🔥 Number Seven 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Bench Beside Mine by Milo Hart

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place in December, after the final chapter of The Bench Beside Mine. It contains spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Peter’s side of the night he reads line seven out loud: Thai on the living-room rug, both lamps on in the green room, a card Dev has asked to see forty-one times, and a list item that asks for both. Explicit content — 18+.

Number Seven

The list lives in my wallet, behind my driver’s license, folded in quarters. It used to share that slot with a sticky note that said I need this to go slower. The sticky note is gone. I threw it out the week after the towpath, in the bin by the Gable Street register, and the girl with the nose ring watched me do it and didn’t ask.

The list is an index card. Blue ink, twelve lines, numbered. I wrote it on a Tuesday night in September at my kitchen table, after Simon was asleep, with the door to the hall shut as if a ten-year-old might wake up and audit it.

Dev has never seen it. That was the rule. Item by item.

He has asked about it, by my count, forty-one times. He’s asked in bed and on the bench and once, unforgivably, at his mother’s dinner table, in Hindi, which he assumed I didn’t understand and which I didn’t, except that Meera laughed into her dal and his father turned a page of his book with great concentration.

By the second Wednesday in December we’d done eight of the twelve. Not in order. I don’t do things out of order as a rule, but I’d found that the list behaved more like a budget than a schedule. Some lines you spend early. Some you hold.

I’d been holding seven.

He came in at 6:40 with snow on his shoulders and a bag from the Thai place on Ferris and a look on his face like a man arriving at a surprise party he’d found out about.

“You said seven o’clock,” he said. “And then you said, quote, Wear something you don’t mind me taking off you. That’s not a dinner invitation, Peter. That’s a threat.”

“It was a courtesy.”

“I wore my good jeans.”

“I can see that.”

He set the food on the counter. He took his coat off and hung it on the second hook by the door, the one I’d put up in November, and he did it without looking, the way you’d use a light switch in your own house, and I had to go and get plates out so I’d have something to do with my face.

Pad see ew, not spicy. A green curry for him, very spicy. Spring rolls, because he believes a meal without a fried component is a rumor. We ate on the rug in the living room under the Reading Railroad timetable, because we’d started doing that and neither of us had suggested stopping. Simon had made the couch into a fort on Sunday and it still had a blanket roof I’d been told not to touch.

“Am I allowed to know,” Dev said, with his mouth full, “what’s happening.”

“After dinner.”

“Is it the list?”

“Eat your spring roll.”

“It’s the list.” He put the spring roll down. “Peter. Is it a number?”

I wiped my fingers on a napkin. I took my wallet out of my back pocket and opened it and slid the card out from behind my license, and he went completely still, like a dog that’s heard the word walk.

I unfolded it. I didn’t turn it around. I read it to myself, line seven, though I’d known what it said for three months.

Then I folded it again and put it in my shirt pocket.

“That’s cruel,” Dev said.

“It’s sequencing.”

“It’s psychological warfare. You can’t take it out and read it at me.”

“I just did.” I stood up and collected the containers. “Finish your curry. You’ll need it.”

He made a noise like a kettle.

I’d done the bedroom properly that afternoon. I’d taken a half day, my second personal day in nine years, and Nora had said “Don’t tell me” before I’d opened my mouth.

Both lamps on, the brass one and the old one, both under green shades. Clean sheets, the dark gray ones. The heat turned up two degrees, because Dev runs warm and I don’t, and I intended for neither of us to be wearing anything for a long time. Towels on the chair. Water on both nightstands. The bottle of lube in the drawer of the oak nightstand, which I’d bought with the bed and which still smelled faintly of the floor-model showroom. Everything where my hand would expect it.

He stopped in the doorway and looked at it all.

“You planned this.”

“I did.”

“You’ve got towels on the chair.”

“I’m a planner. You know this about me.”

“I’m the planner,” he said, but he was smiling, and he came in and put his hands on my waist and walked me backward until my calves hit the edge of the mattress. “Okay. Read it to me. I’ve been good. I ate the whole curry.”

I took the card out of my pocket. I opened it. I held it so the lamp was on it.

“Number seven,” I said. “Both. In one night. Him first.”

He read it upside down over my hands. Then he read it again. I watched him get it. I watched it go down through him, his breath, the hands on my waist going tight.

“Both,” he said.

