A bonus scene from WONDERLAND

RILEY

“I’m still not sure about this,” Peter said as I opened the creaky door.

He held the electric lantern high enough that the light went over both our heads and pooled on the rough wooden floorboards inside the entrance. I glanced at him over my shoulder and pulled a solemn face. “I know. But be brave for me, baby.”

“I’m not scared,” Peter hissed back, then crowded a few inches closer to me as we moved in lockstep over the threshold. “I just think this is a daytime task.”

I couldn’t really argue with that. “Ideally,” I admitted, “but I can’t do it by myself, and I don’t want Grandpa to sprain something. It won’t take long.”

Peter’s sigh gusted against my neck, making it tingle, and his chest brushed against my back. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to pull my focus from the temptation of turning around to kiss him.

We’d both been working long days, and even though we lived together in the apartment in the park and had for months, I still felt like we barely saw one another when we weren’t exhausted and ready to fall into bed.

Even though it was almost completely dark outside, it was only eight o’clock, and I had some plans for Peter after we finished installing the last few panels in the Hall of Mirrors.

The door fell shut behind us, and Peter swung around with a yelp. The lantern almost hit me upside the head, except I ducked out of the way in the last millisecond.

“Shit.” I released a breath of laughter and reached for him. I could feel the electric tension in his body as I rubbed his sides. “If you’re this freaked out, we don’t have to—”

“I’m fine,” Peter insisted, batting my hands away and nodding pointedly ahead. “Let’s just get this over with.”

The Hall of Mirrors was the most recent addition to the lineup of Meadows Park attractions. I’d been rushing to finish it in time for the weekend before Halloween, when we were setting up a bunch of spooky decorations and partnering with a neighbor for hayrack rides.

Ever since I’d first brought up the idea of putting up the mirrors that had been gathering dust in Grandpa’s garage for years, Peter had been leery. I didn’t get it.

“What is it with you and the fun-house mirrors, anyway?” I asked him as we walked through the building’s first room, over a path indicated with parallel lines of white paint, past a series of tall mirrors that cast our reflections in elongated distortion. The lantern’s light created a cool additional effect, actually, and I noted that for the purposes of the final plans for the Halloween-themed weekend.

Still a half-step behind me, Peter muttered, “They’re just…creepy.”

In the next room, I grabbed his arm. “Here, let me…” I switched on the LED lights installed in the mirror that took up one wall of the small, square space, and Peter sucked in a breath at the effect.

“Holy shit.” He trailed his fingertips over the smooth surface of the mirrored wall. “It turned out amazing.” It was called an infinity mirror. The combination of a one-way and two-way mirror with the lights inserted between them created a multilayered reflection that looked like a tunnel disappearing into the distance.

Peter had been forced to listen to the audio of about a dozen videos while I’d been doing the initial research. I was pretty proud of the result, but in this moment I was staring at Peter instead of the mirror. The blue LED lights illuminated his face and lit up his eyes so they were the color of hot fire.

He noticed me staring. “What?”

I shrugged, startled to be caught. “You look…”

He looked down at himself. “Blue?”

I reached for the switch on the wall again, then his hand. “Yeah. Blue looks good on you. Come on.”

“Impatient,” Peter murmured, winding our fingers together more tightly and raising the lantern with his other hand as we moved into the last room.

This space was long, narrow, and full of wooden frames—on the walls or suspended along the winding path. Some of the frames held mirrors, while others were empty and could be walked straight through. The result was a true maze, and getting it right had taken me forever.

I proudly looked at Peter for a reaction, and found his nose wrinkled. “What?” I asked, baffled.

“It’s creepy.”

I tried to see the room through his eyes. I found the optical illusion fun, not frightening. “What do you mean?”

“I keep expecting a clown with a knife to show up, reflected four hundred times,” Peter explained tersely, gesturing with the lantern in a way that made the light bounce around the mirrors like a dozen blinking satellites. “Let’s just get this over with.” He let go of my hand to walk ahead of me, and something about the tension in his back and his determined strides made his ass look even more enticing than usual.

I felt bad for noticing, though, because he obviously wasn’t having a good time. I would make it up to him after we—

I bumped into a mirror and stumbled sideways. The light—and Peter—kept moving away.

“Hey, wait up—” I sidestepped and then bumped into another mirror. They were acrylic, so I couldn’t hurt myself, but I was strangely unsettled.

“Riley?”

I blinked to my right, then my left. The light was still ping-ponging around the mirrors ahead and behind me. “I got a little lost,” I admitted with a shaky laugh.

