The Best Man Needs Practice — Bonus Chapter

Lesson Eight — by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place one year after the epilogue. Camden and Bram have returned to Casa Maré Alta — the honeymoon cottage where it started — newly engaged, insufferably happy, and in possession of a framed syllabus with seven checkmarks and one new line written in Bram’s block capitals.

Content warning: This scene is significantly more explicit than the main novel. Graphic sexual content, praise kink, size difference, body worship, edging, and two men who have stopped pretending they need an excuse.

Lesson Eight

Bram

The cottage hadn’t changed.

Same blue shutters. Same cracked fountain out front. Same French doors opening onto a terrace with a direct sightline to the Atlantic. The fig candle was new — Camden had ordered one from the resort’s supplier and had it waiting on the counter when we arrived, because he was the kind of man who turned sentimentality into logistics and refused to admit either.

The syllabus was on the wall.

Framed. Professionally. Museum glass, archival matting, the cream-coloured hotel stationery preserved behind anti-UV coating as though it were a constitutional document rather than a list of sexual objectives written in two handwritings on stolen paper. Camden had done it as a joke. I’d had it reframed properly at a gallery in Georgetown, which ruined the joke, which was the point.

Seven lessons. Seven checkmarks in black ink. And below them, in the space I’d left blank for a year, one new line in my block capitals:

8. Show him what a year of practice looks like.

Camden found it within four minutes of arriving. I know because I was timing from the kitchen, where I was making his cortado with the resort’s machine, which still jammed on the steam wand and still required the same argument I’d been winning since the first morning.

“Bram.”

His voice came from the bedroom. The specific register that meant he’d found something that had disarmed him and was deciding between a joke and the truth.

I brought the cortado. He was standing in front of the frame, barefoot, in the white linen shirt he’d worn on the plane, his carry-on still on the floor behind him. His finger was on the glass, tracing the new line.

“When did you write this?” he asked.

“Last week. Before I shipped it to the resort.”

“You shipped our sex curriculum to Portugal via international freight.”

“Insured.”

“You insured our sex curriculum.”

“It’s irreplaceable.”

He turned. His green eyes were bright and his mouth was doing the thing — the left-sided smile, the one with the crinkle, the one that was mine. He set the cortado on the nightstand, which was the first indication that the cortado was not the priority.

“Show me,” he said.

“Show you what?”

“Lesson Eight. A year of practice. Show me what you’ve learned.”

I’d learned several things in a year.

I’d learned that Camden’s neck was the key to his entire nervous system — that a mouth on the tendon below his ear could reduce his vocabulary to single syllables in under ten seconds. I’d learned that his hips were ticklish on the left side and not the right. I’d learned that he liked being lifted and carried but would never ask, so I did it without asking, and the sound he made when his feet left the ground was worth the twelve months of practice it had taken to read the signal.

I’d learned to talk.

Not the way Camden talked — elaborate, performative, a verbal fireworks display designed to distract as much as arouse. I’d learned to talk the way I did everything: plainly, directly, with the specific and unsettling precision that made Camden’s breathing change in the way I’d been trained to detect.

I started with the shirt.

“Arms up,” I said.

He raised his arms. I pulled the linen over his head and tossed it toward the chair. It missed. Neither of us cared. His chest was freckled from the flight — the window seat, the sun through the glass, the particular pattern of copper spots across his collarbones that I’d memorised over three hundred mornings and could have drawn from memory.

I put my mouth on his collarbone. Kissed the freckle directly above it — the one I called the aperture freckle, because it sat at the same angle as his tattoo, and because naming his freckles was the kind of absurd, obsessive intimacy that a year of cohabitation had produced and that I refused to be embarrassed about.

“I’ve been thinking about this since Lisbon,” I said against his skin. We’d had a layover. Three hours. He’d fallen asleep on my shoulder in the terminal and his shirt had ridden up and I’d spent forty-five minutes looking at a strip of bare hip and planning.

“We were in Lisbon two hours ago.”

“I plan quickly.”

I dropped to my knees.

Camden’s breath caught. A year in, and me on my knees still did that — the sharp intake, the hand that went to my hair by reflex, the barely audible word that might have been my name or might have been a prayer and was, from Camden, functionally identical.

I undid his trousers. Pulled them down with his briefs in one motion, because a year had eliminated the need for incremental revelation. He was hard. He’d been hard since he saw the frame — I’d felt it when he kissed me in the doorway, his cock pressed against my thigh through the linen, the urgency of it contradicting the lazy smile he was performing.

I took him into my mouth.