“Both.”

“Me in you. And then you in me.”

“In that order. The same night. Without stopping more than we need to.” My voice was very calm. It’s always calm. My pulse was doing something it hadn’t done since the first time he’d kissed me against his own front door. “I wrote it in September. I didn’t think I was allowed it then. It looked greedy on the card.”

“Peter.” His voice had gone low. “It’s not greedy.”

“It’s a great deal of sex for one Wednesday.”

“It’s a perfect amount of sex for one Wednesday.” He took the card out of my hand, very carefully, as if it might go off, and folded it and put it back in my shirt pocket and buttoned the pocket. Then he patted it. “Pottsville stands?”

“Pottsville always stands. For both of us. All night.”

“Okay.” He breathed out. “Okay. Glasses?”

I thought about it. That was new too, thinking about it, rather than assuming the answer was whatever he wanted.

“On,” I said. “For the first one, you’re in charge. But I want to see all of it.”

He undressed me slowly, standing, by the bed. He started with the shirt and kissed every inch he uncovered, down the buttons, his beard dragging rough over my chest, and when he got to the pocket with the card in it he unbuttoned that too, took the card out and set it on the nightstand by the lamp, face down, like a man laying down a winning hand.

He knelt to take my trousers off. He kissed my stomach on the way down, below the navel, the soft place I used to flinch from. I didn’t flinch. I put my hand in his hair.

“You’re shaking,” he said against my skin.

“It’s cold.”

“You turned the heat up. I can see the thermostat from here.”

“Then I’m shaking,” I said, and he laughed, and took me in his mouth without any warning at all, and I said his name to the ceiling like a complaint.

He didn’t stay long. That wasn’t the point, and he knew it. He got me hard and wet and aching and then pulled off and stood up and pushed me back onto the bed with one hand flat on my chest, and I went. I lay there in my glasses and nothing else and watched him strip in the lamplight. Sweater over his head. T-shirt. The good jeans, which he got stuck in at the ankle and hopped, swearing, and I laughed so hard I had to cover my face.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he said, naked, flushed, hard, with one sock on. “I’m about to rock your world.”

“Take the sock off first.”

“I’m taking the sock off. It’s coming off. Look at me taking it off.”

Then he was on the bed and on me, all that heat and weight and hair, and the laughing went somewhere else.

He took his time. I’d known he would. He kissed me until I was arching up into him and then he turned me over, gently, his hands on my hips, and pulled a pillow under me, and spread me open with his thumbs, and I put my face in the sheets and felt his breath and then his tongue.

I swore. I always do, now, for this. I’ve stopped apologizing. He licked me slow and broad and then pointed, pushing in, his beard scraping the insides of my thighs, his hands holding me open, and I pushed back against his face with no dignity whatsoever and heard myself saying please, which I’ve also stopped apologizing for.

“Again,” he said, muffled.

“Please.”

“There he is.”

One finger, slick, while he kept his mouth on me. Then two. He knows the angle now. He found the spot inside me like it was on a map he’d drawn himself and rubbed slow, steady circles over it, and I came up off the pillow onto my elbows and my glasses slid down my nose and I didn’t fix them.

“Dev. Now. I’m ready, I’m—”

“You’re not. One more.” Three fingers, slow, the burn and then the give. He curled them, and I made a sound into the sheets I can’t spell. “Now you’re ready.”

He turned me onto my back. He wanted to see me too. He knelt between my legs and slicked himself, both hands, eyes on mine the entire time, and pushed my knees up and back, and I held them there myself, because I wanted to. Because I wanted to be the one holding myself open for him.

He pressed in. Slow. That thick, blunt stretch of him, an inch, another, his jaw tight, his eyes on my face, watching for anything, ready to stop. I didn’t want him to stop. I let my head fall back and breathed out and took him, all of him, until his hips were flush against me and he was shaking, holding still, buried.

“Okay?” he said.

“Better than okay.” My voice wasn’t calm anymore. “Move. Please. I’d like you to move.”

He moved.

He fucked me the way he does everything when he stops planning: with his whole body and no reservations. Long deep strokes, then short ones, his hands under my knees pushing them to my chest, his weight driving down into me. The headboard knocked the green wall. I’d measured the clearance when I set the bed up. I hadn’t accounted for this. I didn’t care. I grabbed his forearms and held on and watched him through my glasses, his face, his mouth open, sweat on his chest, the line of hair down his stomach to where he was disappearing into me over and over, and I couldn’t stop looking. I’ll never stop looking. That’s why the glasses.

