🔥 Bonus Chapter

Vet’s Good Boy — Husbands

by Chase Power

Husbands

Dave — The Real Wedding Night

We got home at quarter to two.

I am going to tell you about it. The whole thing. I am going to tell you because what was on the page in the book was the truth but it was not the whole truth, and you have read this far with us — through the locker room and the cage and the bondage night and the trade I almost took and the morning I undressed him under a bedside lamp and called him perfect — and you have earned the rest. So. The whole thing.

The drive home from the reception was twelve minutes. I drove. He was in the passenger seat in his suit pants and his white shirt with the top three buttons open and his bow tie loose around his neck like a man in a magazine, and his wedding ring caught the streetlights every time we passed under one. He had his head back against the headrest. He had his eyes half closed. He had one hand laced through mine on the gearshift, and his thumb was moving — small, slow, absent — across my knuckles, and I knew, from twelve minutes of that thumb, exactly what we were going to do when we got upstairs.

I was already hard. I had been, on and off, for about two hours.

I am forty-five years old. I am — I want to be clear — not a man with a young man’s refractory recovery anymore. I am a man who had spent four hours at his own wedding watching his husband — his husband, now, that word — laugh and dance and accept toasts in a charcoal grey suit that had been tailored to him in November and had spent four months hanging in our closet, and I had spent every single one of those four hours thinking about getting him out of it.

I had been a saint at the reception. I had not put my hand on the small of his back during the toasts. I had not pressed my mouth to his temple. I had been appropriate and contained, and I had let him have his wedding the way he had asked me to have it — Sully, I want it to be elegant, he had said two months ago, I want my mom to be proud.

That bill was about to come due.

We pulled into the parking garage. He turned his head sideways to look at me. The streetlight was the only light on him. His mouth was a little swollen from kissing me at one different moment all night, and his eyes were dark, and he said, “Sully.”

“Yeah.”

“Take me upstairs.”

“Yeah, kid.”

“Now.“

We did not run. Forty-five-year-old men do not run, and Jordan was in dress shoes. But we did not stop, either. The second the elevator doors closed he was on me — back against the elevator wall, his good hand fisted in the front of my shirt, mouth at my throat — and I had my hands on his hips, and he was making the small noise he had been making since the night I had first kissed him on a couch eleven months ago, and I was going to lose my mind in an elevator on the night of my wedding.

The doors opened on three. I dragged him out by the hand.

I unlocked our door. We went in. I closed the door, locked it, turned around — and he was already there, against the door, and his hands were on my belt. I caught both of them in my own.

“Jordan.”

“Sully—“

“Slow down.”

“I do not — Sully, I do not want to slow down—”

“I know you don’t, kid. Listen to me.”

He stopped. He looked up at me. His eyes were black. His chest was going up and down. His lower lip was bitten red.

“Tonight,” I said, very quiet, “we have all the time in the world. Tonight is — Jordan. Tonight is the rest of our lives starting. We are not in a hurry. I am going to take you to bed and I am going to take you apart and I am going to take a long time. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And I am going to do something else, too. Tonight I am going to let you do the thing you have been asking to do for two months.”

His eyes went huge. “Sully—”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure.”

“I am sure, kid. We have been talking about it for weeks. I want you to be the first man who has ever — the only man who is ever — I want you to do it tonight.”

He made a sound. A small, broken, oh sound, and his good hand came up to my face and his thumb dragged across my lower lip, and he said, very quietly, “Sully. I love you so much I cannot — I cannot—”

“I know.”

“Take me to bed.”

I took him to bed.

I undressed him slowly.

I want to give you the part of this that nobody got to see. The part that was just for us, because everybody in our life had had us all night, and now we were going to have ourselves.

The bow tie came off first. I dropped it on the rug we had bought together at a place in Hartford in October — and he laughed, and I said, let it go, kid, the rug forgives you, and I undid his shirt buttons one at a time. There were seven open above the waist already; six more below. I did them with both hands, slow, and I kissed the skin as I exposed it — collarbone, sternum, the line of dark hair that ran down his stomach, the soft place above his belt buckle.

His hands were in my hair the entire time, and they were shaking, and I let them.

