🔥 The Boathouse 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Rival’s Ring by Rafe Calder
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place six years before The Rival’s Ring opens: the full night in the Callahan boathouse that Finn and Maximo spend the whole book refusing to name. It contains spoilers for the novel’s backstory and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.
Maximo’s side of the night of Desmond Callahan’s wake: a dead man’s whiskey, a tin roof in the rain, a law student who walks out first, and the morning after. Explicit content — 18+.
The Boathouse
They bury Desmond Callahan on a Thursday, in the rain, and by six o’clock the whole river is standing in his front parlor pretending it isn’t counting the exits.
I’m by the window with a whiskey, neat. My father is in the dining room with the Irish men his own age, being civil in a voice that carries. Rafael’s at his shoulder. I’m twenty-eight, and I’ve been told to stand somewhere useful and not hit anyone, so I’m standing by the window, not hitting anyone, and looking at the far end of the room.
He’s there. He’s been there for an hour.
Finn O’Rourke. Twenty-four, home from law school for the funeral of the only man on this river who ever got both families to sign the same piece of paper. Black suit, black tie, a white shirt so stiff it could stand by itself. Auburn hair combed flat and already starting to give up in the damp. He’s holding his glass at exactly the angle his mother holds hers, and every time somebody comes up to shake his hand, he says something that makes them laugh and step back a foot. I’ve watched him do it eleven times. It’s a hell of a trick. I’ve never seen anybody keep a whole room at arm’s length with his mouth.
I’ve seen him maybe four times in my life. A christening. A hotel opening. Once on the steps of the courthouse, talking to a judge like the judge worked for him. I don’t know him. I know his hands. Long fingers, no rings, a steel watch. He holds a glass like it’s evidence.
He drinks it neat too. I noticed that around the third one.
Around the fourth, he looks up and catches me noticing.
He doesn’t look away. Most men do, when they catch me looking. It’s the size, or the nose, or the name. He just holds it, cool, green, all the way across a dead man’s parlor, like he’s asking me what I think I’m going to do about it.
Then he sets his glass on the mantel, very precisely, next to the photograph of Desmond Callahan in his boat, and walks out through the kitchen.
I give it a minute. I’m not stupid. Then I give it another one, because I am.
The rain’s coming down sideways off the river. Callahan’s lawn runs down to the water in a long wet slope, and at the bottom there’s a boathouse with a tin roof and a single yellow bulb burning over the door.
He’s inside. I can see the shape of him through the gap in the planks, sitting on an upturned crate with a bottle of Desmond’s whiskey between his feet.
I knock on the open door, because I was raised right.
“It’s a boathouse,” he says without turning around. “There isn’t a protocol.”
“Figured I’d ask.”
“You’re Arturo’s son. The fighter.”
“Maximo.”
“I know your name.” He turns his head. Up close his eyes are red at the rims, and his tie’s pulled loose, and he looks about as far from that parlor as a man can get without leaving town. “Everybody knows your name. You broke Danny Fitch’s orbital bone over a parking space.”
“It was a loading bay. And he swung first.”
“That’s what everyone says.”
“Yeah. Difference is, I mean it.”
Something happens at the corner of his mouth. He holds the bottle up without a word. I come in out of the rain and take it, and I sit down on a stack of canvas boat covers across from him, and we drink out of a dead man’s bottle with the roof roaring over our heads like a crowd.
“He taught me to sail,” Finn says after a while. “Desmond. When I was eight. My mother thought it was a useful skill for a boy who’d be negotiating with yachtsmen.” He looks at the floor. “He was the only adult I ever met who didn’t want anything off me.”
“He gave me my first job. Running his slips, summers. Fourteen. He paid cash and he never once asked my father for a favor.”
“Then we’ve lost the same thing.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to cry in front of an Alvarez.”
“Okay.”
He doesn’t. He drinks, and gives me the bottle back, and I watch his throat work and I think, very clearly, I’m in trouble.
“You’ve been looking at me for an hour,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I could lie. I’m good at it. I’ve been doing it to my father since I was twelve.
“Because you’re the best-looking thing I’ve seen in my life,” I tell him, “and you hold a glass like you’re going to file it.”
He stares at me.
