Bonus Chapter: First Christmas at Station 4

The Fireman’s Pole Position
by Chase Power

⚠️ This bonus chapter contains spoilers and takes place after the events of the novel. Explicit MM content. Reader discretion advised.

Bonus Chapter — Jazz

The station smelled like pine and cinnamon and the particular institutional warmth of a building that had been decorated by people who loved it more than any building had a right to be loved.

Mason had gone overboard. Garland on every railing, lights around the engine bay doors, a miniature tree on the dispatch desk that Rhea had tolerated with the weary patience of a woman who picked her battles. Tinsel on the taxidermied bass. A wreath on the front of Engine 4 that Eli had tried to remove on safety grounds and that the crew had reinstated three times.

And the mistletoe.

Someone — Nia, I suspected, because Nia played the long game — had hung mistletoe in exactly three locations: the kitchen doorway, the hallway to the bunkrooms, and directly above the captain’s office chair. Eli had discovered the office one at 0600 and removed it with the expression of a man defusing an ordnance.

I’d found it in the trash and rehung it. He removed it. I rehung it. He removed it. I rehung it with industrial tape.

By the third reinstallation, Eli stopped removing it. Not because he’d surrendered — Eli Walker did not surrender. Because he’d recalculated the cost-benefit analysis and determined that the energy spent fighting the mistletoe exceeded the energy spent tolerating the paramedic who kept putting it back.

I considered this a victory.

“You’re incorrigible,” he said, standing in his office doorway at 0800, the mistletoe directly above his head, a mug of my terrible coffee in his hand. He drank my terrible coffee every morning without complaint. Love had many expressions; voluntary consumption of substandard coffee was among the most romantic.

“I’m festive. There’s a difference.”

“The difference is semantic.”

“The difference is romantic. You’re welcome.” I stepped into his office. Under the mistletoe. Close enough to see the silver at his temples and the line of his jaw above his beard and the particular softening that only appeared when we were alone and he let the captain go to sleep.

“Hi, Captain.”

“Hi, Jazz.”

“You’re standing under mistletoe.”

“You put it there.”

“And now you’re under it. Seems like the universe is trying to tell us something.”

He kissed me. Brief, warm, his free hand cupping the back of my neck, thumb tracing the spot behind my ear that he’d discovered in the bunkroom three months ago and had been exploiting ever since. My terrible coffee tasted better secondhand. Everything tasted better through Eli.

“Tonight,” he said against my mouth. “After the shift.”

“What happens tonight?”

“I have plans.”

“Captain Eli Walker has plans?”

“Captain Eli Walker has a laminated itinerary. But I’m not sharing it.”

I grinned against his jaw. “I love you, you ridiculous man.”

“I love you too. Now get back to work before Mason films this and the internet has opinions.”

The shift was quiet the way Christmas Eve in small towns is quiet — the whole world indoors, wrapped in warm light and family. We ran one call: an elderly woman on Maple Street whose smoke detector had been triggered by an ambitious gingerbread construction project. The gingerbread house was salvaged. The real house was fine. She gave us cookies.

Secret Santa at 1900.

The crew gathered in the day room — Nia, Mason, Tomás, Rhea off-duty in a sweater with a reindeer on it that she dared anyone to comment on, and Avery, who was spending Christmas Eve at the station because his mother was working and the crew had become, without anyone naming it, the family that caught the people who needed catching.

Mason gave Nia a custom mug that said World’s Scariest Lieutenant. Nia examined it, determined the font was acceptable, and set it beside her existing mug with the quiet satisfaction of a woman whose reputation was being properly maintained.

Nia gave Mason a book called Social Media for Beginners. Mason opened it and found, inside the front cover, a handwritten note: You don’t need this. You’re already the best. — N. He pretended not to get emotional. Everyone pretended not to notice.

Tomás gave Rhea a pair of noise-canceling headphones with a card that read: For when the radio is too much and the firefighters won’t shut up. Rhea put them on immediately, looked at Mason, and said, “Finally. Silence.”

Rhea gave Avery a stethoscope. Not a training one — a real Littmann, gunmetal gray, with his initials engraved on the bell. Avery held it in both hands and his face did the thing that seventeen-year-old faces do when the world gives them something they didn’t dare ask for.