I got his shirt off. I got down on my knees in front of him to undo his belt, because I had done this on his couch the first night we had ever had each other, and I was going to do it on our wedding night, because the symmetry was the point. He looked down at me — dress shirt and slacks at one fifty-three in the morning — and his eyes were wet, and I undid his belt and his fly and worked his trousers and his briefs down to his knees in one motion, and I said, against his hip bone — the same hip bone I had taught him to load off of fourteen months ago: “Husband.”

He whimpered. A small, hurt, I cannot believe this is real sound, and his good hand fisted hard in my hair, and I said it again, against his thigh: “Husband.”

“Sully—“

“You are my husband.”

“Yeah.”

“Say it back.”

“You are — Sully, you are my husband.”

“Good boy.”

He came. Right then. Untouched. With my mouth at his hip bone and his trousers around his knees and my left hand wrapped around the back of his thigh, he came — just from those words, just from kneeling-and-husband-and-good-boy stacked one on top of the other in sixty seconds, and I caught him with my mouth, because I was right there and he was right there and there was no part of me that was going to let that moment happen anywhere else.

He sobbed once, hard, his hand still in my hair, his thighs trembling, and I rode it out with him, and when he was done he was making small wet laughing noises and saying my name and saying Sully I’m sorry, Sully I’m sorry, and I stood up, and I caught his face in both my hands, and I said, “Don’t apologize.”

“Sully, I have not done that since I was fourteen, I am twenty-five years old—“

“Jordan.”

“Yeah.”

“You are an idiot if you think I am anything but the most flattered man on planet earth right now.”

He laughed. Wet and surprised. He wiped his face on the back of his good hand. “Just — husband. You said husband. And I — Sully, I do not know what happened to my body.”

“You finally got to keep me. Your body knew. That’s all.”

He kissed me — sloppy, off-center, beautiful — and he said, against my mouth: “Get on the bed, Sully.”

“Jordan—”

“Get on the bed.“

I got on the bed.

I have not, in this book, told you about Jordan Martinez doing the thing he was about to do.

I have not, because we had not yet, on the timeline of the book. He had asked. He had asked in November, and again in December, and a third time on New Year’s Eve at three in the morning when we were both a little drunk on champagne and lying in bed talking about every dirty thing we had ever wanted to try, and each of those three times I had said — not yet, kid. I want it to mean something. I want it to be a thing. And he had been so patient about it. He had said, whenever you want, Sully. Whenever you decide. And tonight — tonight was the night I had decided, two weeks ago, in the middle of a Tuesday, when I had been at my coach-from-the-bench job watching college kids skate drills and I had thought, suddenly and clearly, the wedding night. I am going to give him the wedding night.

I had not told him. He had not known until the elevator, twenty minutes ago.

I want to tell you what it was like to be forty-five years old, to have spent twenty-five years on top in every relationship I had ever quietly had, to have come out at thirty-nine, to have been with my husband for fourteen months, and to lie on my back on our bed on our wedding night and let him undress me the rest of the way, slow, with both his hands, and to let him kiss every inch of me on his way down, and to spread my legs for him, and to let him touch me there for the first time in my life, with his eyes on my face and his free hand on my chest and his voice in my ear saying good, Sully. you’re so good. let me. let me have this.

It was like being twenty.

Not in the body sense. My body is forty-five. My knees are forty-five. My back is forty-five. My body knew exactly how old it was.

It was like being twenty in the getting-to-have-it sense. Like being given back a thing I did not know I had been missing. Like learning, on the night of my wedding to a twenty-five-year-old man, that there were still rooms in my own house I had not opened, that I had walked past for forty-five years and not opened, and that one of them turned out to have a window in it, and the window looked out on a view I had not seen before.

He went slow. So slow. He had — I do not know where he had read it, or watched it, or what his research process had looked like in the four months since he had first asked, but he was not faking expertise. He was being careful. He was being humble. He was paying attention to every single sound I made, every breath, and every time my hand twitched on the comforter he stopped and said, okay? still good? And I said yes, and he kept going, and he took twenty minutes, easy, just on the prep, because he was not going to hurt me on our wedding night, and by the time he asked me — Sully. can I, with his lips against my chest — I was so far gone I could only nod.

“Words, Sully.”

“Yeah.”

“Out loud, husband.”

I laughed. The word was intoxicating coming out of his mouth back at me, the way it had been intoxicating coming out of mine an hour ago, and I said: “Yes, Jordan. Yes. Please.”