Peter made his way back to me, holding the lantern directly in front of himself so he could tell the empty frames from the mirrored ones. He peered into my face, his eyes worried in the shadows and the light churning all around us, like we were meeting in the middle of a dream.

“I told you this was creepy,” Peter scolded me, then took my hand again to lead me along behind him. “I saw where you left the ladder.”

An A-frame ladder was positioned at the end of the maze, where I planned to hang angled mirrors from the ceiling. Looking up into them offered a reflected view of the entire mirrored hallway. But getting the ceiling mirrors into place without a second pair of hands had been impossible.

“You know,” I said conversationally, watching out of the corner of my eye as Peter scaled the ladder, unknowingly putting his ass on perfect display, “I recall that you like being scared.”

Peter scoffed, reaching the top of the ladder and balancing himself with one hand on the rafter above his head. “You’re never going to let me live that down, huh?”

“Maybe I’m just hoping if I bring it up enough times, we’ll have a repeat.” I winked as I handed him the end of the chain on one corner of the first mirror.

“Has it occurred to you that it might not have been the slasher movie, but the fact that I was a sixteen-year-old kid in proximity to another boy, in a dark room, under a blanket?”

“Some guys get horny when they’re scared. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” I was teasing him, but I also meant every word. That night had been hot as hell. He’d clambered onto my lap, hard and shaky and desperate, and frotted against me like he was trying to break a fever.

Peter looped the chain over the rafter and then used the hook on the end of the chain to secure it to itself. “I’m not ashamed,” he shot back, and hurried down the ladder, then dragged it a few feet so it was in position under the mirror’s next anchor point.

I held the frame steady with one hand and held up the second piece of chain with the other. “Sorry,” I said, still fighting a smile. “I shouldn’t bring it up.”

He snatched the chain from my hand and narrowed his eyes. “But you’re not going to stop.”

“Hey.” Realizing he was actually upset, my humor vanished. He wrapped the second piece of chain, and as the rafter took the weight of the mirror, my hands were freed. I reached through the ladder’s rungs and squeezed his calf. “I’m sorry. For real. Am I being a dick?” Mention of dicks reminded me that his was a few inches above my nose, and did I see a bulge…?

“You’re apologizing and staring at my cock at the same time,” Peter said testily, but when I glanced up guiltily, he was smiling. Then he bit his lip. “Okay, so maybe that night was pretty hot.”

“It was,” I agreed.

He was still bracing himself against the rafter with one hand. A lock of hair fell over his eyes as he looked down at me. The mirrors made the light low and strange. A thread of something curled up my spine, and maybe I could see how the eerie and the sexual could be two sides of the same coin.

Judging by the way he slowly wet his lips, Peter wasn’t denying that anymore either.

I held his eyes and slid my hand up his calf, twining past his knee and up his thigh until my palm was spread over his crotch, where, fuck—he was hard.

“Jesus.” Peter groaned and grasped the rafter with his other hand too. “If you keep doing that, I’m going to fall off this fucking ladder.”

The idea of him falling quickly broke the spell, and I snatched my hand back, holding the ladder instead. “Then come down here,” I told him urgently.

He obeyed, coming down so fast, the force of his hasty steps made the ladder rock against my hands. When his shoes hit the floor, I let go of the steel rungs and grabbed him instead, jerking his hips against mine as his hands dived into my hair and he yanked my mouth to his.

Without breaking our kiss, I jerked at the waistband of his jeans until it was tugged down enough that I could shove a hand inside, sliding my forefinger past his hole.

His kiss turned into more of a bite in response, and he twisted my hair in his hand until my scalp stung.

I felt almost light-headed with how bad I wanted to fuck him, but I didn’t know if I could slow down long enough to actually get inside. We didn’t use condoms—we were unquestionably exclusive, and we’d both been tested—but we always used lube.

Peter’s mouth left mine, and his teeth grazed the side of my neck. “I want your dick,” he said against my skin, like he was reading my mind.

“I don’t have any—”

“I don’t care.” He let go of me and leaned back just enough to shimmy out of his jeans and boxers, then tugged open the button on my fly. His eyes were hot, his lips parted, and with an unsteady breath, I finished what he’d started and kicked off my pants, gripping my cock hard so I wouldn’t come just from the heady sight of him. We had plenty of wild sex, but there was a violent edge to him that was new and intoxicating, and all teasing aside, reminded me of that night when we were sixteen.

