Write Me Up by Jace Wilder - Bonus Chapter

Write Me Up — Bonus Chapter

An Exclusive Scene Too Hot for Amazon
by Jace Wilder

Celebration — A Bonus Scene Too Hot for Amazon

Set two months after the events of Write Me Up. Cade’s poem has just been published in the campus literary journal. Nolan has plans.

CADE

The text arrives at 6:47 PM while I’m standing in the campus bookstore holding a copy of Meridian — the one with my poem in it, page thirty-one, tucked between a villanelle about climate grief and a prose piece about someone’s dead cat. My poem is neither of those things. My poem is about a man who gave me rules and got chaos in return, and the literary journal printed it in 11-point Garamond, which feels like a sign from the universe that typography approves of our relationship.

The text is from Nolan. Two words:

My apartment. Now.

No period-signal. No coded language. Just a directive delivered with the clean authority of a man who has learned that he doesn’t need a clipboard to make me do exactly what he wants.

I buy three copies of the journal. I take the bus.

He opens the door before I knock — he heard me on the stairs, because Nolan Mercer hears everything, especially my footsteps, which he once told me he could identify in a crowded hallway the way a musician identifies a note in a chord. He’s in dark jeans and a black t-shirt, barefoot, his hair falling forward slightly. The apartment smells like candles. He has never, in the entire history of our relationship, lit a candle.

“You lit candles,” I say.

“I bought candles. I lit them. These are separate achievements and I’d like credit for both.”

“You hate candles. You said they’re a fire hazard and an unnecessary variable in a controlled environment.”

“I’m capable of growth.” He takes the journal from my hand. Opens it. Finds page thirty-one. Reads the poem for what I know is at least the fourth time, because I watched him read it three times when I first showed him, and his expression each time was the same — focused, reverent, the look of a person encountering something that matters and giving it the full weight of his attention.

“Published poet,” he says. Not teasing. Proud. The low, certain voice that makes my knees remember they have a structural weakness where he’s concerned.

“One poem. In a campus journal with a circulation of maybe two hundred. Let’s not—”

“Published. Poet.” He sets the journal on the counter. Steps toward me. His hand comes to my jaw — the grip, the angle, the specific way he tilts my face up that my body recognizes the way a lock recognizes a key. “I told you to publish it. You did. And now I’m going to reward you.”

“Reward me.” My voice has dropped an octave without my permission. “Is this a Pavlovian thing? Positive reinforcement to encourage future creative output?”

“It’s a ‘my boyfriend got published and I’m going to take him apart until he forgets how to spell his own name’ thing.”

Boyfriend. The word still lands with weight, even now. Even after two months of being real and public and not-a-violation. The weight is good. The weight is the kind that holds you down instead of pushing you under.

“Take the hoodie off,” he says.

“You usually like to do that part yourself.”

“Tonight you do what I tell you. Starting now.”

The command voice. The one that lives below his regular voice the way bass lives below melody — foundational, structural, the frequency my body has been tuned to since the night he said come here in a room with one lamp and I discovered that obedience, when it’s chosen, feels like flying.

I pull the hoodie over my head. Drop it on the floor. He watches it land with an expression that is seventy percent desire and thirty percent residual distress about items on the floor, and the ratio makes me grin.

“Shirt,” he says.

Off. The cotton clears my head and I stand there in jeans and the silver chain necklace, and his eyes do the full inventory — shoulders, chest, the line of hair below my navel — with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who has seen this body a hundred times and has decided that a hundred is not nearly enough.

“Jeans.”

I unbutton them. Slow. Holding his gaze while my fingers work the button and the zipper, sliding the denim down my hips with the deliberate pace of a person who has learned that the space between the command and the compliance is where the power lives. His jaw tightens — that reflex, the one I’ve been cataloging since September, the involuntary clench that means his body has processed something his brain hasn’t approved.

I step out of the jeans. Stand in front of him in black boxers and the chain. Nothing else. The apartment is warm — the candles and the heating and the particular temperature that Nolan’s body generates when he’s looking at me like this, which is approximately one thousand degrees Fahrenheit concentrated in his eyes.

“You’re staring,” I say.

“I’m admiring. There’s a difference.”

“The difference being?”

“Staring is passive.” He closes the distance. His hand on my hip, fingers pressing into the groove above my waistband. His mouth near my ear, breath hot against my skin. “Admiring is what you do before you devour something.”

He kisses me. Not gentle — claiming. His tongue sweeping into my mouth with the focused intent of a man who has spent the entire day planning this and is now executing with precision. His hand slides from my hip to my lower back, pulling me flush against him so I can feel every line of his body through his clothes — the hard plane of his chest, his belt buckle cold against my bare stomach, and lower, the rigid evidence that he has been thinking about this for longer than the walk from his desk to the door.

