Sawdust and Surrender

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by Jace Wilder

This scene takes place nine months after the events of Thaw.
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Sawdust and Surrender

Eli

The coffee was an excuse and we both knew it.

It was a Thursday in November — nine months since I’d crashed into Beck’s snowbank, nine months since a storm had locked me inside a cabin with a man who communicated in furniture and fed me stew that changed my religion. Nine months, and I still made him coffee at three in the afternoon and carried it out to the workshop like a ritual, because the ritual was really just a reason to watch him work with his sleeves rolled up. I was not above manufacturing excuses to see Beck Calloway’s forearms. I would never be above that. I would go to my grave unapologetically thirsty for those forearms.

The workshop door was open. November in Colorado was cold enough to see your breath, but Beck ran hot — always had, always would, the human furnace whose body temperature I’d been freeloading off since February — and he kept the door cracked when he was working because the heat from the wood stove inside made the space tropical by his standards.

I pushed the door wider. Stopped.

He’d taken his shirt off.

Not unusual, in the abstract. The workshop got warm when the stove was burning and the tools were running. But the specifics — the specifics were killing me. He was standing at his main workbench, sanding something large and flat that I recognized as the headboard he’d been building for our bed. The new bed. The one he’d designed after I’d mentioned, once, casually, that I’d never had a real headboard and wouldn’t it be nice to have something to hold onto.

He hadn’t responded at the time. He’d just looked at me with that expression — the cataloguing one, the one that meant he was filing information for future use — and three days later I’d heard the sound of the planer at six in the morning and known that Beck Calloway was building me something to hold onto.

Now he was sanding it. Shirtless. His back was to me — the wide, muscled planes of it catching the workshop light, the scar on his left shoulder blade pale against tanned skin, sawdust clinging to the sheen of sweat between his shoulder blades. His arms moved in long, fluid strokes, the sanding block traveling the length of the headboard with the meditative precision of a man who could feel the difference between 220-grit and 320-grit with his fingertips. The muscles in his back shifted with each pass. His sweatpants sat low on his hips. The waistband of his boxer briefs was visible above them, dark grey against the tanned skin of his lower back, and the twin dimples above his ass were on full display like a personal insult directed specifically at my self-control.

“You’re staring.”

He hadn’t turned around. Hadn’t paused. Just kept sanding, the rhythm unbroken, his voice carrying the low, amused certainty of a man who knew exactly what he looked like and exactly what it did to me.

“I’m appreciating craftsmanship,” I said. “I thought you’d want to know your technique is being admired by a discerning audience.”

“You’re staring at my back.”

“Your back is part of the craftsmanship.”

He turned then. Looked at me in the doorway with the coffee mug in my hands and whatever was happening on my face — flushed, hungry, the expression I wore approximately 60% of the time I was in his vicinity — and his eyes did the slow, comprehensive sweep that meant he was transitioning from woodworking mode to a different kind of project entirely.

“Bring me the coffee,” he said.

I brought him the coffee. Crossed the workshop floor — sawdust underfoot, the smell of linseed oil and cedar and the particular warm musk of Beck’s skin that I could have identified blindfolded in a crowd of a thousand — and held out the mug.

He took it. Set it on the workbench without drinking. His eyes didn’t leave mine.

“You want to learn the hand plane?” he asked.

My mouth went dry. The hand plane. The same offer he’d made with the pasta dough nine months ago, standing behind me at the kitchen counter, his hands over my hands, his chest against my back, his voice low in my ear while the air between us caught fire. We both knew what “learning the hand plane” meant. It was code. It was foreplay. It was Beck’s version of a pickup line, and it worked every single time.

“Yes,” I said. “Teach me.”

His eyes darkened. He reached past me to the wall rack and took down the smoothing plane — wooden body, sharp blade, the one he treated with the reverence other men reserved for sports cars. He set it on the headboard. Then he stepped behind me.

His chest hit my back and every nerve ending in my body detonated.

Bare skin against the thin fabric of my sweater — his sweater, still, always — and I could feel the heat of him radiating through the cotton, the solid wall of his chest, the ridges of his stomach against my lower back. His hands came around me and covered mine on the plane, dwarfing them completely, his calloused fingers guiding mine into the correct grip.

“Pressure here.” His mouth was at my ear. His voice was the one — the low one, the one that bypassed my brain and went directly to my cock. “Even stroke. Let the blade do the work.”

He guided my hands along the headboard. Push, lift, return. The curl of walnut shaving rising from the blade in a perfect ribbon. His hips were pressed against my ass and I could feel him — thickening, hardening with every stroke of the plane, and my own body was responding with a speed that should have been embarrassing except that I had stopped being embarrassed about wanting Beck approximately eight months ago.

“You feel that?” he murmured. “The grain opening up. The wood telling you where it wants to go.”

“I feel something,” I managed. “I don’t think it’s the wood.”

His laugh was low and warm against my neck. Then his mouth was on my skin — the spot below my ear that he’d claimed on night one and had never given back — and his hands left the plane and went to my hips and pulled me backward against him and there was no ambiguity about what I was feeling now. He was fully hard, thick and insistent against my ass, and the grinding pressure of it drew a moan from me that echoed off the workshop rafters.

“I built this for us,” he said against my throat. His hands slid under my sweater. Up my stomach. Across my chest. “The headboard. For our bed. For you to hold onto.”

“Beck —”

“And I’m going to break it in with you.” His thumb circled my nipple and I arched back against him so hard the hand plane clattered off the bench. “Right here. Right now. In my workshop. On my workbench.”

