🔥 Not on the Table 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Assassin’s Alibi by Rafe Calder

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place one year after the first night of The Assassin’s Alibi, after the epilogue. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Mikhail’s side of an anniversary: six coats of oil, seven chairs against the wall, a dark blue tie, and a fifty-dollar amendment. Explicit content — 18+.

Not on the Table

I’ve oiled the table six times. He only knows about five.

Ezra keeps the count. He raises it at Sunday dinner, in front of his mother, the way another man would mention a parking fine. Eleven feet of oak, a year old in November, and nothing has been on it but plates, case files and his elbows.

“Not on the table,” I’ve said. I said it in March, with his legs around my waist. I said it in July, when he’d won a jury and came through the gate saying the code like a sentence being passed. He takes the counter instead. He takes the bed, the shower, the floor in front of the glass. He’s patient about it. He’s building a record.

Today is a Friday in October. It’s a year.

So this morning, when the sensible car had gone down the gravel, I oiled the oak again and let it dry. I carried seven chairs to the north wall and stood them in a row, like a jury. I left one at the head. I put the gray blanket on the end of the table, folded once. On the blanket I put the bottle, his dark blue tie, and a fifty-dollar bill.

He’s home at six. I hear him say the gate code. Tonight he says it like a date.

He stops inside the door with a file under his arm. He looks at the chairs against the wall. The blanket. The tie. The money.

“Mikhail.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the fifty for?”

“Counsel. I want an amendment.”

He puts the file down on the counter with great care. “You want to amend the retainer. It has one clause. It’s the only one-clause instrument I’ve ever drafted, and I’m vain about it.”

“Then draft a rider.”

“Saying what?”

I’ve practiced it. A year ago I couldn’t have got it past my teeth.

“That the table is no longer excluded.”

He doesn’t laugh. His eyes go dark, and he looks at the oak, and at me.

“You oiled it.”

“This morning.”

“That’s six.”

“Yes.”

“You told me it was going to be an heirloom.”

“It isn’t one yet. Nothing has happened on it.” It comes out level. I check. “I want it to have had us.”

His throat moves.

“That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said about furniture.” He picks up the fifty and puts it in his breast pocket. “Motion carries. Terms. Yours first. You paid.”

I say them. All of them, out loud, in my own kitchen, and the hinge of my jaw stays loose.

“Lights on. Every one. You on your back on that blanket, with your wrists in the tie. I sit in that chair and take my time. Then you take me, over the end of it, where I can hold the edge.”

He has to put a hand on the counter.

“You’ve got so much better at that.”

“I practice weekly.”

“And stop?”

“Stop is stop. Two taps if you can’t speak.”

“On oak.”

“It carries.”

I undress him myself. He keeps his hands at his sides. He learned that on a kitchen counter, and he’s never needed telling twice.

Jacket over the back of a chair. The green court tie, flat on the stone. Shirt, belt, the rest. He’s hard before I’ve finished, flushed down to the chest, and he doesn’t cover any of it. He stopped covering things a long time ago.

I lift him onto the blanket. He still makes the sound.

“Wrists.”

He holds them out. Dark blue silk, three flat turns, a knot he could pull open with his teeth. Two fingers under it.

“Squeeze my hand.”

He squeezes.

“Good.”

His eyes close on the word. A year, and it still goes through him like current.

“Arms over your head. Hands flat on the wood. That’s the only job you have.”

“I’d like it noted that I have wanted this table since November. I have been extremely patient. I’ve made do with a counter, which is stone, Mikhail, and I think the record should reflect…”

I put him on his back and pull him down the blanket until his hips are at the very edge. Then I sit in the chair at the head of my table, and I put his knees over my shoulders.

He stops talking.

“Keep going,” I tell him. “I want every word. I’m only going to make it difficult.”

I start at the inside of his knee. My mouth, then my teeth, then the flat of my tongue, all the way up the long muscle of his thigh. I don’t hurry. Nobody is timing this. I mouth the crease of his hip. I breathe on his cock and don’t touch it, and watch it jump against his stomach.

“That’s… you’ve sat down to this like a meal.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to say something terrible about eating at this table.”

“Three hundred dinners. This is the best one.”

He laughs, and I spread him with my thumbs and lick him open, and the laugh breaks in the middle.

I’ve learned him this way. Slow, flat strokes first, until his thighs stop fighting. Then the point of my tongue, working into him, and his heels dig into my back and his hands slap flat on the oak over his head.

“Fuck. Oh, fuck, that’s… I move to strike the last year. All of it. We could have been doing this on a table…”

I slick two fingers and push them into him under my tongue. He’s hot and tight and he lets me in at once. I curl them. He makes the small sound, the one he doesn’t choose.

“That one,” I tell him. “Again.”

I take his cock into my mouth while my fingers work him. All of it, slowly, to the root. He’s salt and clean skin, and he’s so hard I can feel his pulse on my tongue. I hold him in my throat and press inside him at the same time, and his back comes off the blanket.

“Mikhail. Mikhail, I’m going to…”

I come off him. I keep my fingers still.

“Not yet. When I say.”

“You bastard.”

“Yes.”