He’s still fully dressed. I’m nearly naked. The asymmetry is deliberate — it’s always deliberate with Nolan — and the vulnerability of standing bare against a clothed man who is kissing me like I’m something he won and earned and refuses to share makes my cock twitch against the thin cotton of my boxers in a way that he absolutely feels, because his hips press forward in response, and the pressure of him against me — hard, insistent, separated by denim and cotton and nothing else — drags a sound from my throat that I did not approve.

“Bedroom,” he says against my mouth.

He walks me backward through the apartment. His mouth never leaves mine. His hands roam — my back, my ribs, the waistband of my boxers where his thumb hooks and tugs without pulling, a promise disguised as a tease. My calves hit the bed frame. I sit. He stands over me, and the geometry of this — him above, me below, his hand finding my chin and tilting my face up — is the architecture of us. The blueprint. The thing we built from write-ups and stairwells and a belt that changed the meaning of the word control.

The candles are on the nightstand. Two of them, casting warm, shifting light that makes the shadows on his face move like breath. The bed is made with the military precision I’ve come to understand is not a personality trait but a love language.

The belt is there too. Brown leather. Silver buckle. Folded neatly beside the candles like a sacrament waiting for its ceremony.

“You planned this,” I say.

“I’ve been planning this since you showed me the acceptance email. Every detail.” He reaches for his own shirt. Pulls it over his head in that efficient, one-handed motion that I will never not find devastatingly attractive. His chest in candlelight is lean and defined and mine, and the possessive jolt that word sends through me — mine — is one I’ve stopped being embarrassed by. “Get on the bed. Center. On your back.”

I comply. Not because I have to. Because the thing I’ve learned about submission — the real kind, not the performance — is that it’s a form of generosity. I give him my obedience because I trust what he does with it, and what he does with it has never been anything less than extraordinary.

He strips his jeans off. Then the rest. The sight of Nolan Mercer fully naked and fully hard in candlelight, reaching for a leather belt with one hand while looking at me with an expression that is equal parts tenderness and hunger, is the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed. And I’ve witnessed it many times now. It doesn’t diminish.

He kneels on the bed. Straddles my hips without making contact — hovering, his weight on his knees, his cock brushing my stomach in a maddening whisper of friction. He takes my wrists. Brings them together above my head.

The belt loops around both our wrists. Left mine, right his. Linked. The leather settles warm against our skin, and the symbolism of it — not restraining one of us but connecting both — hasn’t lost its power since the first time I caught his hand and said together and watched his face become something I’d never seen before and want to see every day until I die.

“Together,” he says. A confirmation. A vow renewed.

“Together.”

He starts at my mouth. Kisses me deep and slow while his free hand traces the line of my jaw, my throat, the chain necklace that sits in the hollow of my collarbone. His mouth follows his hand — down my neck, across my collarbone, finding the spot below my ear that makes me arch and gasp and grab at the belt loop because my hands want to be in his hair and the leather won’t let them.

“You wrote something beautiful,” he murmurs against my chest. His tongue traces a line down the center of my sternum. “And you were brave enough to put it in the world.” His mouth finds my nipple. His teeth graze it — light, precise, the exact calibrated pressure that he knows makes my hips buck. My cock is so hard it’s aching, pressed between our bodies, and every movement he makes creates friction that is both too much and catastrophically insufficient.

“And the world said yes,” he says. His mouth at my ribs. My stomach. The groove of my hip, where his tongue traces the line of muscle that tracks from my waist to the place he’s heading with devastating, unhurried intent.

“The — fuck — the literary journal said yes. The world hasn’t weighed in—”

“I’m weighing in.” He removes my boxers with his free hand. One motion. The elastic catches on my cock — the brief, electric friction of cotton against the head — and the sound I make is involuntary and undignified and exactly what he wanted to hear, if the curve of his mouth is any indication.

He looks at me. All of me. Naked, hard, arms above my head, bound to him by a belt that used to mean discipline and now means devotion. His eyes are black in the candlelight — pupils consuming the gray-green, leaving nothing but want.

“My verdict,” he says, “is that you’re extraordinary.”

He takes my cock in his mouth and my vision goes white.

Not the polite white of a soft-focus romance. The blinding, all-consuming white of a nervous system being overloaded by a man who gives head the way he gives everything — with total, undivided, relentless focus. His mouth is wet and hot and skilled in ways that a man with his level of analytical intelligence was always going to be skilled, because Nolan Mercer learns systems, and my body is a system he has spent two months mastering.

