand. You.”

“Here?”

“Here.”

“In the bathtub.”

“In the bathtub you insisted on. That I said was unnecessary. I want you to fuck me in the bathtub so I never hear the end of it.”

His hand stilled on my cock. His breathing changed — faster, shallower, the way it changed when something I said hit the switch in his brain that bypassed thinking and went straight to want.

“Turn around,” he said.

I turned. Carefully, in the confines of the tub, water sloshing. Faced him. His face was flushed — from the heat of the bath, from the heat of what we were doing — his eyes dark, his lips parted. I straddled his lap, knees on either side of his hips, our cocks pressing together under the water, and the contact made us both exhale.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” He put his hands on my hips. His thumbs pressed into the hollows above the bone — the spots he’d mapped and memorized, the spots that made my spine arch. “You’re so beautiful.”

“You’ve been spending too much time with me. You’re turning into a sap.”

“I’ve been spending exactly the right amount of time with you.” He pulled me closer. Our chests met. Wet skin against wet skin, the water lapping around us, the candles flickering in the displacement. “And you are beautiful. Every time I look at you I think that, and I’m done not saying it.”

The man who couldn’t look me in the eye six months ago. The man who hid his hands in his pockets and flinched at accidental touches and thought he was broken because he couldn’t feel what everyone else felt.

That man was gone. This man — the one with his hands on my hips and his cock against mine and his voice steady and sure — this man had burned the costume and scattered the ashes and was never, ever going back.

He reached behind me. The lube was on the edge of the tub — because of course it was, because Nate prepared for everything, because this bath had never been just a bath. His fingers, slick and warm, found me. I lifted slightly, gave him access, and felt him press inside — one finger, then two, the stretch familiar now, welcomed, my body opening for him with the ease of six months of practice and trust.

“You’re already—” he started.

“I’ve been thinking about this since you texted me at ten saying you were ‘running a bath.'” I rocked onto his fingers. Felt them curve. Felt the press against the spot that made stars detonate behind my eyes. “I knew what that meant. I’ve been ready for two hours.”

“Jesus, Leo.”

“Hurry up.”

“I don’t hurry. You know I don’t hurry.”

“You’re meticulous. I know. It’s infuriating and hot. Hurry up.”

He laughed. Soft and low and pressed against my collarbone. Then his fingers withdrew, and I heard the condom, and I felt him position himself, and I sank down.

Slowly. Taking him inch by inch, feeling the stretch and the fullness and the specific, overwhelming rightness of having him inside me. His hands were on my hips, guiding, steadying, and his face — his face was the thing that undid me. The awe. Even now, even after hundreds of times, the awe was still there. Like he still couldn’t believe this was real. Like every time I took him inside me was the first time, and the miracle of it hadn’t faded.

I bottomed out. Fully seated on him, his cock buried in me, our hips flush. The water was around us — warm, moving, catching candlelight in golden shivers. I put my hands on his shoulders. Looked at him.

“Move,” he whispered.

I moved.

Slowly at first. Rising and falling on him, the water moving with me, creating waves that crested over the rim of the tub and hit the tile floor in rhythmic slaps. His hands were on my hips, his fingers pressing into the muscle, and his eyes were locked on mine and his mouth was open and the sounds he was making — low, guttural, the sounds of a man who was buried inside someone he loved and was losing the ability to form words — were echoing off the tile and filling the small bathroom like a second kind of music.

“You feel—” he started.

“I know.”

“Every time — how is it every time—”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. Don’t stop talking.”

The praise. Even now — even with Nate being the one inside me, even with the roles arranged differently than the first time he’d discovered this about himself — the words were the gasoline and the sex was the match.

“You’re so tight,” he said. His voice was wrecked. His hips were moving now too, thrusting up to meet my descent, the water churning between us. “So hot. The way you ride me — Leo, the way you look right now — fuck, you’re perfect—”

I rode him harder. Bracing my hands on his shoulders, using the leverage of the tub’s edges, finding the angle that hit right and then hitting it again, again, again. The bathroom was a symphony of sound — water against porcelain, skin against skin, his voice saying my name and my voice saying his and the wet, obscene slap of our bodies meeting under the surface.

His hand found my cock between us. Stroked me in time with his thrusts, and the dual sensation — him inside me and his hand on me — collapsed whatever distance remained between feeling and annihilation.

“I’m close,” I gasped. “Nate—”

“I know. I can feel it.” His hand tightened. His hips drove up harder. “Come for me. I want to feel you. I want to see your face.”

“Nate—”

“I’ve got you. I’ve always got you. Let go.”

I let go.

I came in the warm water with his cock inside me and his hand around me and his eyes on my face and candle wax dripping onto the tile and water flooding over the edge of the tub neither of us cared about. I came saying his name the way I’d said it a thousand times — like it was the only word, the first word, the last word — and he followed me over seconds later, his body arching under mine, his hands clamping on my hips, a groan that bounced off every surface in the small tiled room and filled it with the sound of a man who had found everything he’d ever been looking for.

We collapsed into each other. Me against his chest, him against the porcelain, the water settling around us as our breathing slowed. The candles were still burning. The bathroom floor was flooded. Gerald’s cousin — a second succulent, recently acquired, named Barbara — was on the bathroom shelf, undisturbed by the proceedings.

“We flooded the bathroom,” I said.

“Worth it.”

“The downstairs neighbors are going to kill us.”

“Worth it.”

“Nate.”

“Leo.”

“You were right about the bathtub.”

He grinned. That sharp, crooked, devastating grin — the one that still, after six months, after all of it, rearranged my internal organs every time.

“I’m always right about the bathtub,” he said. “I’m right about the milk. I’m right about Gerald. And I’m right about you.”

“Right about me how?”

He put his hand on my face. Wet, warm, dripping. Thumb on my cheekbone. The gesture that was ours.

“That you were worth waiting for,” he said. “Every year. Every minute. Every night on that terrible couch. All of it. You were worth every second.”

I kissed him. In the bathtub, in the candlelight, in the flooded bathroom of the apartment we’d chosen together, with two succulents and a future and a golden retriever that was going to happen whether I liked it or not.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you too.” He kissed my forehead. “Now help me mop up the bathroom before the ceiling caves in.”

We mopped. Badly. Laughing. Together.

The way we did everything now.

Want more Nate and Leo? Read their full story in Straight Man’s Exit.

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