“Welcome to the profession,” Rhea said.

Avery hugged her. Rhea, who did not do hugs, held very still for three seconds and then patted his back once with the restrained affection of a woman who was absolutely not crying.

Then it was Eli’s turn.

He handed me a small box. No wrapping — a plain cardboard box, the kind hardware stores use for screws and hinges. Inside, on a bed of tissue paper, was a key. Small, brass, old. On a leather fob that smelled like his garden shed.

“It’s the key to the shed,” he said. His voice was quiet, the voice he used for things that cost him. “My father built it. I’ve never given anyone else a copy.”

The shed. Where Eli kept the tomato seedlings in spring, the garden tools his father had organized by size, and the old notebook — leather-bound, water-stained — where David Walker had logged every planting season from 1985 to 2020. The last private space. The room in Eli’s life where his father still lived.

I closed my hand around the key and kissed him in front of the entire crew because some moments did not survive restraint.

Mason filmed it. Nia let him.

Sparky received a custom dog bed from Mason — memory foam, station logo embroidered on the side. He sniffed it once, walked past it, jumped on the couch, and fell asleep. The crew howled. Sparky was unmoved.

By 2200, the station had emptied. Eli and I were alone.

He’d set up the bunkroom.

Not our cabin — the bunkroom. My bunkroom. The narrow room off the apparatus bay where I’d spent my first night in Pine Ridge, where Sparky had chosen me, where Eli had stood in the doorway holding a laminated sheet of rules and I’d thought oh no, he’s exactly my type and had been right in a way that changed the rest of my life.

Fresh sheets. Battery-operated candles. Wine. Two glasses. And on the nightstand, propped against the lamp, a piece of paper. Laminated.

Station 4 — Christmas Eve Protocols
Effective 2200 hours, December 24
Authorized: Captain E. Walker

1. No clothing after 2200 hours.
2. The captain will be addressed by first name only.
3. All requests will be granted.
4. Noise complaints will not be filed.
5. The dog has been relocated.
6. The medic is encouraged to be specific about what he wants.
7. Aftercare supplies have been staged in the nightstand drawer.
8. This list supersedes all previous protocols.

“You laminated Christmas sex protocols,” I said.

“I’m thorough.”

“You’re insane. I love you. Take your clothes off.”

“That’s Rule 1. It’s not 2200 yet.”

I checked my phone. “It’s 2203.”

“Then we’re in violation.”

He crossed the room in three steps and his mouth was on mine and his hands were under my shirt and everything combusted in the space between his chest and mine.

He kissed me the way he kissed me when the want had been building: deep, thorough, his teeth catching my lower lip in the way that sent a jolt straight to my cock. His hands pulled my shirt over my head and then his palms were on my chest, broad and rough and warm.

“Rule 2,” I said, pulling back just far enough to breathe. “First name only.”

“Jazz—”

“Not mine.” I grabbed his shirt. Unbuttoned it one-handed — a skill I’d mastered and deployed at every opportunity because the way his breath caught was a drug I had no interest in quitting. The flannel fell open. His chest: broad, dark-haired, the muscle of a man who moved hose and swung axes for a living. I put my mouth on his collarbone and tasted salt and soap and the scent that was just Eli, undiluted.

“Say your name for me,” I murmured against his skin.

I bit down. Gently — just hard enough to make his breath stutter. His hand fisted in my hair.

“Eli,” he said. Low, rough, the word pulled out of him.

“Again.”

“Eli.” His hips pressed forward, and I could feel him through his jeans — hard, straining against the denim, three hours of restraint collapsing under the weight of his own name.

I dropped to my knees.

I looked up at Eli Walker — flushed, breathing hard, shirt open, candlelight turning his skin gold — and thought about the first time I’d been on my knees for him. The locker room. Post-fire. Adrenaline and urgency.

This wasn’t that. This was Christmas Eve, and the man I loved had laminated a sex protocol, and I was going to take my time.

I unbuckled his belt. Slowly. Watching his face while my fingers worked the leather. I freed the button. Drew the zipper down. Pulled his jeans and briefs over his hips in one motion and let him spring free, hard and thick and flushed dark, and took a moment to just look.