Not slowly. Not with the careful, exploratory approach of lesson three, when I’d been learning the terrain with the focus of a man reading a map for the first time. This was a year of data. I knew the spot below the head that made his thighs shake. I knew the rhythm he liked before he came — steady, consistent, no variation, the opposite of what most people assumed. I knew the exact pressure that turned his verbal output from words to sounds to the specific silence that meant he was close.

I brought him to the edge three times.

Each time, I pulled off. Sat back on my heels. Looked up at him. Let him feel the absence, the air on his wet cock, the frustration building in his stomach and his fists and the particular set of his jaw that said he was about to start negotiating.

“Bram — I swear to God —”

“Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to stop being a sadist and let me —”

“Specifically.”

“I want to come. In your mouth. Right now. Please. Please, Bram.”

I gave him what he asked for. Took him deep, worked the rhythm he needed, and held his hips when they jerked forward because the year had also taught me when to absorb the force and when to direct it. He came with my name broken across three syllables, his fingers locked in my hair, his body curving over mine as if he could fold himself into the contact.

I swallowed. Wiped my mouth. Stood.

He was leaning against the wall, boneless, his eyes glazed, his chest heaving. The freckles were flushed pink. The engagement ring on his left hand caught the Portuguese light.

“That was —” He blinked. “That was Lesson Eight?”

“That was the preamble.”

“The preamble?”

I picked him up. One arm under his thighs, his back against the other, his body weightless in the way that four years of wanting him and one year of having him had turned into muscle memory. He wrapped his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist and I carried him to the bed — the same bed, the same white sheets, the same mattress that had held both our weights and all our confessions.

I set him down. Stripped. His eyes tracked me — chest, stomach, cock, thighs — with the photographer’s gaze that never turned off, the one that evaluated composition and light and found, apparently, something worth capturing.

“You’re staring,” I said.

“I’m composing. Different thing.”

“Compose faster. I’m on a schedule.”

I crawled over him. His body opened beneath mine — legs apart, hips tilted, the automatic positioning of a man who knew exactly how we fit and was done pretending the fit was accidental. I kissed him. Deep, proprietary, the kiss of a man who owned this mouth and was grateful for the ownership and expressed the gratitude through thoroughness.

I prepared him with the attention he deserved. One finger, then two, then three, his body responding with the ease of a year of trust — opening, adjusting, welcoming. He gripped my forearm and said things against my jaw that were half-instruction and half-confession and entirely the most honest version of Camden Royce: no jokes, no frame, just a man telling another man exactly how he wanted to be touched.

“Now,” he said. “Please. A year of practice and you still make me beg. It’s unconscionable.”

“I like hearing you ask.”

“You like hearing me lose.”

“Same thing. With you.”

I entered him. Slowly, because some things didn’t change with practice — the first inch was always a conversation, his body and mine negotiating the difference in scale that had been the running motif of our entire relationship. He exhaled. I held. He nodded. I gave him more.

When I was fully inside him, he looked up at me with the expression from the private portrait — open, certain, the face of a man who had stopped running and was allowing himself to be exactly where he was.

“There you are,” I said.

He made a sound that was not a laugh and not a sob and was, I’d learned, the specific noise Camden Royce produced when love and pleasure and the impossibility of adequate language converged in his chest simultaneously.

I moved. And the year — the coffee and the lamp and the Tuesday mornings and the three hundred nights of learning each other’s schedules and nightmares and the specific topography of each other’s bodies — was in every thrust. Not desperate. Not frantic. Certain. The certainty of a man who knew he’d be doing this tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, and who found in the repetition not boredom but a deepening, the way a river deepens its own channel: same water, same path, more depth each time.

He came again. Untouched. Arching beneath me, his cock pulsing between our stomachs, his voice producing my name in the specific register that contained no performance and no defence and nothing except the raw, unmediated fact of a man who was being known completely by someone who would never stop paying attention.

I followed. Deep inside him, my forehead against his, my eyes open because he’d taught me that — he’d taught me to keep my eyes open, to see and be seen, to remain in the room instead of retreating into the sensation.

Afterward. The sheets tangled. The ocean through the open doors. His head on my chest, his finger tracing the scar on my hand, the engagement ring warm against my skin.

“Lesson Eight,” he murmured. “Passed?”

“Passed.”

“Is there a Lesson Nine?”

“There’s a Lesson Nine every morning for the rest of your life. It’s the same lesson. I just keep getting better at it.”

He pressed his face to my chest. The laugh vibrated through my ribs. The ring caught the light. The cortado was cold on the nightstand, untouched, irrelevant, and perfect.

The right man makes repetition feel like anticipation.

I pulled the sheet over us. Held on. Let the ocean keep time.

We had all the practice we needed.

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