“Look at you,” he said. “God, look at you, sweetheart. You’re so good. You take me so good.”

“Don’t—” I gasped. “Don’t make me come. Not yet. Not on this one. I need it for the next.”

He groaned like I’d hit him. “You’re killing me.”

“That’s the idea.”

“You want me to come in you.”

“Yes. In me. Then I want you on your back.”

That did it. I felt it go through him. He drove into me three, four more times, hard enough to move me up the bed, and then he pushed in deep and held there with his forehead against mine and came, pulsing, with a broken low sound against my mouth that I could feel in my teeth.

I held him through it. My hands on his back. My heels hooked behind his thighs, keeping him there, full of him, my own cock trapped hard and leaking between our stomachs and aching so badly I had to breathe through my nose and count.

I got to eleven before he could talk.

“Fuck,” Dev said into my neck. “Fuck, Peter.”

“That’s the first half.”

He started laughing. Weakly, helplessly, his whole weight on me. “I can’t feel my legs.”

“You won’t need them.”

He lifted his head and looked down at me. His hair was wrecked and his eyes were very dark, and something moved across his face, the thing he used to swallow and doesn’t anymore.

“I love you,” he said. “I know you know. I’m saying it on the record.”

“Noted,” I said, and he kissed me, and I kissed him back, and my heart was going so hard it was almost embarrassing.

We didn’t stop for long. That was on the card. We drank water, sitting against the headboard with our shoulders touching. I wiped us both down with the warm washcloth I’d left folded in the bathroom sink, under the tap, because of course I had. He watched me do it with an expression of deep, private amusement.

“You prepped a washcloth.”

“I prepped two.”

“Where’s the second one?”

“For later.”

“Oh my God,” Dev said, and put his face in his hands.

I’d stayed hard the whole time. I’m not twenty. It had taken some concentration. I set the glass down on the nightstand next to the card, and took my glasses off and cleaned them on the corner of the sheet, slowly, and put them back on, and looked at him.

He knows what that means.

He went quiet. His throat moved.

“On your back,” I said. “Please.”

He lay back. He put his arms over his head without being asked, wrists crossed on the pillow, and looked up at me, and I knew he was thinking about the hotel in Harrisburg, my tie, the mirror, Pottsville. I hadn’t brought a tie. I didn’t need one. He held the position himself.

“Good,” I said, and he shut his eyes.

I took my time. I’d earned it. I’d held out through the whole first half; I wanted to be very, very thorough with the second.

I kissed him everywhere he’d kissed me. Down his throat, his chest, the soft dark hair and the hard muscle under it. I bit his nipple gently and he arched and swore. I found the ticklish place under his ribs and pressed my mouth flat over it so he couldn’t squirm away. I kissed the scar on his hip from when he was fourteen. He’d gone soft after coming, and he was getting hard again under my hands, slower this time, heavy, and I wrapped my fingers around him and stroked him just enough to make him want more and then took my hand away.

“Peter.”

“Hm.”

“You’re doing a system.”

“I’m doing a system,” I agreed, and pushed his knees apart.

He was still slick. I’d been inside him plenty of times since the clinic, and I’ve learned him the way I learn anything, by attention and repetition and keeping notes I don’t write down. I went slow anyway. I put my mouth on him first, because I’d wanted to for weeks and because the noise he makes is the best sound I know. Then one finger, while I licked him, and he twisted his wrists in the pillowcase and begged. Then two. He was loose and warm and open from coming, and when I curled my fingers he cried out loud enough that I was briefly glad the neighbors on the left are an elderly couple who sleep with a white-noise machine.

“Please,” Dev said. “Please, Peter, please. I’m ready. I swear to God I’m ready.”

“I know.” I took my fingers out. I knelt up between his thighs and slicked myself, and looked down at him, wrists still crossed over his head because I hadn’t told him he could move them, flushed all the way down his chest, hard again and leaking onto his own stomach, his mouth open. “Look at me.”

He looked.

I pushed into him.

He was so hot. Loose from his own orgasm and still tight around me, and it took every ounce of the concentration I’d been hoarding all night not to come right there, sinking into him, with his eyes on mine and the green wall behind him in the lamplight. I got all the way in. I stayed there. I breathed.