Then he laughs. It cracks out of him, surprised and a little ugly, like it hasn’t been used in a while, and he puts the back of his wrist over his mouth to stop it, and he can’t. I watch him laugh in a boathouse at his mentor’s wake, and I’m gone. That’s the moment. Six years later I’ll still be able to tell you the exact angle of the rain.
“You can’t say that to me,” he says, when he can.
“Just did.”
“Our fathers—”
“Your father’s in there telling mine that the Carrow Street lots were always yours. Mine’s pretending he believes him. Nobody’s looking for either one of us.” I set the bottle down on the boards. “You walked out first. I’m asking, counselor. That’s all I’m doing.”
“I’m not a counselor. I haven’t passed the bar.”
“You will.”
He’s quiet a long time. The water knocks against the pilings under the floor.
Then he stands up, and comes across the boathouse, and stops between my knees.
“Ask properly,” Finn O’Rourke says.
I put my hands on his hips. Lightly. Just the weight of them. I can feel him shaking through two layers of black wool.
“Can I kiss you?”
“Yes.”
I stand up into it.
He’s an inch taller than me. I didn’t know that. I have to tip my face up, and he has to tip his down, and his mouth is cold and tastes of Callahan’s whiskey and he kisses like a man reading the fine print. Careful, exact, checking every line. For about four seconds.
Then I get a hand in that combed-flat hair and pull, just a little, and he makes a sound into my mouth and grabs my lapels in both fists and the fine print goes straight out the door into the rain.
It’s not careful after that. It’s teeth and breath and his back hitting a wooden post hard enough to shake dust off the rafters. He bites my lip. I bite his back, and he groans like I hit him, and his hips come off the post and grind against mine, and he’s hard. God, he’s hard. I can feel the whole length of him through his funeral suit.
“Off,” he says against my jaw. “This. All of it. Off.”
“Bossy.”
“I’ve been told.” He’s yanking at my tie like it owes him money. “Do you want me to stop giving instructions?”
“No.” I catch his wrist. Kiss the inside of it, where the pulse is jumping. “I want you to give me every single one.”
He goes still. Looks at me. And something in that cold green face just cracks straight down the middle.
“Kneel,” he says. His voice isn’t steady. “Please.”
I’m on my knees on the wet boards before he’s finished the second word.
His belt’s a good one. Black calf, steel buckle. I open it slow. He’s breathing like he’s run up the lawn, one hand braced on the post behind him and the other hovering by my head like he isn’t sure he’s allowed. I drag his trousers and his shorts down to his thighs, and he springs free right in front of my face, flushed dark and wet at the tip and already twitching, and for a second all I do is look.
“Don’t—” he starts, strangled. “Don’t look at it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re going to take your time.”
“I’m going to take my time.”
I take his hand off that post and put it in my hair.
“Hold on,” I tell him. “Pull if you want it faster. Pull hard if you want me to stop. Otherwise you get what I give you.”
His fingers knot in my hair so hard my scalp sings. He doesn’t pull. He just holds on.
I lick him from the root to the head, one slow flat stroke, and he says fuck in a voice I’d bet the Foundry nobody on this river has ever heard out of him. I do it again. I lick the slit and taste salt, and close my lips around the head, and suck, gentle, and his knees nearly go.
“Oh, God. Oh, God, you—”
I take him down.
All of him. Slow, a half inch at a time, my hands on his bare hips holding him to the post so he can’t do a thing about it, till my nose is buried in auburn hair and he’s in my throat and I can feel him pulsing on my tongue. I hold him there. I swallow around him, once, and look up.
He’s looking down at me with his mouth open and his eyes gone black. He’s never seen anything like this. I can tell. Nobody’s ever knelt for him and meant it.
I pull off, wet, and grin at him.
“Bastard,” he gasps.
“Yeah?” I lick a long stripe up the underside, and he shudders. “Say it again.”
“You bastard, you absolute— don’t you dare stop, don’t you dare—”
I don’t stop. I suck him hard and deep and steady, my fist following my mouth, a twist at the top every time that makes him swear. His hips are working now, short helpless jerks into my throat, and I let him. I want him to. His fingers are wrenching my hair, and his breath’s coming in sobs, and the rain’s so loud on the roof I can barely hear him, and I don’t need to. I can feel it. Every muscle in his thighs locking up under my palms.
