Straight Roommate, Queer Problem Book Cover

Hands On

A Straight Roommate, Queer Problem Bonus Scene
by Jace Wilder

⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus scene contains explicit MM sexual content and is intended for readers 18+. This scene takes place three weeks after the epilogue of Straight Roommate, Queer Problem.

Hands On

A scene TOO HOT for retailers. Three weeks after their happily ever after.

The studio was quiet in the way only empty creative spaces can be—all held breath and residual intention, the ghosts of thirty pairs of hands still hanging in the air.

I was cleaning the last wheel when I heard his boots on the stairs.

I knew it was Evan before the door opened. Not because I recognized his footsteps—though I did, the particular weight of him, the unhurried cadence that said I’m here and I’m not going anywhere—but because my body always knew. Nine years of calibration. A decade of my nervous system tuning itself to the frequency of one specific man.

“Hey.” He leaned in the doorway, dusty from a job site, sleeves rolled to the elbows, forearms streaked with joint compound and sweat. His hair was pushed back from his forehead and his blue-gray eyes had that particular gleam—the one I used to interpret as friendly warmth and now recognized as want.

“You’re early,” I said. “Class ended twenty minutes ago.”

“I timed it.” He stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind him. The lock clicked, and the sound traveled down my spine like a fingertip. “You promised me a lesson, Sutton.”

He’d been asking for three weeks. Ever since we’d moved his stuff back into the loft—our loft now, officially, with his name on the lease and his toothbrush in the holder and his weight on my mattress every night—Evan had been watching me throw with an intensity that went beyond casual interest. Show me how, he’d say, standing too close while I centered a mound of clay, his eyes tracking the movement of my hands like he was memorizing something.

I’d deflected. Teased. Promised later because watching Evan Cole watch my hands on wet clay while we were in the fragile, electric early weeks of whatever we were doing seemed like a spectacularly bad idea.

But he’d kept asking. And I was constitutionally incapable of refusing Evan anything, which was the root cause of every beautiful catastrophe in my life.

“Fine.” I gestured to the nearest wheel. “Sit.”

He pulled a stool up and sat, his long legs bracketing the wheel, knees wide. He looked absurd and gorgeous—two hundred and ten pounds of renovation project manager in work boots and a flannel, sitting at a pottery wheel like a bull in a jewelry shop.

“Now what?” he asked.

I dropped a prepared mound of stoneware clay onto the bat. “Now you get your hands wet.”

He dipped his fingers in the water bucket. I shouldn’t have watched. I watched anyway—the water sliding between his fingers, darkening the dust and compound on his knuckles. These were the hands that had rebuilt my kitchen cabinets, that had carried me to bed, that had learned in three weeks how to take me apart so thoroughly I forgot my own name in two languages.

“Both hands on the clay,” I said. “Palm and fingers, wrapping it. You want to feel the center.”

He cupped the mound, and I watched his forearms flex. “It’s cold.”

“It’ll warm up.”

I started the wheel at a slow rotation. The clay turned under his grip, wobbling unevenly. Evan frowned—the same frown he got at a job site when a measurement was off—and tightened his hands.

“You’re choking it,” I said. “You can’t force clay. It’s not lumber.”

“Everything is lumber if you’re determined enough.”

“That is the most Evan Cole thing you’ve ever said.” I moved behind him. “Here.”

I leaned over his back, my chest against his shoulders, and wrapped my hands around his. The position was—well. It was the pottery-lesson position, the one you saw in movies, the one that was already loaded with suggestion before you added nine years of pining and a recent history of enthusiastic sex. My chin was near his ear. My hips were against his lower back. His hands were inside mine, clay and water slick between our fingers, and the wheel was turning, turning, turning.

“Feel that?” I murmured. “The wobble. You need to find the center. Squeeze steady, even pressure, let the wheel do the work.”

His breathing changed. I felt it—the expansion of his ribs against my chest, the slight hitch that I’d learned over the past three weeks was Evan’s body admitting something his mouth hadn’t gotten around to yet.

“Like this?” His voice was lower.

“Steadier. You’re rushing.” I pressed his hands tighter around the clay, guiding the pressure, and the mound began to even out under our combined grip. The wobble smoothed. The clay started to center, a spinning axis of earth between our interlocked fingers. “There. Feel the difference?”

“Yeah,” he breathed. But he wasn’t looking at the clay. I could see the angle of his jaw, the way he’d turned his head just enough to catch my face in his peripheral vision. “I feel it.”

The wheel hummed. Water ran warm between our fingers. I was acutely aware of every point of contact—my chest to his back, my hands over his, my breath on his neck—and the clay was centered now, spinning smooth and true, but neither of us moved.

“Nico.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the next step?”

I slid my thumbs over the tops of his hands, pressing them into the clay. “You open it. Thumbs down into the center. Slow.”

