🔥 The 417 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Off the Post

Thank You for Reading! 💜

You made it to the bonus content—which means you’ve lived through Grace and Dani’s journey from blood on the ice to gold around their necks. Thank you for giving their story a chance.

This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

⚠️ CONTENT WARNING ⚠️

This bonus chapter contains explicit FF sexual content including multiple orgasms, oral sex, praise kink, emotional vulnerability, christening-the-apartment energy, and the kind of heat that explains why the lamp is always on. This chapter is TOO HOT for Amazon.

The 417

This scene takes place three months after the Olympics—the day Dani drives the 417 through Ottawa for the first time to move into their new apartment in Toronto.

DANI

Three hundred and forty-one kilometers.

Dani had driven every one of them with the windows down, the music too loud, and a grin on her face that she was fairly certain constituted a traffic hazard. The 417 through Ottawa was not, by any objective standard, a scenic route—flat highway, Canadian shield rock cuts, the occasional Tim Hortons like a punctuation mark in the grammar of the Trans-Canada. But Dani wasn’t seeing the highway. She was seeing the destination. She was seeing the end of the distance.

Three hundred and forty-one becoming zero.

The apartment key was in her pocket. Grace had given it to her three days ago, at the signing—had slid it across the table with the composed efficiency of a woman executing a real estate transaction and the barely concealed emotion of a woman who was handing over a piece of her life. The key was silver. Unremarkable. The most important object Dani had ever owned.

She found the building in the Annex just after 6 PM. Brick. Third floor. Tall windows that caught the September light and held it. She pulled into the parking spot that was hers—hers, a designated spot with a number that corresponded to an apartment that had her name on the lease—and sat in the car for a moment with the engine off and her heart doing something that a cardiologist would have found professionally interesting.

She texted Grace: I’m here.

Grace’s reply was immediate: I know. I’ve been tracking your location for the last forty minutes.

Stalker.

The data was available. Third floor. The door’s unlocked.

Dani took the stairs two at a time. The hallway smelled like fresh paint and someone’s dinner and the particular scent of a building that was old enough to have character but maintained enough to have functional plumbing. She found the door—their door, the door with their number on it—and turned the handle.

The apartment opened around her.

Hardwood floors. Tall windows. The September light pouring through them in long amber columns that fell across the empty living room like spotlights on a stage. The kitchen to the left—small, galley-style, the kind of kitchen where two people would have to stand very close to cook together. The hallway leading to the bedroom. The bedroom where—

Grace.

She was standing in the kitchen doorway. Bare feet. Black leggings. A t-shirt that Dani recognized as her own—the Montreal Canadiens vintage tee she’d left at Grace’s old apartment three weeks ago, the one that was too big on Grace and fell off one shoulder and made Dani’s entire nervous system recalibrate every time she saw it.

Grace’s hair was down. Loose around her shoulders. The mole on her collarbone was visible above the neckline of the stolen shirt. She was holding two mugs of tea and looking at Dani with the expression that Dani had been driving three hundred and forty-one kilometers to see: the smile. Not the almost-smile. The real one.

“You made it,” Grace said.

“I made it.”

“How was the drive?”

“Long. Beautiful. I stopped for coffee in Kingston and the barista recognized me from the kiss.”

“The center ice kiss is the gift that keeps giving.”

“She gave me a free muffin. Blueberry. She said we were her favorite couple on the internet.”

“We’re everyone’s favorite couple on the internet. It’s statistically verifiable.”

Dani crossed the apartment in four strides. She took the mugs from Grace’s hands, set them on the counter behind her without looking, and kissed her.

Three hundred and forty-one kilometers of anticipation went into the kiss. Three months of weekend visits and video calls and the particular ache of loving someone who lived five hours away. The kiss was not gentle. It was not measured. It was the kiss of a woman who had been driving toward this woman for three hundred and forty-one kilometers and was not interested in preliminary conversation about highway conditions.

Grace responded instantly. Her hands found Dani’s face—the tender geometry, thumbs on cheekbones, the signature hold—and then slid into Dani’s hair and gripped. Her back hit the kitchen counter. The mugs rattled. The tea that neither of them was going to drink sloshed against ceramic.

“The tea—” Grace started, between kisses.