“You,” Dev said, very hoarse, “feel. So good.”

“Hands,” I said. “You can have your hands.”

They came down off the pillow and grabbed me. My hips, my back, my face. He pulled me down into a kiss that was all teeth and tongue, and I started to move in him, slow, long, the way I’d been dreaming about since the card was blank.

I’d been on edge for over an hour. It didn’t take long. I didn’t want it to take long, not now. I’d asked for both and I wanted to feel both, the him-in-me still there, wet and aching, while I was in him. Every stroke I could feel it. Everything he’d given me, and everything I was giving back. Back and forth. The same thing, both ways, the way the bench goes both ways.

“Peter.” He was gripping my shoulders hard enough to leave marks. “I’m gonna. Again. I can’t believe—”

“Yes. I want you to. With me in you. Touch yourself.”

He got his hand around his cock and stroked, fast, his head thrown back. I pushed his knee up with my free hand and changed the angle and drove into him, short and deep, over that spot, again and again, until he went rigid under me and cried out and came for the second time, all over his stomach and his fist and my wrist, clenching around me so hard it pulled me right over the edge after him.

I came inside him with my face in his neck and his name in my mouth. I didn’t count. For once in my life I didn’t count anything at all.

It took a while to come back.

The lamp. The green wall. His heart under my ear, and the radiator ticking, and somewhere out in the street a snowplow scraping by, its orange light coming and going across the ceiling.

“Peter,” Dev said eventually.

“Mm.”

“That was the hottest thing that’s ever happened to anybody. In history. I’m including the Romans.”

“That’s not verifiable.”

“I’m including the Romans, Peter.”

I laughed into his chest. He put his hand in my hair. My glasses were crooked; he straightened them for me without opening his eyes.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“How many more?”

I didn’t need to look. “Four.”

“Four.” He was quiet for a second. “Can I see them?”

I lifted my head.

He’d asked forty-one times. Forty-two now. I’d said no every time, and I’d said it because the list was mine, the one thing I’d made that was only for me, the first thing I’d wanted in a decade that wasn’t for anyone else. It had been the safest place I’d ever kept anything.

But he’d kept to the rule. Forty-two times. He’d never once gone into my wallet, or tried to, or asked Simon to, which I genuinely would not have put past him.

I reached over him to the nightstand. I picked up the card and held it out.

He took it like it was a ticket for a train that didn’t run anymore.

He read it. All of it. His lips moved a little; he does that when he reads something that matters. I watched his face, and I knew where he was by what it did. The ones we’d done. The ones I’d moved up. Number nine, where he laughed out loud. Number eleven, where he went red to the ears and looked at me over the top of the card and said, “Peter,” in a scandalized voice, and I said, “It’s on there. Draw your own conclusions.”

Then number twelve, which I’d written last, at about one in the morning, in September, at my kitchen table. When I hadn’t had any reason to think I’d get to do any of the eleven above it.

He stopped. He read it again. He put the card down on his chest and looked at the ceiling for a long time.

12. Wake up on a Saturday and not have to drive anywhere after.

“That one’s not a sex thing,” Dev said. His voice wasn’t steady.

“No.”

“That’s the one you can’t do yet.”

“Not yet. Not till spring.” I put my chin on his sternum, beside the card. “No house talk before spring. That’s on the other card.”

“I know. I’m not house-talking.” He swallowed. “I’m just saying. Spring’s not that far.”

“It’s a hundred and one days.”

He started to laugh. He laughed until the card bounced on his chest, and he grabbed it and held it so it wouldn’t fall, and then he folded it, very carefully, in quarters, and handed it back to me.

“Keep it,” he said. “It’s yours. I just wanted to see.”

I put it back in my wallet, behind my license.

Then I got up and fetched the second washcloth.

On Saturday morning, the game cancelled for snow and Simon at Celia’s until noon, I woke up at 7:10 in the green room with Dev’s arm over my ribs and his breath on the back of my neck. I lay there and watched the light come up on the wall.

I didn’t have to drive anywhere after. Not for five hours.

I took my wallet off the nightstand, and the pen, and found the card, and on the line under number twelve, very small, I wrote: Partial credit.

Then I put it back and went to make him his coffee. Black, cardamom.

One sugar.

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