🔥 Thaw 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Timber Line

Thank You for Reading! 🖤

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the avalanche, the thirty-inch cot, the first desperate touch under the blankets, the oral by lantern light, the tool shed at midnight, the logging truck cab, the cabin on maintenance day, the widow-maker, the medical tent confession, the angry barn sex, the firing, the two-week separation, the bar kiss in front of sixty strangers, the sleeper cab reunion, the hotel wall, Carmen Torres’s kitchen table, and a dog named Hatchet. Thank you for giving Judson and Levi your time.

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⚠️ Content Warning: Extremely explicit MM sexual content including mutual masturbation, simultaneous handjobs, oral sex (both giving and receiving), first kiss between the characters, edging, dirty talk, body worship, first-person POV narration of graphic sexual acts, emotional intensity, and a man experiencing his first sexual encounter with another man. Set during the supply shack chapters (between Chapters 4 and 5). Readers 18+ only.

Thaw

Set during the second night in the supply shack. Levi’s POV.

The second night in the shack, and I have mapped every sound Judson Lang makes in the dark.

There’s the controlled breathing — the long, measured inhales through the nose that say he’s awake and managing it. The shallow, quick cycles that mean he’s losing the fight with his own body. The held breath — the silence between inhale and exhale that stretches into three seconds, four, five — that means he’s hard again and trying to will it away through sheer respiratory discipline, as if a man can suffocate his own desire by refusing to feed it oxygen.

And then there’s the one I’ve been waiting for. The exhale that isn’t an exhale. The ragged, involuntary release of air that carries a vibration in it — not a moan, not quite, but the ghost of one. The sound of a man whose body has crossed a line his brain hasn’t authorized.

That sound. Right there.

It’s after midnight. The stove is down to embers — we burned the last load an hour ago and the next isn’t for forty minutes. The shack is somewhere around twenty-five degrees and falling. We’re under every blanket in the supply cache, pressed together on the cot in the configuration that stopped being a survival decision around six o’clock this evening and became something else entirely. My chest to his back. My arm across his ribs. My nose against the nape of his neck where his hair meets skin and the smell of him is concentrated into something so potent it should be classified as a controlled substance.

He made that sound.

And my hand is on his chest, flat over his sternum, and I can feel his heartbeat spiking from resting to racing in the span of two breaths, and his body is doing the thing — the involuntary, desperate, tectonic shift of his hips backward into mine — and I’m already hard. I’ve been hard for an hour. I’ve been hard since the first time tonight, since I wrapped my hand around him under the blankets and felt him come apart in my grip and heard my name leave his mouth like a structural failure.

That was three hours ago. He rolled away after. Stared at the wall. Told himself it was survival. Proximity. A fluke.

Then an hour later, his hand found me. Fumbling, unpracticed, ferocious. He jerked me off with the determination of a man splitting wood — powerful strokes, no finesse, his breathing ragged in the dark — and I came in his fist so hard I saw the inside of my own skull, and he held me through it, his hand gentle on the aftermath, his thumb tracing the head with a tentative wonder that nearly destroyed me more than the orgasm.

Now it’s midnight and the cold is impossible and his body is pressing against mine and the sound is in his throat and we are so far past survival that the word has become meaningless.

“Judson.” I whisper it against his neck. My lips brush the skin there and he shudders — full body, involuntary, the shudder of a man touched in a place that no one has ever touched. “Are you awake?”

“Yeah.” Wrecked. The voice of a man who hasn’t slept and can’t sleep and is being consumed from the inside by something he doesn’t have a category for.

“You’re shaking.”

“Cold.”

“You’re not cold. I’m pressed against every inch of you and you’re a furnace.”

Silence. His hand comes up and covers mine on his chest. The grip is crushing — his fingers lacing through mine, squeezing until I feel the bones in my knuckles compress. He’s holding on to me the way you’d hold on to a rope over a canyon, and the desperation in that grip tells me everything his voice won’t.

“Tell me what you need,” I say.

“I don’t—” He stops. Swallows. That swallow, the heavy one, the one that means the truth is climbing up and he’s fighting it. “I don’t know what I need. I’ve never — this isn’t—”

“Your body knows.” My hand slides out of his grip. Down his chest. Slow. Giving him every opportunity to stop me, to grab my wrist, to say the word that ends this. “Let your body tell me.”