“Forget the tea.”

“I spent seven minutes steeping it to the optimal—”

Dani kissed her harder. Grace’s seven-minute optimal steep time disappeared into the kiss along with whatever other data points she’d been preparing to share. Her body arched against Dani’s, the counter pressing into her lower back, her hips moving forward to meet Dani’s in the instinctive alignment of two bodies that had learned each other’s geometry in a bed one-third this size.

“I want to christen the apartment,” Dani said, her mouth moving from Grace’s lips to her jaw to the spot below her ear that made Grace’s breath stutter.

“The apartment isn’t even furnished. There’s a mattress on the floor and two mugs and a lamp.”

“You bought the lamp.”

“The lamp was the first thing I bought. It arrived Tuesday.”

“Before the bed?”

“Before the bed, before the couch, before the dishes. The lamp was the constant. You said so.”

Dani pulled back enough to look at Grace’s face. The September light was painting gold across her cheekbones. Her lips were swollen from the kiss. Her eyes were dark—the pupil-blown, hungry expression that Dani had cataloged in the Alpine lodge and the equipment room and every dark room they’d shared and that was, right now, being displayed in the amber light of their own kitchen in their own apartment where nobody was hiding and nobody was quiet and nobody was checking the hallway for teammates.

“Show me the lamp,” Dani said.

“The lamp is in the bedroom.”

“Then show me the bedroom.”

GRACE

The bedroom was empty except for a queen-size mattress on the floor and a lamp on the windowsill.

Grace had spent an irrational amount of time selecting the lamp. She’d researched bulb temperatures and shade materials and light diffusion patterns with the same analytical rigor she applied to defensive zone breakouts. The result was a lamp that cast exactly the right shade of amber—warm, soft, the precise color temperature of the Olympic Village lamp that had burned through their first night together with the light on.

She turned it on.

The amber light filled the empty room. It caught the hardwood floors, the white walls, the mattress with its new sheets—the good ones, Egyptian cotton, because Grace had learned from Dani that certain purchases were not about practicality but about intention. The light fell across Dani’s face as she stood in the doorway, and Grace watched the recognition cross her features—the amber glow, the deliberate echo, the woman who had said light on in a room in the Olympic Village now seeing the same light in a room that was theirs.

“You matched it,” Dani said.

“2700 Kelvin. The same color temperature as the Village lamp. I tested eleven bulbs.”

“You tested eleven bulbs.”

“The data was—”

“Available. I know. Come here.”

Grace went.

Dani’s hands were on her before she’d finished crossing the room. Not urgent—deliberate. The hands of a woman who had driven five hours and was not in a hurry because the hurrying was over. The distance was zero. The gap was closed. There was nowhere else to be and no one else to be with and no alarm that was going to ring and no roommate that was going to return and no narrow bed that was going to protest.

There was a queen-size mattress and an amber lamp and an entire empty apartment and all the time in the world.

Dani’s hands found the hem of the stolen Canadiens shirt. She lifted it slowly—her fingers trailing up Grace’s sides, thumbs brushing the sensitive skin along her ribs, the shirt rising to reveal the stomach and the mole and the body that Dani had memorized by touch in the dark and by sight in the light and that she was now touching in their home for the first time.

“This is my shirt,” Dani said, pulling it over Grace’s head.

“It’s been my shirt for three weeks.”

“Looks better on you. Looks best on the floor.”

The shirt landed on the hardwood. Grace hadn’t been wearing a bra—a calculated decision, made approximately forty minutes ago when she’d changed out of her moving-day clothes into the outfit she’d selected with what Dani would have called premeditation and Grace preferred to call preparation. The apartment was warm. The air touched her skin. Dani’s eyes touched her skin, which was warmer.

“The mole,” Dani said. She kissed it. The landmark. The start of every map she’d ever drawn of Grace’s body. Her mouth was warm and familiar and Grace’s body responded with the Pavlovian immediacy of a system that had been trained to associate this specific stimulus with everything that followed.

“Mattress,” Grace managed.

“Not yet.”

“Dani—”

“I drove three hundred and forty-one kilometers. I’m taking my time.”

She took her time.