“Good.”

“Jordan.“

“Look at you.”

That was what he said when he was inside me for the first time. His face four inches from mine. Both of us holding completely still. Look at you. His voice was low and raw and he had a sheen of sweat at his temple and his hair in his eyes, and he said it with the exact — the exact — cadence I had used on him so many times. Look at you. The cadence of a man who is shocked stupid by what is in front of him.

I closed my eyes. He kissed each eyelid.

“Sully. Tell me what you need.”

“Just — go slow. Just — give me a minute.”

“Yeah.”

He gave me a minute. He did not move. He just stayed there, inside me, with his forehead against mine, kissing my mouth, my jaw, my throat, and after a while I breathed a little easier and I lifted one hand and I put it on the back of his neck and I said, “Move, Jordan.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Move.”

He moved.

I cried, on and off, the whole time. Not big crying. Not sad. The other kind. The kind a body does when it has been carrying something for a long time and somebody, finally, takes it off you. He saw me crying and he did not panic. He kissed the tears off my face, and he kept moving, and he talked — he talked to me, the way I had talked to him, and he was good at it, by now, because he had been studying me for fourteen months.

“Sully. Look at you. Look at you.“

“Jordan—”

“I have you. I have you, husband. Just feel it. I have you.”

“Jordan.“

“You are doing so good. You are perfect. So good for me. Just like that.”

I have not, in fourteen months, been called good for me before tonight.

It turned out I liked it, too.

I do not know what sound I made when he found a place inside me I had not known was there. I do not know if it was a word. I think it was just a noise. A noise, and then his name, and then the words don’t stop, over and over, and he didn’t, and he kept talking, and I — I was, for the first time in my entire adult life, not the man running the room. I was not in charge of the moment. I was being held in it, by the man who had married me four hours ago, and I was letting him, and I was letting myself, and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I was laughing as well as crying — the wet, broken, I am too lucky to live laugh — and Jordan was laughing back, and we were both crying, and we were both laughing, and he was inside me, and we were married, and there was nothing in the world that was bigger than the bed we were on.

I came when he asked me to. He said, very low, against my ear: “Husband. Come for me.”

And I did.

He held me through it. He kissed me through it. He did not stop talking.

When he came he said my name. Just my name. Dave. Not Sully. He had only ever called me Dave maybe ten times in fourteen months — at the wedding ceremony being one of them, in front of eighty-four people — and on the bed, with his face against my throat and his good hand fisted in mine on the pillow, he said Dave with the rest of him gone, and it was one of the great sounds of my life.

We lay there. Five minutes. Twenty. I do not know. Eventually he eased out of me, got up, came back from the bathroom with a warm wet cloth, and cleaned me — slowly, carefully, the way I had cleaned him the first night — brought me a glass of water that I drank a quarter of and gave back, and climbed back into bed and pulled me against his chest.

He was bigger holding me, I realized. I am bigger than him by four inches. I had always, naturally, been the one who held him. We had not done it the other way. He had not been, until tonight, the bigger thing in our bed.

He was, tonight. He held me, and his arms went all the way around my chest, and my head was on his shoulder, and I closed my eyes, and I thought — oh.

Oh. This is going to happen too. This is going to be a thing we do, sometimes, now. I am not going to be the only one holding. He is going to hold me sometimes. He is going to hold me on Sundays, and after hard days, and on nights when I am being a man too in his own head, and he is going to hold me, and I am going to let him.

This is also part of the rest of my life.

I had not known. I had not known that part.

“Jordan.”

“Yeah.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, Sully.”

“That was — that was—”

“I know.”

“Sully. I am not letting you go yet. Like, for a while. I am not letting you go for a while.”

“Okay, kid.”

“Not Sully right now. Husband.“

“Yeah.”

“Husband.”

“Yeah, Jordan.”

He kissed the top of my head. He held me. We did not fall asleep right away. We lay there for an hour. Maybe more. He was warm. He smelled like soap and sweat and the faint last note of the cologne he had been wearing all day. The lamp was still on. The comforter was a wreck. Outside, the snow was still falling, slow and fat under the streetlights, and I could see it through the gap in the curtains, and I thought about my father.

I thought about Patrick Sullivan, dead at sixty-three of a heart he had not known was bad, who had played beer-league hockey his entire adult life and