He doesn’t stop me.

My hand reaches his waistband. Pauses. His breathing has become something fractured — shallow, rapid, each exhale carrying that ghost-moan that I’ve been cataloguing like a scientist cataloguing seismic activity. I slip beneath the elastic.

He’s hard. Impossibly hard. The heat of him against my palm is shocking — we’ve been lying in a frozen box for hours and his cock is furnace-hot, rigid, the skin stretched tight and slick at the tip where he’s been leaking. I wrap my hand around him and the sound he makes — a guttural, shattered noise somewhere between a groan and a sob — bounces off the tin walls and returns to us multiplied.

“Levi—” My name. Broken. Glued back together wrong. “Levi, I can’t — I need—”

“I know.” I stroke him. Slow. Torturously slow, because we have time tonight, we have the whole frozen, brutal, beautiful night, and I am going to take every minute of it. “I know what you need.”

“I don’t even know what I—”

“You need to stop thinking.” I tighten my grip. Twist on the upstroke. He bucks into my fist and his hand slams down on my thigh, fingers digging in. “For one night, Judson. Stop thinking. Stop analyzing. Stop trying to file this under something your brain can process and just feel.”

He makes a sound that might be assent. Might be surrender. The distinction doesn’t matter — what matters is that his body relaxes back into mine, the rigid resistance giving way to something softer, and his hips start moving. A rhythm. Hesitant at first, then finding itself — the instinctive, primal roll of a man’s body into the thing that’s giving it pleasure.

I match him. My hand working him in time with his thrusts, my body pressed against his back, my own cock grinding against his ass through two layers of thermal cotton that might as well not exist for all the barrier they provide. The friction is maddening — not enough to get me off but enough to keep me desperately, achingly aware of every point of contact between us.

“Tell me what it feels like,” I say against his ear. Low. Just for him. Just for the dark and the tin walls and the winter that’s trying to kill us outside while something that is the exact opposite of death burns between us inside.

“It feels—” His voice breaks on a stroke. “Like everything is — like my skin is — I can feel you everywhere. Not just your hand. Everywhere. Your chest. Your breath. Your—” His hips jerk. “Your cock against me. I can feel—”

“Do you like that?”

A sound that is absolutely not a word. A sound that is older than language, pulled from somewhere primal and undefended.

“Tell me.” I grind harder against him. The ridge of my cock pressing into the cleft of his ass through the cotton, and the pressure draws a groan from both of us — his low and shattering, mine sharp and bitten-off against his neck. “Say it, Judson.”

“Yes.” Almost inaudible. The hardest word he’s ever spoken, delivered to the wall of a tin shack in the middle of a blizzard, and it costs him something I can hear leaving — some load-bearing wall, some structural member of the man he’s been for forty-five years. “Yes. I like it. I like — I want—”

“What do you want?”

“More.“

The word hangs in the frozen air. Heavy with meaning. Heavy with a desire so vast and unprocessed that it can only emerge as a single syllable, compressed and molten, the core of something that’s been building since the first day he looked at me across a staging area and forgot how to speak.

I don’t give him more. Not tonight. Not the more that’s building between us like pressure behind a dam — the thing we’ll do in his cabin weeks from now, the thing that will change both of us permanently. Tonight is about hands. About learning the basic vocabulary of each other’s bodies before we attempt the sentences.

But I give him something.

I pull my hand from his waistband. He makes a sound of protest — raw, desperate, his hips thrusting into empty air — and I say, “Shh. Turn over.”

He turns. Faces me. In the faint red glow of the dying stove, I can see his outline — the massive shoulders, the heaving chest, the dark eyes that are all pupil, all want. We’re face-to-face on a thirty-inch cot and his breath is hot on my mouth and his hand is already reaching for me, finding my waistband, pulling the elastic down.

“Together,” I say. I push his thermals down. Take both of us in my hand — or try to. He’s thick and I’m not small and my fingers barely close around both shafts. His hand joins mine. Together, we wrap around ourselves, and the first stroke — the hot, slick slide of cock against cock, his hand and mine moving in tandem — rips a sound from his chest that I feel in my own ribcage.