Grace stood in the amber light of their bedroom while Dani mapped her with the slow, comprehensive attention of a cartographer charting beloved territory. Mouth on the mole. Mouth on the collarbone. Mouth on the hollow of her throat where the pulse beat fast and visible. Hands traveling the contours of her waist, her hips, the small of her back. Every touch was a homecoming—the physical act of a woman returning to a body she knew by heart and finding it exactly as she remembered, exactly as she wanted, exactly as she needed.

Grace’s leggings came off. Dani knelt to pull them down—slowly, the fabric peeling away from skin, her mouth following the path of exposed territory. A kiss to the outside of Grace’s thigh. A kiss to the inside of her knee. A kiss to the ankle that Dani had hooked under hers at the Olympic cafeteria table a lifetime ago.

Grace was naked in the amber light. Their light. Their room. Their home.

“Your turn,” Grace said. Her voice had changed—the modulation shifting from composed to the other register, the one that existed only for Dani, the one that was lower and rougher and carried the weight of everything the Machine couldn’t express.

Dani stood. She pulled off her own shirt, then her jeans, then everything else, stripping with the efficient speed of a woman who had been wearing too many clothes for three hundred and forty-one kilometers and was done with the condition. She stood in the amber light and Grace looked at her—all of her, every scar and muscle and the compass tattoo pointing up from her wrist and the rib tattoo that said North is not a place. It’s a direction.

“You’re home,” Grace said.

“I’m home.”

They fell onto the mattress together.

DANI

The queen-size mattress was a revelation.

After weeks in a thirty-six-inch bed that creaked with every movement and required the spatial negotiation skills of a Tetris grandmaster, the queen felt like a continent. Sixty inches of space. Room to move. Room to spread out, to reposition, to do things that the narrow bed had made geometrically challenging and that the queen rendered not just possible but luxurious.

Dani intended to use every inch of it.

She rolled Grace onto her back and settled above her, taking her weight on her forearms, their bodies aligned from chest to thigh. The mattress didn’t creak. The mattress didn’t groan. The mattress accepted their weight with the silent competence of furniture that had been designed for this exact purpose and Dani felt a surge of gratitude for the engineers at whatever mattress company had produced this miracle of structural integrity.

“No creaking,” Grace observed.

“No creaking.”

“I’m going to miss the creaking.”

“Liar.”

“The cardboard bed was part of our origin story. It deserves respect.”

“I will respect it from a distance. From the distance of this queen-size mattress that does not sound like it’s dying every time I do this—”

She rolled her hips against Grace’s. A slow, deliberate press—the full-body contact that the narrow bed had allowed only in careful, pre-negotiated configurations and that the queen permitted with the generous freedom of a surface that didn’t care about weight distribution.

Grace’s breath caught. Her hands found Dani’s shoulders, fingers curving over the muscles that three months of off-season training had sharpened. Her legs opened wider, accommodating, the instinctive adjustment of a body that knew exactly what it wanted and was done pretending otherwise.

“Also,” Dani continued, pressing her mouth to Grace’s jaw, “no pillow.”

“No pillow.”

“No Margot in the next bed.”

“No Margot.”

“No security guard in the hallway.”

“No security guard.”

“Just us.”

“Just us.” Grace’s voice was the low one. The private one. The one that made Dani’s blood run hot. “In our apartment. In our bed. With our lamp.”

“The lamp you tested eleven bulbs for.”

“Twelve. I returned one.”

“God, I love you.”

Dani kissed her way down Grace’s body with the slow, reverent attention that the moment demanded. This was not the frantic coupling of the Alpine lodge or the desperate silence of the Village. This was the first time in their own space. The inaugural act. The christening of the apartment that would become their home, performed on a queen-size mattress in amber light, with no rules and no clock and no one listening through thin walls.

She kissed the mole. The collarbone. The sternum. The soft plane of Grace’s stomach, where the muscles contracted under her mouth. She kissed the crease of Grace’s hip—the left one, then the right one—feeling Grace’s fingers tighten in her hair with each kiss, the grip that said closer, more, don’t stop.

She arrived where Grace wanted her. Looked up.

Grace was watching. Eyes open. Present. The amber light caught the tears that hadn’t fallen yet—the brightness that came from feeling something too large for the body to process quietly.

