Straight Until Him — Bonus Chapter

Blue Shutters — First Night
by Jace Wilder

A post-novel bonus scene from Evan’s POV. This chapter takes place after the final chapter of Straight Until Him.

Blue Shutters

The house smelled like paint and possibility.

We’d closed on it three days ago — signed the papers at a title company that smelled like old carpet and new beginnings, Jake’s hand shaking when he picked up the pen and steady by the time he set it down. Lily had been at school. Megan had texted Congratulations with an emoji that was either a house or a castle; we’d chosen to interpret it as a house.

Now it was Friday night, Lily was at Megan’s, and the house was ours.

The bed frame wasn’t assembled. Jake had started it — of course he had, the man couldn’t look at an unbuilt piece of furniture without experiencing a physical compulsion to build it — but the Allen wrench had snapped and the hardware store was closed and the frame was in pieces against the bedroom wall like a jigsaw puzzle abandoned mid-solve.

The mattress was on the floor.

Our mattress. The one we’d bought together at a store where the salesman had called us “you two” without blinking and Jake hadn’t flinched. A king, because we’d agreed: no more full-size, no more sleeping on top of each other because there was nowhere else to go. A king in a house with two bathrooms and a fenced yard and blue shutters that Jake was already planning to repaint because the blue was “a little too blue.”

“There’s no such thing as too blue,” I’d told him.

“There’s a blue that belongs on a house and a blue that belongs on a clown car. This is clown-car blue.”

“I love it.”

“You would.”

Now he was standing in the doorway of the master bedroom — our master bedroom, in our house, with our mattress on our floor — holding two beers and looking at me with an expression I’d seen exactly once before. The night of the storm. The night everything started.

“What?” I said from the mattress, where I was sitting cross-legged, still in my moving-day T-shirt and jeans.

“Nothing.” He handed me a beer. Sat down next to me. The mattress dipped under his weight, and I rolled into him — physics, gravity, the inevitable pull of a smaller body toward a larger one. He caught me with his free arm. Held me there, against his side, my head on his shoulder.

“We bought a house,” I said.

“We bought a house.”

“Together. With a mortgage. And a yard. And clown-car shutters.”

“I’m repainting the shutters.”

“You’re not repainting the shutters.”

He kissed the top of my head. The gesture that had become ours — the first point of contact, the greeting and the goodnight and the I’m here that didn’t need words. His lips in my hair, warm and certain.

“We should christen the bedroom,” I said.

“We don’t even have a bed frame.”

“We have a mattress. We have a floor. We have—” I set my beer on the windowsill, turned in his arms, and swung my leg over his lap. Straddled him. His beer nearly tipped; he caught it, set it down blindly, both hands finding my hips on autopilot. “—privacy. In our own house. No Mrs. Petrov. No thin walls. No one for miles.”

“The neighbors are thirty feet away.”

“Then they’d better get used to us.”

I kissed him. Not soft, not sweet — the kiss of a man who’d spent six weeks in a beige apartment being quiet and careful and muffling every sound into a pillow or a shoulder, and who was now sitting in a house with actual walls and actual distance and actual ours and had zero intention of being quiet ever again.

Jake’s hands tightened on my hips. His mouth opened under mine and he kissed back with the specific hunger of a man who’d just signed a thirty-year mortgage and was processing the commitment through the only language he was fluent in: physical contact.

“Shirt,” I said against his mouth. “Off.”

He pulled it over his head. Moving-day Jake — sweaty, flushed, dust on his forearms, his chest hair damp against his skin. He’d been carrying boxes for six hours. He smelled like labor and deodorant and the specific musk of a man who’d been working with his body all day, and I wanted to press my face into every inch of him.

I did.

Chest first. My mouth on his pec, his collarbone, the hollow of his throat where I could feel his pulse hammering. Down through the hair on his chest — I dragged my tongue through it, tasted salt, felt the vibration of the groan he didn’t bother to contain. No Mrs. Petrov. No sleeping child. Just us and the empty rooms and the freedom to be as loud as we wanted.

“Evan—” His voice echoed off the bare walls. The room was empty except for the mattress and our bodies, and every sound bounced back amplified, multiplied. His voice in surround sound. I was going to love this house.

I pushed him flat. He went — shoulders hitting the mattress, hands falling to his sides, the surrender that had become as natural to him as breathing. Jake Miller, who held everything up for everyone, letting me press him down into a bare mattress on a bare floor and take everything apart.