He pushed down. The clay yielded, opening into a well under his thumbs, and I heard him make a sound—a small, surprised exhale—that hit me like voltage.

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s really good.”

“You’re not even looking at the clay.”

He was right. I was looking at the side of his neck—the tendon, the faint pulse point, the place where his skin tasted like salt and sawdust.

“I’m looking at your hands,” I said, which was true.

He stopped the wheel.

The sudden stillness was deafening. Clay-smeared water dripped into the tray. The overhead fluorescents buzzed. Evan turned on the stool, and his hands—wet, clay-streaked, rough—closed around my hips and pulled me forward between his spread knees.

“I didn’t come here for a pottery lesson,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’ve been thinking about you all day. On the site. Tearing out drywall and thinking about your hands.” His thumbs drew circles on my hip bones through my jeans, leaving clay prints. “About what your hands look like when you’re working. About what they feel like when—”

I kissed him.

Three weeks in and I still wasn’t used to it—the reality of kissing Evan Cole after nine years of imagining it. His mouth was warm and insistent and tasted like the coffee he’d grabbed on his way here. He kissed the way he worked: thorough, deliberate, refusing to leave anything unfinished. One hand slid up my back, clay transferring to my shirt, and the other hooked into my belt loop and pulled until there was no space left between us.

“Here?” I murmured against his mouth.

“Here.” He bit my lower lip—gently, then not gently. “I want to see you in your element.”

The worktable behind me was the wide butcher-block surface where I wedged clay and scored slabs. It was sturdy—I’d built it to hold a hundred pounds of stoneware. It could hold us.

Evan stood, and in one motion he gripped my thighs and lifted me onto the table. The ease of it—the sheer, casual demonstration of strength—went through me like a drug. My legs wrapped around him on instinct. His hands were on my jaw, tilting my face up, and his hips pressed forward between my thighs with the kind of pressure that made my vision blur at the edges.

“I love your studio,” he said, kissing along my jaw, teeth scraping the edge of my ear. “I love watching you work. I love your fucking hands, Nico.”

He took my right hand and pressed his mouth to my palm—a slow, open-mouthed kiss against skin still slick with clay water—and then he dragged his tongue across the base of my fingers, and I made a sound that I was going to pretend later I hadn’t made.

“That’s the sound,” he said. Low. Rough. Satisfied. “That’s the one I can’t stop thinking about.”

He pulled my shirt over my head and tossed it. His followed. Then his mouth was on my collarbone, my chest, the line of my ribs, and his hands were working my belt with the focused efficiency of a man who disassembled things professionally. My jeans hit the floor. His followed, and then it was just us—bare skin and clay dust and the fluorescent hum of the empty studio—and Evan dropped to his knees on the concrete floor with the same calm certainty with which he approached every structural challenge.

“Evan—”

“Shh.” He looked up at me from between my thighs, and the sight of him there—this man who’d been my straight best friend for nine years, kneeling on the floor of my studio with clay smeared across his chest and his pupils blown wide—was so far beyond anything I’d ever let myself imagine that my breath locked in my throat. “I’ve been thinking about this since the job site. Let me.”

He took me in his hand first. Slow, exploratory strokes that were still new enough to make us both marvel at the physics of it—how well he knew this motion on himself and how different it was here, the angle reversed, the response immediate and devastating. His thumb found the sensitive underside and pressed, and my hips jerked.

“Like that?” He was studying me with the same intensity he brought to blueprints—reading the reactions, cataloging what worked, building a map.

“Like that. God—exactly like that.”

Then his mouth replaced his hand, and I stopped being able to form words.

What Evan lacked in experience he compensated for with the same relentless competence he brought to everything. He was careful and focused and devastatingly attentive, adjusting his pace and pressure in real time based on every sound I made, every involuntary twitch of my hips, every time my fingers tightened in his hair. He used his hand and his mouth together, finding a rhythm that was slow and deliberate and absolutely, categorically ruinous.

My head fell back. My hand braced against the worktable. The other was in his hair—sandy brown, still gritty with drywall dust—and I was saying things, incoherent encouragement that tumbled out without permission. Yes and there and Evan, fuck, right there and you’re so good at this, you have no idea—

The praise hit him like a switch. I felt it—the vibration of his groan around me, the way his hands tightened on my thighs, pulling me closer. Three weeks had taught me this: Evan Cole, who had spent his whole life being competent and reliable and useful without ever being told he was enough, came undone when I told him he was doing well. When I told him he was good. When I told him he was everything.

“You’re perfect,” I breathed, and his rhythm stuttered and deepened. “You feel so—fuck—Evan, I’m close, I’m—”

He pulled off. Stood. Gripped my jaw and kissed me hard—and I could taste myself on his mouth, a reality that short-circuited something fundamental in my nervous system.

“Not yet,” he said against my lips. “I want to feel you.”