“Light on,” Grace whispered.

“Always.”

Dani lowered her mouth.

Grace didn’t reach for the pillow. There was no pillow to reach for—they hadn’t bought pillows yet, the mattress was bare except for the fitted sheet, and the absence of the pillow was its own kind of freedom. Grace made sound. Open, unmanaged, gorgeous sound—the full-volume expression that the Village had suppressed and that the apartment received with the acoustically generous welcome of empty rooms and high ceilings and walls that belonged to them.

She said Dani’s name. All three syllables. She said it like a prayer and a curse and a declaration of intent. She said it loud enough that the neighbors would hear and Dani didn’t care and Grace didn’t care and the not-caring was its own kind of ecstasy—the freedom of being exactly what they were, exactly where they were, without modulation or management or the constant grinding effort of silence.

The orgasm hit Grace with the full force of three months of distance and five hours of anticipation and the accumulated emotional weight of coming home to someone for the first time in her life. She came with her back arched off the mattress and her hands in Dani’s hair and a sound that started as Dani’s name and ended as something wordless—raw, released, the sound of the Machine going offline and the woman taking over.

Dani held her through it. Gentled her down. Kissed her way back up the body she loved—stomach, ribs, the mole, the throat. Settled beside Grace on the queen-size mattress and watched her breathe.

“Hi,” Dani said.

“Hi.” Grace’s voice was wrecked. Completely destroyed. The press conference voice was in another postal code. “Welcome home.”

“Best welcome I’ve ever received.”

“Your turn.” Grace’s eyes opened. The dark look was there—the post-orgasm version that was simultaneously satisfied and hungry, the expression of a woman who had received and now intended to give with the comprehensive thoroughness that characterized everything she did.

She rolled Dani onto her back. The queen-size mattress accepted the redistribution of weight without comment. Grace settled above her, hair falling around their faces like a curtain, the amber light caught in the dark strands.

“I’ve been thinking about this for five hours,” Grace said. Her hand was already traveling south, the fingers that calculated angles and measured trajectories now applied to the precision work of taking Dani apart. “Every kilometer. Every rest stop. Every minute you were on the highway, I was in this apartment thinking about what I was going to do to you when you arrived.”

“Grace—”

“I calculated optimal positions for the mattress-on-floor configuration. The lower height changes the available angles by—”

“Please stop doing math and touch me.”

“The math is the touching.” Grace’s mouth curved against Dani’s neck. “I’m optimizing.”

Her hand slid between Dani’s thighs and the math became irrelevant. Or rather, the math became physical—the precise, calculated application of pressure and rhythm that Grace brought to everything, the Machine’s analytical mind directed at the project of Dani’s pleasure with a focus that was simultaneously clinical and devastatingly intimate.

She was inside Dani. Two fingers, curling, finding the place that made Dani’s vision white out. Her thumb circled in the slow, deliberate pattern she’d learned in the dark and perfected in the light. Her mouth found Dani’s breast, then her throat, then her ear.

“You drove three hundred and forty-one kilometers,” Grace whispered. “You left your apartment and your city and your life and you drove to me. You chose this. You chose us.”

“Grace—I’m going to—”

“I know. I can feel it.” Her fingers curled deeper. Her rhythm accelerated—not faster, but more focused, the adjustments micro and devastating, the real-time calibration of a woman who read Dani’s body the way she read the ice. “Come for me. In our apartment. In our bed. With the light on.”

Dani came.

Not like the Olympic night, where the orgasm had carried the weight of eight years and broken a dam. This was different. This was a homecoming—the physical expression of arrival, the body confirming what the key in her pocket had promised and the drive on the 417 had delivered. She was here. She was home. The woman she loved was holding her in a room with an amber lamp and the distance was zero and the gap was closed and she came with the uncomplicated joy of a person who had found the place they belonged and intended to stay there.

Grace held her through it. Arms wrapped tight. Face in Dani’s hair. The murmured words that were their private language now: I’ve got you. I’m here. Your person doesn’t leave.

GRACE

They christened the kitchen next.