He knows the pace I need. Slow at first, his tongue working the underside in long, flat strokes while his lips maintain a pressure that makes my toes curl. He knows the depth — taking me further on every pass, the head hitting the back of his throat in a way that makes his eyes water and makes me moan so loud I’m grateful the apartment is above a laundromat and not a library.

His free hand finds my hip. Pins it. Holds me still while his mouth works, because he knows that my instinct is to thrust and my thrusting disrupts his precision, and Nolan Mercer does not tolerate disruptions to his precision. He controls the rhythm. He controls the depth. He controls the specific, devastating moment when he pulls almost all the way off, tongues the slit slowly — so slowly I can feel individual nerve endings screaming — and then sinks back down to the root.

“Nolan — fuck — I’m going to—”

He stops. Pulls off. Looks up at me from between my thighs with his lips swollen and wet and his chin glistening and an expression that says not yet with the calm cruelty of a man who is thoroughly enjoying the power he’s wielding.

“You’re evil,” I breathe. “You are — certifiably — evil.”

“I’m thorough.” He crawls up my body. Our bound wrists shift on the pillow. He kisses me — deep, unhurried, and I taste myself on his tongue, salt and musk and the particular flavor of a man undoing you by degrees. “I said I was going to take you apart. That means all the way apart. No shortcuts.”

“I was apart. I was fully apart. You could have let me—”

“Not yet.” His mouth at my jaw. “You come when I decide you come. That’s the rule.”

“I thought we were done with rules.”

“Not all rules.” His grin against my skin. The echo of the epilogue. The callback that proves our entire relationship is one long conversation, and the conversation’s best lines keep recurring with new meaning.

He reaches for the nightstand with his free hand. Lube. Condom. The practical logistics of desire, handled with the same quiet efficiency he brings to everything — no fumbling, no awkwardness, just the competence of a man who has done this enough to make it seamless and who knows that seamlessness is its own form of foreplay.

The prep is slow. It’s always slow with Nolan. His fingers slicked and patient, one first, testing, reading my body’s response with the attentiveness of a man whose clinical training makes him exquisitely attuned to the signals of another person’s comfort. He talks me through it — not clinical, not detached, but the low, steady narration that has become part of our language. “Relax.” “Breathe.” “That’s it.” “You’re doing so well.”

Two fingers. The stretch deepens. He curves them, searching, and when he finds the spot — the one that makes my spine arc and my mouth fall open — he presses it with a precision that is so perfectly, devastatingly Nolan that I want to laugh and scream simultaneously.

“Right there?” he asks. Like he doesn’t know. Like the question is academic.

“You — ah — you know exactly where — fuck — you mapped it, didn’t you. You have a fucking diagram—”

“I have a very good memory.” He crooks his fingers again. My back lifts off the mattress. “And a very responsive subject.”

“Don’t call me a subject while your fingers are inside me—”

“Would you prefer ‘boyfriend’?”

“I’d prefer you fuck me before I lose what’s left of my sanity.”

“Since you asked so nicely.”

He removes his fingers. Rolls the condom on with his free hand — a minor feat of dexterity given that his other wrist is still bound to mine by leather, and the fact that he manages it without fumbling is either impressive or infuriating and I don’t have the cognitive resources to determine which.

He enters me face to face. Our linked wrists above my head, his free hand bracing beside me, his forehead against mine. The first push is slow — always slow, always careful, always the measured patience of a man who understands that trust is a physical negotiation as much as an emotional one.

The fullness is consuming. Not just physical — total. His body in mine, his face above mine, his breath mingling with mine, the leather around our wrists a constant, grounding reminder that we are tethered to each other by choice and by desire and by a love that survived a stairwell and a laundry room and a write-up for a podcast at 10:02 PM and eleven days of silence that almost ended us.

“Look at me,” he says.

I haven’t looked away.

He starts to move. Unhurried. Deep. Each stroke a complete sentence — a thesis, an argument, a conclusion — delivered with the rhythmic precision of a man who has learned that the best sex is not the fastest sex but the most intentional. He pulls almost all the way out and drives back in, and the angle is perfect, and the depth is perfect, and the sound he makes on each return — a low, guttural groan that he used to suppress and no longer does — is the most honest sound I’ve ever heard from a human being.

“You’re perfect,” he says. Not the command-voice praise of the arrangement. Not the sexual weapon of the brat-taming nights. This is the real thing. The underneath praise. The praise that comes from a man who has seen every part of me — the chaos and the poetry and the damage and the trying — and has concluded that the sum is worth more than its parts. “You’re perfect, and you’re published, and you’re mine.”