“Oh God—” His forehead drops against mine. His breath fractures. “Oh God, Levi, that’s—”

“I know.”

We stroke together. Face-to-face, breath-to-breath, every exhale shared, every sound absorbed by the inch of air between our mouths. The pace is slow at first — learning the rhythm, the pressure, the specific angle that makes his breath stutter and the one that makes mine disappear entirely. Then faster. Then faster again. His hand tightening on mine, mine tightening on his, our hips rocking into the shared grip with an urgency that builds like a weather system — pressure and heat accumulating until the air itself feels charged.

“Levi — I’m—”

“Not yet.” I slow the pace. He makes a sound that’s almost a sob. “Look at me.”

His eyes open. Find mine. In the stove-glow they’re black and bottomless and utterly undefended — no granite, no foreman, no forty-five years of walls. Just a man. Scared and wanting and more honest than he’s ever been in his life.

“This is real,” I tell him. Our hands still moving. Slow. Deliberate. “This isn’t the cold. This isn’t survival. This is you and me, and it’s real.”

“I know.” His voice cracks. “I know it’s real. That’s what terrifies me.”

“Be terrified. And stay.”

“I’m staying.” His free hand finds the back of my neck. Pulls my face closer. His forehead against mine, his nose against mine, his mouth a breath from mine. We haven’t kissed. In everything we’ve done in this shack, we haven’t kissed, and the absence of it is its own kind of pressure — a frontier uncrossed, a line that even his surrendering body hasn’t been willing to cross. Kissing is different than hands. Hands can be excused. Kissing is a choice made by the mouth, and the mouth is where the words come from, and the words are the things that make it real.

“I want to kiss you,” he says. And the admission — the simple, devastating, barely-whispered admission of a desire so ordinary and so monumental — hits me harder than any orgasm.

“Then kiss me.”

He closes the inch. His mouth meets mine. And the first touch of his lips — rough, beard-scratched, trembling — sends a current through my body that reorganizes every cell I have. He kisses the way he does everything — with his whole self, fully committed, no halfway. His mouth opens against mine and his tongue finds mine and the taste of him — coffee, salt, the mineral trace of mountain water — floods my senses and I make a sound into his mouth that I will not be embarrassed about because it is the most honest sound I’ve ever produced.

Our hands accelerate. The kiss deepens. It’s messy and desperate and perfect — teeth clicking, beards scraping, the sounds we’re making swallowed and shared between us. His hips are driving into our grip with a force that rocks the cot on its bolts, and my hips are meeting his thrust for thrust, and the dual friction of cock against cock and mouth against mouth is building something at the base of my spine that’s going to take me apart.

“Now,” I gasp against his lips. “Together. Now.”

He breaks first. His whole body locks — every muscle seizing, his hand crushing mine around our shafts — and he comes with a sound that I swallow with my mouth. Hot pulses between our bodies, slicking our hands, the scent of him flooding the narrow space. The clenching of his body, the sound he makes, the way his hand spasms against mine — it triggers my own release like a chain reaction, and I come against him, with him, our orgasms overlapping and tangling the way our bodies are tangled, inseparable, simultaneous.

We lie there. Mouths still touching. Hands still wrapped around the softening evidence of what we’ve done. His breath and my breath. His heartbeat through our joined chests, slowing, steadying, returning to something that might eventually resemble normal.

He doesn’t pull away.

For the first time, he doesn’t pull away.

His arm wraps around my back. Pulls me closer. His face buries in the space between my neck and my shoulder, and his breath is warm and steady, and his body relaxes against mine with the total, unconditional surrender of a man who has stopped fighting.

“Levi.”

“Yeah.”

Silence. Long. The stove ticks. The wind howls. The world is frozen and we are not.

“This is the most alive I’ve ever felt.” Whispered into my skin. A confession meant for the dark and only the dark, but I hear it, and I hold it, and I know that whatever happens when the morning comes and the road clears and the world breaks back in — whatever distance he puts between us, whatever walls he rebuilds, whatever terrified retreat he stages — I will have this. This moment. This man, stripped to the studs, saying the truest thing he’s ever said with his mouth against my neck and his arms around my back and the ruins of his certainty cooling between us.