“I’m going to— Maximo. Maximo—”
It’s the first time he’s said my name. I pull off right on it, one breath before he goes over, and hold him in my fist, still, while he shakes.
I laugh. I can’t help it. He looks so furious.
“You son of a bitch,” Finn O’Rourke says, white to the lips. “I am going to sue you into the river.”
“For what?”
“I’ll think of something. I’ll— I’ll draft it in the morning.”
“Draft it now.” I stand up slow, my body dragging up the length of his, until we’re nose to nose and his wet cock’s trapped between us. “Tell me what you want, counselor. Instructions. You said.”
He swallows. I watch it.
“I want you inside me,” he says. Quiet. Like he’s admitting to a crime. “I’ve wanted it since you looked at me over that coffin. I want you to— I want it to be you.”
I lay him down on the boat covers.
They’re old canvas, folded thick and damp at the edges, and they smell of creosote and the river. I get his jacket off him, and his waistcoat, and the tie goes God knows where. I open his shirt button by button, and he lets me, lying there with his chest heaving, watching my hands like he’s trying to memorize them.
He’s pale. Lean. That’s about all the bulb through the door gives me; the rest I’ll spend six years wondering about. His nipples go tight under my thumbs, and he arches, and I bend and take one in my teeth, and he grabs the back of my head and holds me there.
“Yes. There. Harder.”
I give him harder. I give him everything he asks for, in order. My mouth down the center of his chest. My teeth on his hip bone, hard enough to mark. I get his trousers and shoes off him and his long legs open on the canvas, and I push his knees up and wide, and I put my mouth on him again, lower this time.
He chokes.
“What are you— oh. Oh, Christ. You can’t—”
“Want me to stop?”
“No.”
I lick him open slow, broad strokes first, till his thighs quit fighting me. Then the tip of my tongue, pushing in, and he lets out a sound so raw it scares a gull off the roof. His heels are drumming on the canvas. His hands have nowhere to go, so they go everywhere: my hair, my shoulders, the canvas, his own mouth.
“Nobody’s ever—” he gets out. “Nobody’s ever done that.”
“Then I’m first.” I kiss the inside of his thigh. “Get used to it.”
I find a tin of boat grease on the shelf behind my head and decide against it, and he laughs, breathless, when he sees my face. I’ve got a little bottle of oil in my coat for my hands; I keep it for the bag. I hold it up.
“Prepared,” he says.
“Fighter. My knuckles crack.”
“That’s the least romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
“You want romantic, or you want my fingers?”
He looks at me for a long second, flushed and wrecked and spread out on Desmond Callahan’s boat covers in nothing but an open shirt.
“Fingers,” he says. “Now.”
I give him one. Slow. He’s tight, so tight I feel his pulse around my knuckle, and he goes rigid, breathing through his teeth, and I don’t move. I just wait, with my other hand flat on his stomach, till he lets out a breath and his body gives.
“More.”
Two. I take my time. I curl them, and search, patient, and find it, and his whole body comes up off the canvas like I’ve put a current through him.
“There—”
“I know.”
“Don’t stop, don’t you stop, God, how are you— you’re so patient, how is a man your size this patient—”
“I’ve been waiting an hour.” I crook them again, and he sobs. “I can wait another one.”
“Don’t you dare.”
He’s rocking onto my hand now, chasing it, his cock leaking a puddle onto his stomach, and he’s stopped giving orders. He’s just making noise. I work a third in, and he takes it with a long cracked groan and his head thrown back, and I watch the boy who keeps a whole parlor at arm’s length come apart on three of my fingers on a stack of canvas.
He reaches for my belt blind. I help him. I shove my trousers down just far enough, and slick myself with what’s left of the oil, and he looks down at me between us, and his eyes go wide.
“Oh,” he says, faintly. “That’s— that seems ambitious.”
“You can take me.”
“I know I can.” His jaw sets. Pure O’Rourke. “Do it.”
His left hand’s flat on the canvas by his head. I put mine over it, and lace our fingers, and press it down. Four seconds. That’s all I hold it. Long enough to learn the width of that finger. I don’t know yet why I’ll need to.