I stripped him. Jeans, boxers, work boots that took too long to unlace and made him laugh — the sex laugh, the one I’d unlocked on date night, the one that meant he was happy and present and not thinking about anything except my hands on his laces and my mouth on his ankle and the absurdity of a man giving a blowjob while wrestling with steel-toed boots.

“This is romantic,” he said, grinning upside-down at the ceiling while I yanked his second boot off.

“Shut up. These boots are structural enemies.”

“They’re Timberlands.”

“They’re between me and your cock and that makes them the enemy.”

He laughed. I threw the boot across the room — it thudded against the wall, the sound of a house absorbing its first piece of chaos — and then I was between his legs and the laughter stopped.

He was hard. Already hard, had probably been hard since I’d straddled him, because Jake’s body responded to mine with an immediacy that still startled me sometimes. Six weeks or six months or six years wouldn’t be enough to get used to it — the way his cock stiffened the second I touched him, the way his breathing changed, the way his hands reached for me with the blind certainty of a man who knew exactly what he wanted and had stopped being afraid to take it.

I took him in my mouth.

No teasing. No buildup. Just — mouth, tongue, depth. I swallowed him down and the sound he made filled the empty bedroom, bounced off the bare walls, came back to me from every direction. Deep, guttural, the sound of a man who’d spent weeks being quiet and was finally, finally allowed to be loud.

“Fuck—Evan—”

I hummed around him. The vibration made his hips jerk, and I took it — rode the thrust, relaxed my throat, let him push deeper. His hand found my hair, gripped, and the pull at my scalp sent electricity down my spine. I moaned with his cock in my mouth and the sound was obscene and loud and mine and nobody was going to knock on a wall or file a noise complaint.

I pulled off. He whimpered — actually whimpered, a sound I was going to replay in my head for the rest of my natural life — and I crawled up his body, stripping my own clothes as I went. Shirt over my head, jeans shoved down, briefs kicked off. Naked on top of him, skin on skin, his cock pressed against mine between our stomachs.

“I want you to fuck me,” I said. Clear. Direct. Looking down at him in the evening light coming through the uncurtained window. “Right here. On the floor of our house. First night. No furniture. No bed frame. Just us.”

His eyes went dark. The brown swallowed by black, the pupils eating everything. His hands came to my waist and flipped me — smooth, powerful, the casual strength of a man who lifted machinery for a living — and I was on my back on the mattress and he was above me and the ceiling of our house was visible over his shoulder, white and empty and waiting for the sounds we were about to give it.

“Lube’s in the box by the door,” I said. “Front pocket.”

“You packed lube in the essentials box?”

“It is essential. Go.”

He went. Naked, hard, walking across an empty bedroom to dig through a cardboard box, and I watched him from the mattress — the broad back, the thick thighs, the stretch marks on his hips that I’d kissed so many times they felt like mine. This man. This impossible, stubborn, beautiful man who’d moved into my apartment in a garbage bag and ended up carrying me into a house with blue shutters.

He came back with lube and a condom and knelt between my legs and prepped me with the thorough, attentive focus that defined everything Jake Miller did with his hands. One finger, then two, watching my face, reading the responses, adjusting the angle when I gasped, pressing deeper when I arched. His other hand on my thigh, grounding, steady. The calloused pad of his thumb tracing circles on my skin.

“More,” I said. “Three.”

Three fingers. The stretch that made my toes curl, that sent sparks from my prostate up my spine and out through every nerve ending. I grabbed his arm — the one inside me — and held on, my nails digging into his forearm, and the sound I made was the loudest sound this house had ever heard.

“That’s it,” Jake said. Low, steady, the voice he used when he knew exactly what he was doing. The voice he’d learned from me and made his own. “That’s it, Evan. Let me hear you.”

“Jake—please—I need—”

He didn’t make me ask twice. He rolled on the condom, slicked himself, and positioned himself between my thighs. I wrapped my legs around his waist — our position, the one that felt like coming home — and he pressed in.

Slow. Deep. Inch by devastating inch, his cock filling me, stretching me, the thick heat of him inside my body and the look on his face — awe, concentration, love so naked it hurt to see — and I pulled him down and kissed him as he bottomed out.

“Ours,” I said against his mouth. “This is ours. This house, this room, this—”

He thrust. Deep, hard, the headboard-less freedom of a mattress on a floor, nothing to hold back against, nothing to dampen the force. The mattress slid an inch on the hardwood. I yelped — half laugh, half moan — and he grinned and did it again.

