Istanbul, 6:07 AM

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Straight Man’s Plus-One
by Jace Wilder

This scene takes place two weeks after the events of the novel. Contains spoilers and content too explicit for Amazon. Reader discretion advised. 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️

Adrian

The flight was twelve hours and fourteen minutes. I slept for none of them.

Not because the seats were uncomfortable — business class, which I had never booked before, because Adrian Vale did not spend money on luxuries when economy served the same function. But Adrian Vale before Miles and Adrian Vale after Miles were different men operating under different principles, and the after-Miles version had decided that arriving in Istanbul exhausted, cramped, and smelling like recycled cabin air was not how a man showed up for the person he loved.

I didn’t sleep because I was counting hours. Then minutes. Then the specific, excruciating increments of time that separate a man from the moment he walks through a hotel door and finds the person who has been living inside his chest for fourteen days.

The Istanbul airport was golden at dawn. The Bosphorus was visible from the taxi — a dark ribbon of water between two continents, glittering with the first light. The driver asked if I was here for business. I said no. He asked if I was here for pleasure. I said yes, and the word pleasure tasted like Miles’s mouth and the cedar-salt scent of his skin and the sound he made when I pushed inside him, and I had to look out the window and breathe until the taxi arrived at the hotel.

The Sultanahmet district was waking up. Call to prayer echoing from minarets. The hotel was a converted Ottoman house with stone walls and arched doorways and a terrace overlooking the strait. I checked in. The woman at the desk smiled and said, “Your partner is in room twelve. He said to tell you the door is unlocked.”

Partner. Miles had used the word. Had checked in using the word. Had left it with a stranger at a front desk in a city where neither of us had ever been, and the casualness of it — the absolute, unperforming ease with which Miles Fenwick claimed me to a hotel receptionist at six in the morning — made my chest feel like a room with every window open.

I took the stairs. The hallway was narrow, stone-floored, lit by wall sconces. Room twelve was at the end. The door was unlocked, as promised.

I pushed it open.

The room was dim. Shuttered windows, a high ceiling, white sheets on a wide bed. The balcony doors were cracked — the sound of the Bosphorus and the distant prayer call drifting through. Miles’s camera bags were on the desk. His shoes were by the door. His glasses were on the nightstand.

He was in the bed. On his stomach. One arm under the pillow, the other reaching across the empty right side of the mattress — my side. His hair was messy. His back was bare. The tattoo sleeve caught the thin light from the balcony, and the compass rose on his wrist pointed toward the door.

Toward me.

I set my bag down. Quietly. Removed my shoes. My jacket. My shirt. I stood beside the bed in the gray light and looked at the man I had traveled five thousand miles and twelve hours to reach, and the fourteen days of separation collapsed into a single, compressed point of want so intense it felt structural — load-bearing, foundational, the kind of desire that held the rest of the architecture up.

I got into bed. The right side. My side.

His arm found me immediately. Even in sleep — the same instinct from the island, the same gravity. His arm pulled me close, his face finding the curve of my neck, his body curling against mine with the automatic precision of someone who had been reaching for this shape in his sleep for two weeks and had finally found it.

“You’re here,” he mumbled. Half-asleep. His lips moving against my throat.

“I’m here.”

“What time is it?”

“Six-oh-seven.”

“You said six-oh-seven.”

“I’m a man of my word.”

He opened his eyes. Hazel. Green and gold. The eyes I had been looking at through a phone screen for fourteen days — on video calls where the lag made his smile arrive a half-second after his words, on photographs he sent from rooftops and bazaars and a ferry crossing the strait at sunset. Beautiful through glass. Devastating in person.

“Adrian.” He said my name like he was confirming it.

“Miles.”

He kissed me.

The first kiss in fourteen days was not gentle. It was not a greeting. It was the physical expression of two weeks of phone calls that ended with I wish you were here and text messages that ended with I miss the weight of you and the specific, maddening insufficiency of a phone screen when what your body wanted was skin.