Then I let go of his hand, and I put mine on his throat.
Not squeezing. Just resting there. My thumb up under the hinge of his jaw, so he can’t look anywhere but at me.
“Tell me,” I say against his mouth.
“In. Now. Please.”
I push into him.
Slow. So slow. The head first, through that tight hot ring, and he cries out and digs his nails into my back through my shirt. I stop. I wait. I watch his face, the whole time, what the light gives me of it, his lashes fluttering and his mouth open, and when he breathes out I give him another inch. And another. He’s so tight it’s almost pain. He burns around me like a fist. His thighs are trembling against my ribs, and I feel every inch of it, and I don’t look away once.
When I’m all the way in, he makes a sound I’ve never heard a man make. Like something unlocking.
“There,” I tell him. “That’s all of me. You took all of me.”
“Move.”
“Say it nicer.”
“Please, you smug— please. Please move. Fuck me. Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”
I move.
Long and deep and steady, almost all the way out and back in, his heels digging into the small of my back to pull me home. The rain’s hammering the roof like applause. The boat covers are sliding under us, and the whole boathouse is creaking on its pilings, and he’s talking, he can’t stop talking. More. Harder. Right there. God, you’re big, you’re so deep. Don’t stop. Every instruction, I give him. He says harder, I give him harder. He says slower, I give him slow, a long grinding roll that makes his eyes go blind.
I hook his knee over my elbow, and the angle changes, and he stops being able to give instructions at all.
That’s the sound. Right there. That’s what I’ll hear in the dark for six years. Not harder. Not more. Just please, and my name, and please, and my name, like it’s the only argument he’s got left.
“Look at you,” I tell him, low, filthy, right in his ear. “Look at you begging for me. All that mouth, and this is what it does when somebody finally fucks it quiet. You feel that? That’s me. That’s all me in you.”
“Maximo—”
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Come on. Let me see it.”
I get my fist around his cock, and stroke him in time, and he breaks.
He comes so hard he goes silent, back bowed off the canvas, spilling hot over my knuckles and his own stomach and chest, clenching around me so tight the rafters go white. I hold his throat, gentle, and feel his pulse slamming under my palm, and I follow him over with my face in his neck and his name in my mouth, buried as deep as I can get, emptying into him for what feels like a minute.
For a long time, there’s only the rain.
I don’t let go of him.
I keep my hand right where it was. His pulse is slowing under it, knocking against my palm like it’s trying to tell me something. He’s got one hand in my hair, not pulling. Just there.
Neither of us says anything. There’s nothing either of our fathers would want us to say.
“Your shirt’s ruined,” I tell him eventually.
“So’s my suit. And my reputation, and my career, if anybody ever finds out.” His fingers move in my hair, slow. “I find I don’t care.”
“Yeah?”
“For tonight.” A pause. “I can afford it for tonight.”
I should hear that. I’m tired, and full, and warm for the first time all day, and I don’t. I pull one of the dry covers up over the both of us. I put my face in his neck, where he smells like rain and whiskey and me, and I put my arm across his ribs, heavy, so he can’t get far.
The last thing I feel is his heart, going hard under my wrist. Like he’s awake. Like he’s thinking.
I don’t know that I’m going to love him. I don’t know about the injunction, or the pier, or the six years. I don’t know I’m going to sit in a jeweler’s back room one day and ask a man to cut today’s date into a platinum ring.
I just know he’s under my arm, and I fall asleep.
Gray light.
Rain’s stopped. The roof’s ticking as it drips, and somewhere outside a gull is screaming over the river, and I’m cold.
I reach for him before I’m awake.
Canvas. Just canvas. The dent where he was, and it’s cold.
His jacket’s gone from the crate. His waistcoat. His tie, wherever it went. His shoes, which were by the door, which I’d have heard if he’d worn them. He didn’t wear them. He carried them. I know that like I know where a punch is coming from.
I lie there a long time, on my back, looking at the rafters.
The sixth of November. I don’t know yet why I’ll keep that date. I keep it anyway.
The cover beside me is cold. I put my hand flat in the place where he was, and I lie there, and I learn that weight instead.
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