“Yours,” I manage. The word is barely a sound — pulled from me by his cock and his voice and the candlelight on his face and the leather connecting our wrists and the accumulated weight of everything we’ve survived to get here.

“Again.”

“Yours.“

His pace builds. Not urgently — organically. The way a tide comes in. Each stroke deeper than the last, his hips driving forward with an authority that isn’t domination but devotion — the force of a man who is trying to get as close as physics allows and finding that physics isn’t close enough. His free hand wraps around my cock between our bodies, slick with lube, stroking in time with his thrusts, and the dual sensation — full and held, fucked and touched, loved from the inside and the outside simultaneously — dismantles every structure I have left.

I’m making sounds I can’t control. His name, fragmented. Profanity, creative. The word yours repeated like a refrain in a poem I’m writing with my body instead of my phone. He matches every sound with his own — his breathing fracturing, his rhythm losing its clinical precision as his body overrides his brain, as the composure that defined him when we met finally, fully, irrevocably dissolves.

“Nolan — I need to — please—”

“Come for me.” Not a command. An invitation. His forehead pressed to mine, his eyes on mine, his hand working me with devastating accuracy. “Not because I told you to. Because you want to. Because you’re safe. Because you’re mine and I’m yours and nobody is keeping score anymore.”

I come with his name on my tongue and his hand on my cock and his eyes three inches from mine and the belt pulling taut between our wrists, and the orgasm is not an explosion. It’s a wave — deep, sustained, rolling through me in pulses that start at the base of my spine and radiate outward through every cell I have, and I feel it in my fingertips and my eyelashes and the bottoms of my feet and the place behind my ribs where the word love lives.

He follows. Two thrusts later — hard, deep, uncoordinated in a way that only happens when Nolan Mercer has fully abandoned the last of his control. His body locks. His face presses into my neck. The sound he makes is quiet and broken and sacred — a sound I have heard in stairwells and laundry rooms and narrow dorm beds, but that sounds different now in candlelight, in an apartment, in the life we built on the other side of the rules.

Our bound wrists hold. The leather holds. We hold.

After.

He unloops the belt. Slow. Careful. The leather slides from our wrists, and the skin underneath is warm and faintly pink, and he lifts my wrist to his mouth and presses his lips to the inside, where the pulse beats, where the blood runs close to the surface. He stays there. Breathing against my skin. Counting my heartbeat with his mouth the way he counted it with his thumb the first night we touched in a storage room, when everything between us was unnamed and impossible and already inevitable.

He discards the condom. Wipes us down with the towel he keeps in the nightstand — our towel, the one that has been present for every encounter since the arrangement began and that has, at this point, witnessed more of our relationship than any of our friends. He sets the towel aside. Lies down. Pulls me against him.

Full cuddling. Committed. Unapologetic. His arm around my back, my head on his chest, his hand in my hair. The candles flicker on the nightstand, low now, the wax pooling in the holders, the light going amber and soft.

“I’m proud of you,” he says. Into my hair. Where I can feel the words vibrate through his chest and into my skull and down into the place where every criticism my father ever aimed at me has been slowly, steadily, patiently replaced by a voice that says good and perfect and I’m proud of you and means all of it.

I press my face into his shoulder and hold on. I don’t cry. I have a reputation to maintain. The reputation survives by exactly one tear’s margin, and the margin is getting thinner every time this man tells me I’m worth something in a voice that makes me believe it.

“Write more,” he says.

“I will.”

“Write about this.”

“Nobody wants to read about us.”

His arm tightens. His mouth presses to my temple. “I do.”

The candles burn down. One gutters out with a hiss. The other follows a minute later. The room goes dark — warm, quiet, inhabited by two people and the smell of extinguished wax and the particular peace of an evening that asked nothing of us except to be here.

I reach for my phone on the nightstand. The screen lights the dark.

“What are you doing?” he murmurs. Half-asleep. His arm still around me.

“Writing.”

I open the notes app. The cursor blinks. I type:

he said good and the word rebuilt me
brick by brick by brick
until i was a house with open doors
and he walked through every one

I save it. Set the phone down. Press back against his chest.

“Read it to me,” he says.

I do. Quietly. In the dark. His heart beating under my ear, steady as a metronome that doesn’t care about policy.

When I finish, he’s quiet for a long time. Then his arm tightens around me, and he says, in the voice that started everything — the low, sure, underneath voice that lives below all the others:

“Good.”

I close my eyes.

We stay.

He gave me rules and I gave him chaos
and somehow we built a language out of both.

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