I count ten of his breaths. Then I go down on him again, slow, three fingers now, twisting. He’s talking without any order to it. Objections. Threats. A tort he says he’s inventing for my mouth specifically. His cock leaks on my tongue and I swallow it, and when his thighs lock around my head I stop again and rest my cheek on his hip.

“Twice,” he gasps. “That’s twice, I’ll have you… please. Please.”

“You don’t have to ask. I know what you need.” I look up the length of him. He’s stretched out on my table with his wrists tied over his head, wet to the hairline, his chest heaving, the whole room lit and the black glass giving it back. “Look at you. You’re the best thing I’ve ever put on this table.”

His eyes fill. He’s laughing as well.

“Now, Ezra.”

I swallow him to the root and drive my fingers into the place that undoes him. He comes with a shout that rings off the concrete. It hits the back of my throat in long hot pulses and I take every one, and I don’t let him go until he’s twitching and pushing weakly at the air with his bound hands.

I pull the knot with two fingers. The silk falls open.

“You can have your hands.”

They’re in my hair before I’ve finished saying it. He drags me up out of the chair and kisses me, deep, tasting himself.

“My turn,” he says against my mouth. His voice is wrecked. “You said over the end of it. I’m holding you to your own terms.”

He undresses me slowly. He’s unsteady on his legs and he doesn’t care. He kisses the scar under my collarbone. He turns my left hand over and kisses the burn in the palm, shiny and pink, a year old.

“Hands on the table.”

I put them on the oak. He moves me to the end of it, facing the glass. Forty feet of black ocean, and every light in the house on behind me. My back is to the room. I notice that I haven’t checked the door.

“Wider.”

I spread my feet.

“Good,” Ezra says, and I understand at last what I’ve been doing to him for a year. It goes straight down my spine.

“Oh, you felt that. I’ve waited a very long time to hand that back.” His palm runs down my back, slow, shoulder to hip. “Bend. All the way. Chest on the wood.”

The oak is cool and smooth under my cheek. It smells of linseed. He kneels behind me, and puts his mouth on me.

I make a sound into my own table.

“There it is.” His breath is hot on wet skin. “I’m going to talk. You like it when I talk.”

“Yes.”

“Then listen. You carried seven chairs across this room today so I’d have somewhere to put you. You bought a rider for fifty dollars. You asked for this in complete sentences.” His tongue again, slow, then pressing in, and my fingers close on the table’s edge. “Do you know what that does to me? I’d have settled for a nod. A year ago I’d have got a jaw.”

Slick fingers. One, then two. He’s careful and he’s sure. He knows exactly where, and he goes there and stays, rubbing, until my hips are moving and I’m breathing through my teeth.

“You’re so tight. You’re gripping me. That’s it, let me in. That’s so good, Mikhail. You’re doing so well.”

Three. I’m sweating onto six coats of oil. My cock is hard against the edge of the table, trapped there, aching.

“Ezra. Now.”

“Ask me… no. You asked at six o’clock. That’s plenty.”

We stopped needing the box in April. He drafted that too. There were exhibits. So there’s nothing between us when he lines himself up and pushes in, bare and hot, one long slow press that empties my lungs onto the oak.

“Oh, God.” His forehead drops between my shoulder blades. “Give me a second. You feel… I’ve got no remarks. I’ve got nothing prepared.”

“Move.”

He moves.

Slow at first. Deep. His hands are on my hips and his thighs are against the backs of mine, and every stroke drags over that place inside me and pushes a sound out of my chest. The table doesn’t shift. I built the bed. I didn’t build this. Whoever did knew his work.

“It’s holding,” Ezra pants.

“It’s oak.”

“Then I can stop being careful.”

He does. He fucks me hard, over the end of my own table, with my hands locked on the edge and the whole lit room in the glass in front of me. I can see it. A narrow dark-haired man with his head thrown back, driving into a big one who’s bent over and letting him. I watch it. I don’t look away.

“That’s yours,” he gasps. He’s seen where my eyes are. “Look at it. That’s what you look like when you put it down. God, you take me so well.”

He reaches under me. His fist closes on my cock, slick and tight, stroking in time.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got it. Come on my table.”

“My table.”

“Our table. The rider’s signed. Now, Mikhail.”

I come at the word. It tears out of me, over his knuckles and the edge of the oak and the floor, and I shout into the wood. He drives deep and stays, and I feel him go, hot, inside me, with his teeth in my shoulder and my name in pieces against my skin.

For a while there’s only breathing. The ocean. His weight on my back.

“It didn’t creak,” he says eventually.

I laugh. It comes up out of my chest, low and rusty and long, and he puts his face between my shoulders and laughs with me until the table shakes.

He cleans the oak himself. He does it twice, with the blue towel, and then he reads the label on the oil.

“Seven,” he says, working it into the grain. “Coat seven is mine.”

We eat at eleven, at the other end. Cold herring. Black bread. He’s in my sweater with his bare feet in my lap, and the seven chairs are back where they belong. Six of them look as though they’re waiting.

He tips his head at the clock on the stove.

“It’s eleven-forty.”

“I know where you are.”

Later I get out the thirteenth notebook. I write it in under the lozenges.

Paid out: fifty. Counsel. Rider to Clause 1.

I think about it. Then I add a line, because he’ll read it. He reads all of them now.

Received: one heirloom.

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