His mouth was hot and demanding. His hands were in my hair, on my jaw, pulling my shirt from my waistband. I kissed him back with the accumulated hunger of fourteen days and twelve hours and the entire taxicab ride where I’d had to look out the window because the word pleasure made me hard.

“Off,” he said, pulling at my clothes. “Everything off. Now.”

I stripped. He stripped. The sheets were kicked to the foot of the bed in seconds, and then we were naked and tangled and the feeling of his body against mine — the full, unmediated, skin-to-skin contact I had been imagining through screens and miles — was so overwhelming that I had to press my face into his neck and breathe him in before I could do anything else.

Cedar. Salt. The specific, irreducible composition of Miles. Unchanged by geography.

“I missed you,” I said against his throat. “I missed you in a way I didn’t know I was capable of. I missed you in rooms and airports and at three in the morning when the bed was the wrong temperature because you weren’t in it.”

“Adrian.” His voice was raw. “If you keep talking like that, this is going to be over in approximately ninety seconds.”

“Then we’ll go again. I have the room until Thursday.”

He pulled me down. Kissed me deep and wet and filthy, his tongue against mine, his legs wrapping around my waist, his cock hard against my stomach. I ground against him and the friction was so intense I groaned into his mouth.

“Inside me,” he said. “Now. I prepped before you got here.”

“You —”

“I woke up at five-thirty. I knew you’d be here at six-oh-seven because you are pathologically punctual. I wanted to be ready.” He reached for the nightstand. Handed me a condom and lube. “Be ready means be inside me within two minutes of walking through the door. You’re behind schedule.”

I loved this man. I loved his planning and his precision and the way he pretended his need was logistics when it was actually desperation.

I pushed inside him and the sound we made was the same — simultaneous, broken, the exact frequency of two people who had been apart too long and were correcting the error.

“Fuck,” he breathed. His back arched. His hands gripped the sheets. “God — Adrian — I forgot —”

“Forgot what?”

“How you feel. The phone doesn’t — screens don’t — nothing compares to —”

I thrust deep. He stopped talking. The prayer call echoed across the water outside, and the dawn light was turning the room gold, and I fucked the man I loved in a hotel in Istanbul at six in the morning with the windows open and the Bosphorus glittering and his voice saying my name between two continents.

It was not slow. I fucked him hard and fast, his legs over my shoulders, the angle deep enough to hit the spot that made his voice break on every thrust. His cock was leaking against his stomach, untouched, and the sight of him — flushed, desperate, his tattoos vivid against the white sheets — was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in any city on any continent.

“Touch yourself,” I said. “I want to watch you.”

He wrapped his hand around his cock and stroked in time with my thrusts, and the dual rhythm built to a peak that neither of us tried to delay.

He came first. His body clenching around me, his back arching off the mattress, a cry that echoed off the stone walls. I followed him with a groan that I muffled against his shoulder.

He didn’t care.

“Louder,” he said. Breathless. Wrecked. Smiling. “I want Istanbul to know you’re here.”

After, we lay on the balcony. The Bosphorus below, the minarets silhouetted against the brightening sky. Miles wore my shirt — unbuttoned, hanging to his thighs. I wore nothing, because Miles had asked me not to.

Then I took the camera from him. Set it down. Pulled him into my lap on the balcony chair.

We made love again. Slowly this time. Him in my lap, his arms around my neck, the morning light on his face. The Bosphorus glittering behind him.

“How long can you stay?” he asked. Forehead against mine.

“Five days.”

“Then Lisbon?”

“Then Lisbon. Then Philadelphia. Then every morning after that.”

He kissed me. The kind of kiss that contains a promise and an answer and a future.

“Welcome to Istanbul,” he said.

“I would have come sooner.”

“You came exactly on time.”

I held him. The sun rose over the Bosphorus. And for the first time in my life, being on time felt like the most romantic thing I had ever done.

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