He was beautiful. The map of him — the weight and curve, the vein along the underside, the way his abs contracted when I breathed across the head — was territory I knew by heart and wanted again every time like the first.

“Rule 6,” I said. “The medic is encouraged to be specific.”

“Jazz—”

“Specifically, I want you in my mouth. Specifically, I want to make you come so hard your knees give out. Specifically, I want you to watch.”

“Fuck.“

“That’s later. This is now.”

I took him in. Slow. Root to tip, my tongue flat along the underside, my lips tight, my eyes on his. He groaned — deep and raw, a sound that started in his chest and vibrated through his cock and into my throat. His hand cradled the back of my head, not pushing, not guiding. Holding. The way he held everything he loved.

I worked him with my mouth and my hand, finding the rhythm that made his thighs shake — long strokes, a twist at the top, my tongue circling the head while my grip tightened at the base. He was vocal in the way I’d taught him to be: my name, fragments of praise, the particular broken cadence of a man whose control was dissolving.

“Your mouth — Jazz — I can’t — you have no idea what you—”

I pulled off. Looked up. “Tell me.”

“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me and you’re on your knees in the room where I handed you a list of rules and I can’t — I can’t think—”

“Then don’t think.” I took him again, deeper, my throat opening around him, and his hand spasmed in my hair and the sound he made bounced off the cinderblock walls.

I brought him to the edge. Then I pulled off.

“Not yet. I’m not done with you.”

“Jazz, I swear to—”

“Rule 3, Captain. All requests will be granted.” I stood. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “My request is that you put me on that bed and show me what else you planned.”

His eyes went dark. The blue almost gone, swallowed by his pupils. The look I lived for — the moment where Captain Walker’s precision became Eli’s hunger.

He picked me up. Not metaphorically. Hands under my thighs, he lifted, I wrapped my legs around his waist, and he carried me to the bed and laid me down with a controlled strength that made me feel weightless and completely held.

We stripped what remained. Naked, both of us, in the bunkroom where it had started, the candles throwing amber light across our skin.

He covered me. Full weight, chest to chest, hip to hip. The contact — bare skin everywhere, the heat of him, the scratch of his chest hair against my nipples, the hard press of his cock against mine — made my back arch and a sound come out of me that was not words.

“I planned this,” he murmured at my ear. “Since the first night you slept in this bed. Since I stood in this doorway and watched you sleep with my dog on your chest and thought: I want to be the reason he stays.“

“Eli—”

“I’m going to take you apart tonight, Jazz. Slowly. Completely. In the bed where you started.”

He kissed his way down my body. The tattoo on my ribs — lo que eres es suficiente — his lips tracing the letters. The coordinate tattoo on my inner thigh — Providence and Pine Ridge. He kissed each number individually, then his mouth moved higher, teasing, his beard scraping the soft inner surface of my thigh.

“Eli, please—”

“Specific, Jazz. The protocol says specific.”

“I want your mouth on my cock. I want you to make me beg. And then I want you inside me until I can’t remember any name except yours.”

He took me in his mouth and I forgot every word except his name.

He worked me until my legs were shaking and my hands were twisted in the sheets and my voice was a continuous, broken litany of his name and profanity.

Then he pulled off, pressed a kiss to my hip, and said, “Turn over.”

I turned over. Face down, the sheets against my cheek, my breath coming in ragged surges. He reached for the nightstand — the staged supplies — and then his slick fingers were pressing against me, and the first touch made my whole body go taut.

He prepped me with devastating patience. One finger, slow, finding the angle that made me press back. “More,” I said, and he gave me more — two fingers, deeper, curling against the spot that sent sparks up my spine. He scissored and stretched while his voice told me everything he was going to do.

“I’m going to fuck you in this bed until the frame creaks. I’m going to make you loud enough that Tomás hears you through the headphones. And when you come, I want you to say my name the way you said it the first time — like it’s the only word you know.”

“Eli — now — I need—”

“I know what you need.”

He withdrew his fingers. I heard the condom wrapper. Felt him position himself behind me — the broad, blunt pressure, the pause that was both question and promise. I pushed back, impatient, and he gripped my hip and pressed inside me with one long, continuous stroke that made the bed frame creak and my voice break.

“Fuck,” I gasped into the pillow. “Fuck, Eli, you — you’re—”

“Still? Or move?”