The supply closet by the sink. I kept lube in there—a recent addition to the studio inventory, because Evan had a habit of showing up after work and because the worktable had proven itself structurally sound on two previous occasions. I reached back, grabbed the bottle, and pressed it into his hand.

“You sure?” he asked. He always asked. Every time. Not because he doubted—because he wanted to hear me say it.

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

He prepped me slowly, forehead pressed to mine, watching my face with that devastating focus while his fingers worked me open. One, then two, curving and pressing until he found the angle that made my whole body arch off the table.

“There?” Breathless.

“There. God—there.”

He kissed me through the stretch. Murmured against my mouth—things he’d never said out loud before three weeks ago. You’re beautiful. You feel incredible. I can’t believe I get to touch you. I can’t believe I almost missed this.

Then he pulled me to the edge of the table, and I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he pushed into me with a slowness that was its own form of worship.

The sound he made—low, shattered, like something had broken open in his chest—was the most honest thing Evan Cole had ever said without words. His forehead dropped to my shoulder. His hands gripped my hips hard enough to leave marks I’d feel tomorrow. And for a long moment we were both still, just breathing, just being, feeling the impossible reality of this—two men who’d spent nine years orbiting each other finally, finally in the same gravity.

“Move,” I whispered. “Evan. Move.”

He did.

Slow at first. Long, deep thrusts that bottomed out and held, that gave me all of him with every stroke. The worktable creaked under us. Clay tools rattled in their cups. I gripped his shoulders—broad, muscle-dense, built by years of physical labor—and pulled him closer, deeper.

“Harder.”

He gave me harder. His pace built with the same methodical escalation as his hands on clay—steady, precise, refusing to rush. But his control was fraying. I could feel it in the tremor of his thighs, the ragged edge of his breathing, the way his fingers dug into my hips with increasing desperation.

“You feel—” He gritted his teeth. “Nico. You feel—”

“Tell me.”

“Like coming home.” His voice cracked on the word. “Like the thing I didn’t know I was looking for.”

I pulled him into a kiss that tasted like clay dust and coffee and the future. My hand found the space between us, wrapping around myself, stroking in time with his thrusts. The dual sensation—full, stretched, perfectly ruined—built in a wave I couldn’t hold back.

“I’m close,” I gasped. “Don’t stop. Whatever you do, don’t—”

He shifted his angle. Deeper. The head of him found the spot that turned my vision white, and I cried out—his name, or something like it, or nothing at all—and he drove into it again, and again, relentless, devoted, and the wave broke.

My orgasm tore through me with the force of something that had been building for nine years. My body locked around him—arms, legs, everything—and I felt the pulse of it between us, hot and messy and real. Evan watched my face through all of it, his jaw clenched, his eyes burning, and something about seeing me come undone demolished the last of his control.

Three more strokes. Hard, desperate, graceless. His rhythm shattered. He buried himself deep and came with a sound that was half groan, half sob—the noise of a man finally allowing himself to want the thing he wanted, all the way, without apology.

He collapsed against me. Forehead to my shoulder. Both of us breathing like we’d run the length of Chicago. The worktable held, because I’d built it well. The fluorescents hummed. Somewhere across the room, the wheel I’d been cleaning still had a half-formed mound of clay on it, abandoned.

“Nico.”

“Yeah.”

“I got clay on your—everywhere. I got clay everywhere.”

I looked down. He was right. We were both streaked with it—gray-brown stoneware residue smeared across our chests, our arms, our stomachs, blending with sweat and everything else. It looked like a bad abstract painting. It looked like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

“The studio has a sink,” I said.

“The studio also has a floor,” he said, “and I don’t think my legs work anymore.”

I laughed. He laughed. And then we were both laughing, foreheads together, still tangled up in each other, sticky and clay-covered and ridiculous, and I thought—for the thousandth time in three weeks, but with a force that still knocked the breath out of me—this is real. This is actually real.

Evan kissed me again. Soft this time. Slow. The kind of kiss that isn’t going anywhere because it’s already arrived.

“For the record,” he murmured, “I think I’m terrible at pottery.”

“The worst I’ve ever seen.”

“But I’m very good at the other thing.”

I bit his lip. “The best I’ve ever seen.”

His grin was wide, cocky, and aimed directly at me like the weapon it had always been. But there was something underneath it now—a tenderness that he used to save for when I wasn’t looking, that he now let me see.

“Same time tomorrow?” he asked.

I looked around the studio. The clay on the floor. The tools knocked askew. The wheel still spinning lazily in the corner, bearing witness to what happened when Evan Cole decided to learn something with his hands.

“I’ll clear my schedule,” I said.

He kissed me one more time—not soft this time, not slow, a promise of tomorrow and the day after and every day you’ll let me—and I held on, clay-smeared and wrecked and finally, impossibly, home.

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