“Ours,” he agreed. Thrust. The mattress moved. My back arched. “Every.” Thrust. “Room.” Thrust. “In this.” Thrust. “Fucking.” Thrust. “House.”

I lost coherence somewhere around the sixth thrust. The angle was perfect — deep enough to hit my prostate on every stroke, hard enough to push me across the mattress, and Jake was bracing himself with one hand on the floor and one hand on my hip, holding me in place while he drove into me with the relentless, rhythmic power of a man who’d found exactly where he belonged.

“Touch yourself,” he said. “I want to watch.”

I wrapped my hand around my cock and stroked. Fast, desperate, matching his rhythm, and his eyes went to my hand and his breath caught and his hips stuttered for a beat before he recovered and slammed into me with a force that punched the air out of my lungs.

“I love you,” he said. Mid-thrust. The way he always said it now — not as a declaration but as a fact of the universe. Gravity, sunlight, Jake Miller loves Evan Torres. “I love you, and this is our house, and I’m going to fuck you on every surface in it.”

“Every surface?”

“Kitchen counter first. You love the counter.”

“I do love the counter.”

“Then the shower. We have two bathrooms, Evan. That’s two showers.”

“Double the shower sex.”

“The math is irrefutable.”

I was laughing and moaning and coming apart all at once — the specific alchemy of Jake Miller during sex, the way he could be filthy and funny and devastating in the same breath. His cock was inside me and his hand was on my hip and he was listing the surfaces he planned to fuck me on while I stroked myself and the mattress slid across the floor and the house held us both.

“I’m close,” I gasped. “Jake—I’m—”

“Come.” He leaned down. His forehead against mine, his breath on my lips, his hips driving deep. “Come in our house, Evan. I want to hear it.”

I came screaming.

Not literally — but close. Loud, ragged, his name and God’s name and a string of Spanish profanity that my abuela would have been horrified by and my mother would have pretended not to understand. I came across my own stomach and his, my body clenching around him, and the force of it pulled him over the edge — he buried himself deep and came with a shout that echoed off every empty wall in the house and probably traveled directly to the neighbors and I did not care, would never care, would happily take noise complaints for the rest of my life if it meant hearing Jake Miller come undone in a house we’d built together.

He collapsed onto me. Dead weight. Two hundred and fifteen pounds of sweating, panting, satisfied man, and I wrapped my arms around him and held on and felt his heartbeat against my chest — fast, slowing, the drumbeat that I’d first felt through a wall in a beige apartment on Route 9, the night everything started.

“The mattress moved,” he said into my neck. “We need to get a rug. Something with grip.”

“Adding it to the list.”

“Right under bed frame and curtains.”

“Curtains can wait. The neighbors need to earn their show.”

He laughed. Into my neck, into my skin, the vibration traveling through my collarbone into my chest. The laugh that had taken twenty-one chapters to unlock — deep, free, the sound of a man who’d stopped holding his breath.

We lay on the mattress on the floor of our empty bedroom. The ceiling was white above us. The window was uncurtained. The blue shutters were visible from the outside if you walked past, and they were exactly the right shade of blue, no matter what Jake said.

Through the walls — the real walls, the solid walls of a house we owned — I could hear nothing. No Mrs. Petrov. No humming through drywall. No phone calls in Spanish to a mother who worried. Just the quiet of a home that was waiting to be filled.

We’d fill it. With Lily’s drawings on the fridge and Rosa’s tamales on Sunday and a desk built from scrap lumber and the sounds of two people who’d found each other across a shared wall and decided, against all odds, to knock it down.

“Hey, Jake.”

“Mm.”

“Welcome home.”

He pulled me tighter. Pressed his mouth to the top of my head. The gesture that started everything. The gesture that meant I’m here, I’m staying, I’m not pulling back.

“I’m already home,” he said. “I’ve been home since the storm.”

I closed my eyes. His heartbeat under my cheek. The smell of paint and sawdust and us. The house settling around us, learning our weight, learning our sounds.

We fell asleep on a mattress on a floor in a house with blue shutters, and in the morning we’d buy a rug and assemble the bed frame and hang Lily’s diorama in the living room and start filling the rooms with the noise of a family.

But tonight was just us. And it was everything.

Thank you for reading Straight Until Him.

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