“Me too,” I tell him.

He holds me tighter.

Outside, the blizzard rages. The temperature drops. The supply shack groans against the wind and holds, bolted to bedrock by a dead man’s careful hand, and inside the shack two men hold each other and breathe and do not sleep, because sleeping would mean letting go, and letting go is the one thing neither of us can do.

At some point before dawn, he moves. Not away — down. His mouth on my throat. My collarbone. The center of my chest, where my heartbeat lives. He kisses his way down my body with the blind, instinctive navigation of a man following a compass he didn’t know he carried, and when his mouth closes over me — hot, unpracticed, devastating in its hunger — I arch off the cot and grab his hair and understand, with the clarity of a man seeing the sun after years underground, that Judson Lang is not confused.

He is found.

He takes me deep. Gags. Takes me deeper. His hands on my hips are enormous and shaking and so tender that the contrast between their size and their gentleness makes my throat close. I guide him with my fingers in his hair, my hips rolling slow, feeding myself into his mouth with a care that borders on reverence. He moans around me and the vibration sends lightning through my spine and I’m close, I’m so close—

“Judson — I’m going to—”

He doesn’t pull off. He grips my hips and takes me as deep as he can and swallows around the head and I come down his throat with a cry that rattles the tin walls and probably carries across the ridge and into the silent, snow-covered wilderness where no one is listening and nothing matters except this: a man on his knees in the dark, choosing to be found.

He rests his head on my stomach afterward. Breathing hard. I card my fingers through his hair — the coarse, dark strands going silver at the temples — and feel his heartbeat through his skull, fast and gradually slowing, the heartbeat of a man coming down from a summit he didn’t know he was climbing.

“Your turn,” I murmur.

“You don’t have to—”

“I want to. I’ve wanted to since the first day.” I push him onto his back. Settle between his legs. Look up at him — the massive chest, the dark eyes, the expression of raw, terrified wonder. “Let me show you what this is supposed to feel like.”

I take him in my mouth and he loses the ability to form sentences. What comes out instead is a language of sounds — deep, guttural, continuous, each one more unguarded than the last. His hands find my head and hold without guiding, trembling against my scalp, and I work him with everything I have — every technique, every trick, every piece of knowledge I’ve accumulated in eight years of wanting men and being wanted — because this man deserves to know what it feels like when the person touching you knows exactly what they’re doing and wants to be doing it more than they want to breathe.

I bring him to the edge three times. Each time, I pull back. Each time, the sound he makes is closer to breaking. By the third time, he’s begging — actually begging, the foreman, the mountain, the most controlled man I’ve ever met — “Levi, please, I can’t — I need—”

I take him deep. All the way. My throat opens and I swallow and his hips come off the cot and he comes with a roar that the tin roof barely contains, and I take it, take all of it, and the taste of him on my tongue is the taste of surrender and I have never wanted anything more.

Afterward. The stove is dead. The shack is a freezer. We are a furnace, wrapped in wool and Mylar, his chest to my back, his arm across my ribs, his palm on my heart. The position from the first night. The position where this started. But everything has changed — the tension has become tenderness, the fear has become familiarity, and the hand on my chest isn’t desperate anymore. It’s home.

The radio crackles at dawn. Dale’s voice, tinny and distant. The road is clearing. Rescue by late morning.

Judson’s arm tightens around me.

“Tomorrow,” I say.

“Tomorrow,” he answers.

His mouth presses against the back of my neck. Not a kiss — a seal. A mark. A promise that the man in the dark will remember what the man in the daylight is going to try to forget.

I close my eyes. His heartbeat against my spine. The last hours of the shack counting down like the final pages of a story we’re not ready to end.

The ending comes anyway. It always does.

But so does the beginning. Eventually. When the man on the mountain stops running from the thing that’s been chasing him since the first day, stops fighting the body that’s known the truth longer than the brain has been willing to hear it, stops choosing the safe version and steps off the cliff into the version that’s real and terrifying and full.

The beginning comes.

And it’s worth every frozen, aching, beautiful night in the dark.

We hope this bonus chapter was worth the wait in the cold.
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With love,
Jace Wilder