“Oh God. Yes. Please —”

He pulled the sweater over my head. Turned me around. Lifted me onto the workbench in one motion — the same effortless lift, the same casual display of strength that made my brain short-circuit every time, nine months and counting — and my bare back hit the smooth walnut surface of the bench he’d built with his own hands and the coolness of the wood against my skin made me gasp.

He stood between my legs. Shirtless. Sawdust on his shoulders. His chest heaving, his eyes black, his hands gripping my thighs. The workshop light caught the planes of his body — the chest I knew by heart, the stomach I’d mapped with my tongue, the V of muscle disappearing into sweatpants that were doing nothing to contain the erection straining against the fabric.

“You are obscene,” I told him. “You’re standing in a woodshop covered in sawdust looking like the cover of a romance novel and you expect me to function?”

“I don’t expect you to function.” He pulled my hips to the edge of the bench. Leaned down. Kissed me — deep, slow, his tongue sweeping into my mouth while his hand dropped between us and palmed me through my sweatpants and my hips bucked so hard I nearly slid off the bench. “I expect you to be loud.”

I was loud.

I was loud when he stripped my sweatpants off and went to his knees on the sawdust-covered floor and put his mouth on me with the focused, unhurried attention of a man working a piece of wood to a perfect finish. I was loud when his fingers found me, slick with the lube he kept in the workshop drawer now because this was not the first time we’d ended up here and Beck Calloway believed in being prepared. I was loud when he worked me open with the same patient, thorough precision he brought to every joint and every seam, his fingers curved inside me while his mouth never stopped, and the combination drove me to the edge so fast I had to fist my hand in his hair and gasp “stop — not yet — I want you inside me when I —”

He stood up. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The sight of it — his swollen lips, his dark eyes, the casual, devastating gesture — nearly finished me right there.

He pushed his sweatpants down. He was so hard the tip was wet, the full thick length of him curving up against his stomach, and nine months had not diminished the visceral impact of seeing him like this. I didn’t think anything ever would.

He rolled the condom on. Stepped between my legs. I was on the workbench — his workbench, the surface where he built tables and shelves and the bones of our shared life — and he lifted my hips and pressed inside me in one long, steady stroke that I felt in every molecule of my body.

The sound I made was not human. It was a sound that belonged in the rafters of a workshop at three in the afternoon, a sound that was made of pleasure and fullness and the overwhelming certainty that this — this man, this place, this feeling — was the thing I’d been driving toward when I drove off a mountain road in February.

“Good boy.” Low. Rough. His hands gripping my hips, his thumbs pressing into the creases of my thighs. “So good for me. You take me so well.”

Nine months of conditioning. Nine months of those two words lighting up my nervous system like a switchboard. I melted. Went boneless on the bench, my back arching, my hands finding the edge of the workbench and gripping while he started to move.

He fucked me on his workbench with the door open.

There was no one for miles. That was the gift of the mountain — the privacy, the isolation that had started as Beck’s prison and had become our sanctuary. No neighbors. No audience. Just the November air drifting through the cracked door and the sound of skin on skin and my voice echoing off the walls as he drove into me with long, powerful strokes that rattled the tools on their hooks.

“Harder,” I gasped. “God, Beck — harder — I want to feel the bench —”

He gave me harder. Gripped the far edge of the bench for leverage and slammed into me deep enough that my vision whited out, and I screamed — actually screamed, the way only he could make me, the full, unrestrained volume he’d taught me to use — and his answering groan was guttural, primal, the sound of a man whose control had been demolished by his own workmanship and the person lying on it.

“You’re incredible,” he said, and his voice was wrecked. “The sounds you make. The way you look on my bench. In my workshop. In my life. Eli — you’re everything — you’ve always been everything —”

He pulled out. I whined. He flipped me — hands on my hips, spinning me, and my chest hit the bench and my feet hit the floor and he pressed my shoulders down and entered me again from behind and the angle change hit the spot that made me see God and I clawed at the walnut surface and left marks that would still be there tomorrow, evidence, proof, the physical record of what happened when a woodworker and a baker stopped pretending the workshop was just for furniture.

“Touch yourself,” he said. A command. The voice. “I want to feel you come around me.”

I wrapped my hand around myself and stroked and the dual sensation — his cock inside me, my hand on myself, his voice in my ear praising me, the rough walnut against my chest — compressed into a single white-hot point that detonated in approximately four seconds.

I came so hard my knees buckled. He caught me — always caught me, always held me up, always — and followed me over the edge with a sound that was my name said like a prayer, and we collapsed against the workbench together, panting, sweating, covered in sawdust and utterly destroyed.

Silence. The good kind. The workshop kind. The creak of cooling wood and the hiss of the stove and two people breathing hard in the aftermath of something that had started as a coffee delivery and ended as a religious experience.

“Beck.”

“Yeah.”

“I left fingernail marks in the headboard.”

A pause. Then his laugh — the full one, the warm one, the one I’d resurrected from three years of silence and now heard every day and would never, ever get tired of hearing.

“I’ll sand them out.”

“No.” I turned in his arms. Pressed my palm to his chest. Felt his heartbeat — fast, slowing, matching mine the way it always did. “Leave them.”

He looked at me. Green-grey eyes. Sawdust in his beard. The expression I’d learned was love — not the word but the thing itself, the actual weight and texture of it, lived in this face and these hands and this man who built things to last.

“Yeah,” he said. Kissed my forehead. Pulled me against his chest. “I’ll leave them.”

We stood in his workshop — our workshop — in the November light, holding each other, sawdust in our hair and handprints on the headboard and a dog barking from the cabin porch because it was past his dinner time and Bourbon had never once in his life been patient about food.

“I’ll build you whatever you want,” Beck murmured against my hair.

He meant it about more than furniture.

He always did.

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