“Move. If you hold still I will actually die.”

He moved. Deep, measured strokes that built a rhythm I could feel in my teeth. His hands gripped my hips, pulling me back to meet each thrust, and the angle was devastating — calculated, precise, a man deploying months of knowledge with surgical accuracy.

I grabbed the headboard. Cold metal against my palms, hot skin everywhere else. Eli’s hands bruising my hips, Eli’s cock filling me so completely I could feel him in my chest.

“Harder,” I said.

He gave me harder. The bed protested — a rhythmic creak that would have been mortifying if I’d had the capacity for mortification, which I did not.

“Eli — Eli — right there — don’t stop — please don’t—”

“I’m not stopping.” His voice was wrecked. “You feel — Jazz — you feel like everything — like coming home—”

He draped himself over my back. His chest against my spine, his mouth at my ear, his weight pinning me to the mattress. The position changed the angle — deeper, more intimate. His hand slid under me, wrapped around my cock, and the dual sensation — him inside me, his hand around me, his weight holding me down — built to a peak so sharp I could feel it approaching like a wave.

“Tell me when,” he murmured.

“Now — Eli — now — I’m—”

“Come for me.” Low and absolute, authority as devotion, command as care. “Come for me, Jazz. Let me feel it.”

I came so hard my vision went white. My body clenching around him, my cock pulsing in his hand, a sound tearing from my throat that was his name and a sob and a prayer braided into one. He stroked me through it, his mouth saying things against my neck — praise, filthy and tender, the words he knew I needed most.

He followed me over. His hips snapping forward, his hands gripping my ribs, his whole body seizing in a shudder I felt from his chest through my spine. He came with a sound that was open, raw — every wall down, every defense spent.

We collapsed. The bed frame made a sound of structural concern. Neither of us moved.

He pulled out carefully. Then — the nightstand drawer, the staged supplies, Rule 7. A warm cloth, gentle on my skin. A glass of water. The quilt from the cabin, the one his mother had made, because he’d planned every detail including making sure I was warm after.

He lay down beside me. Pulled me against his chest. His hand resting on my stomach, feeling my breathing the way he always did.

“Merry Christmas, Captain.” My voice was wrecked.

“Merry Christmas, Jazz.”

“Best laminated list yet.”

“I’ll file it for next year.”

“Add more rules. I want to break at least ten.”

“I was thinking about the first night,” he said. “When you showed up in the snow with a duffel bag and no plan.”

“I had a plan. The plan was: don’t freeze to death.”

“You stood in the day room with Sparky on your leg and you looked at this station like it was the first place you’d been that wasn’t asking you to perform.” He paused. “I recognized that look. I’d been wearing it for twelve years.”

I turned in his arms. Faced him. “I know the exact moment I stopped passing through.”

“The locker room?”

“The protocol sheet. You handed me a laminated list of twelve rules and I thought: this man cares so much about things working correctly that he typeset his anxieties in a serif font and ran them through a laminator. And I thought: I want to know what it would take to make him break every single one.“

His mouth twitched. The almost-smile. The one I’d spent three weeks earning and now received daily.

“You broke them all,” he said.

“Every last one.”

“Even the bare feet rule.”

“Especially the bare feet rule.”

He kissed my forehead. “I love you,” he said. Simply. Not a confession anymore. A structural element. Load-bearing.

“I love you. And your protocols. And your chili. And your dog, who is probably on the couch right now judging us.”

“He’s in the day room. I checked.”

“You checked on the dog before you set up a sex bunkroom.”

“Priorities, Jazz.”

Sparky’s nails clicked on the hallway floor. The bunkroom door swung open. Seventy pounds of retired arson dog ignored every boundary, jumped onto the bed, and collapsed across our legs.

“Rule 5 has been violated,” Eli said.

“By the dog, not by me. I’m not liable.”

“The dog is your dependent.”

“The dog is a sovereign entity who answers to no protocol.”

Sparky yawned and settled his chin on my ankle.

I pulled Eli closer. Felt his arm tighten. The quilt over all three of us — the man, the medic, and the dog who’d chosen them both.

Some things didn’t need a protocol. Some things didn’t need a rule, or a list, or a laminated sheet to make them real.

They just needed to stay.

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