Except that Peter hadn’t looked at me like someone who knew exactly what he wanted, or walked backward into the last wall-mounted mirror beneath the one we’d just hung and grasped the back of his thigh, pulling up his leg as he wet the forefinger of his other hand with his tongue. When he sank the digit into his hole, I practically charged him, slotting myself into the space he’d made for me between his legs, kissing his throat and stroking his cock roughly while he fingered himself.

He was amazing, and he should know about it. But I kept interrupting my praise with wet kisses along his jaw, until I reached the spot he liked under his ear. “You. Are. The sexiest fucking thing.”

I felt his wrist jerk in the tight space between us as he worked himself with his finger. He grunted. “Now.”

He reached for my cock, and I evaded him for long enough to spit in my hand and slick my shaft. “Are you sure—” But he had already lined me up and was bearing down.

Everything was kind of a blur after that. The shock of his tightness, and the friction, and—oh, shit, the heat. I tilted my head back and opened my eyes, and was confused for a beat by what I saw.

I’d forgotten the mirrors. But I was in the perfect position to look up into the newly hung ceiling mirror and see what looked like a thousand repetitions of our bodies, all down the hallway.

Peter, pinned by my cock, was golden in the lantern light—his gorgeous, long leg hooked around my waist. His arms were anchored around my shoulders. He’d let his head fall to one side. His eyes were closed, and his expression was slack with bliss.

I’d stopped moving, though I didn’t realize it for a long second. Not until he opened his eyes and stared into my face. “What…?”

“Look,” I said, my voice rough and wrecked as I slowly rolled into him again. “The mirrors.”

He blinked a few times, then focused over my shoulder. His breath caught. Maybe he didn’t have my particularly surreal view, but he would be able to admire himself from a few angles anyway.

“Look how gorgeous you are,” I told him, picking up the rhythm from before, the rhythm I knew would make him come.

“Me?” A huff of breath escaped him. “Fuck, Riley. Look at you.”

But I didn’t want to look anymore. I only wanted to hold him, and feel him. I pressed my eyes closed, put my forehead against his shoulder, and brought us both home.

***

I carried the lantern on our way out. If Peter was still freaked out by the mirrors, he didn’t say a word. I was pretty sure he was riding a postorgasmic high, drifting somewhere out of reach of jump scares. He followed me with his finger hooked in the belt loop at the back of my jeans, like he thought he might lose track of me if we weren’t physically connected.

He leaned sleepily against my side while I locked the fun-house door, then seemed to stir at the faint click of the key turning.

“We didn’t hang the other mirror,” he pointed out.

“It can wait.” I slipped my arm around his waist and started us toward the tower, where our big-enough-for-two shower and our warm bed waited for us. “There’s always tomorrow night.”

“Uh-huh,” he said suspiciously. “You’re not angling for a repeat, are you?”

“Baby,” I told him seriously, “I’m angling for more than just a repeat. That has got to be a regular thing, now that I know your secret.”

Peter chuckled, but I knew he was mulling something over when he didn’t fire back at me immediately. Instead, he walked silently beside me the rest of the distance to the tower, and I waited for him to speak.

“It’s kind of weird,” he said quietly, pausing as we reached our door. “I always thought I hated being scared. But I can’t get really scared. Not with you.” He pushed his elbow into my ribs. “You make me feel safe, I guess. And that’s pretty hot.”

I had no idea what to say that wouldn’t seem too small to measure up to what he’d just said. His words settled on me with humbling weight. I swallowed, wanting so bad to be as honest with him as he’d just been with me. Even though I trusted him, moments like this were what terrified me—forget shadowy buildings and trick mirrors.

Peter was avoiding my eyes, so I squeezed his hand until he looked at me.

“Thank you.” Just two little words, and yet they came closest to expressing how he made me feel. In this moment and always: grateful. I rubbed my thumb against his wrist. “You’re my whole world. You know?”

He smiled slowly and opened his mouth, but I didn’t find out what he’d been about to say. A coyote shrieked in the distance, and I was so startled, I dropped the lantern that had been dangling half-forgotten from my fingertips.

“Enough of this wandering around in the dark bullshit,” Peter announced, hauling open the door. “I’ll take a long lunch and help you with the other mirror in broad daylight.”

Stifling my laugh, I let him drag me inside. “So, no repeats, then?”

He hesitated for a half-second. A very interesting half-second. The lower story was softly illuminated by a lamp by the sofa, and I thought I saw him smile a little as he was turning away to stalk toward the stairs. But his voice was serious when he answered me. “Nope. It was a one-time thing, so I hope you committed it to memory.”

As though I could ever forget.