This had not been part of Grace’s plan—Grace’s plan had involved the bedroom, followed by the shower, followed by dinner at the Italian place she’d researched three blocks away. But Dani’s plans operated on a different frequency than Grace’s plans, and the frequency tonight was chaos, and the chaos manifested as Dani pinning Grace against the kitchen counter at approximately 7:15 PM and demonstrating that the counter height was, in fact, optimal for purposes neither the architect nor the contractor had intended.

Grace sat on the counter. Dani stood between her legs. The tea was still on the counter—cold now, abandoned, the seven-minute steep time rendered moot by circumstances. Dani’s mouth was on her neck, doing the thing that turned off Grace’s higher brain functions—the specific combination of teeth and tongue that short-circuited the Machine and left the woman operating without supervision.

“The counter is cold,” Grace managed.

“You won’t be cold for long.”

She wasn’t. Dani’s hands were warm on her thighs—spreading them wider, pulling Grace to the edge of the counter so their bodies aligned in the configuration that Dani was improvising and Grace was calculating and the combination of instinct and analysis produced something that was, as always, better than either approach alone.

Dani dropped to her knees on the kitchen floor.

“Dani, the floor is—”

“Hardwood. I know. Worth it.”

Her mouth found Grace. On the kitchen counter. In the amber light that spilled from the bedroom through the open doorway. Grace gripped the counter’s edge with both hands and let her head fall back and the sound she made echoed off the kitchen walls—tiled, reflective, acoustically generous in a way that amplified every gasp and moan and breathless iteration of Dani’s name.

The second orgasm was faster. Sharper. The body already sensitized, the neural pathways already primed, the circuit from stimulus to response shortened to almost nothing. Grace came on the kitchen counter with her legs over Dani’s shoulders and the cold tea beside her and the empty apartment around them and the sound of it—her voice, unrestricted, full-volume, filling every room of their new home with the evidence of pleasure—was the sound of a woman who would never, ever reach for a pillow again.

Dani stood up. Her knees were red from the hardwood. Her grin was incandescent.

“The kitchen is christened,” she announced.

“The kitchen is christened,” Grace confirmed. Her voice was half an octave lower than it had been an hour ago. “What about the shower?”

“The shower is next on my list.”

“You have a list.”

“Kitchen. Shower. Living room. Hallway. That weird nook by the front door that I think is supposed to be a coat closet.”

“You want to christen the coat closet.”

“I want to christen every square foot of this apartment. I want there to be no surface, no corner, no weird architectural feature that we haven’t claimed. This is our home, Grace. Ours. And I intend to make that fact physically, empirically, thoroughly documented.”

Grace looked at this woman—this impossible, reckless, grinning woman who had driven five hours on the 417 through Ottawa and was now standing in their kitchen with red knees and an ambitious list and an expression that suggested the coat closet christening was not, in fact, a joke—and felt the room behind her sternum expand one more time.

The room with windows. The room Dani had built. The room that was no longer a room but a house, a home, an entire architecture of feeling that had started in the dark and now lived, permanently, in the light.

“I love you,” Grace said. “For the record.”

“For the data.”

“For the variable that doesn’t change.”

Dani kissed her. On the mouth. In the kitchen. In the light.

“Shower?” Dani asked.

“Shower,” Grace confirmed.

They didn’t make it to the Italian restaurant. They ordered delivery at 10 PM, sitting on the mattress in the amber light, wearing nothing, eating pad Thai with chopsticks and drinking wine from coffee mugs because they didn’t own wine glasses yet.

The coat closet had been christened. The hallway too. The shower had proved structurally sound and acoustically interesting. The weird nook by the front door remained on the list for tomorrow.

Grace leaned against Dani’s shoulder. The apartment was dark except for the lamp—the amber lamp, 2700 Kelvin, casting its warm circle across the mattress and the floor and the two women who had traveled three hundred and forty-one kilometers and eight years and five broken rules to end up here: home. Together. In the light.

“How many rooms left?” Grace asked.

“The guest room. But Sully’s moving into it next month, so we should probably christen it before she gets here.”

“Agreed. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.” Dani pressed her nose into Grace’s hair. Green apple shampoo. Home. “Hey, Grace?”

“Mm?”

“Three hundred and forty-one became zero.”

Grace smiled against Dani’s shoulder. The real smile. The one that had started as an atmospheric disturbance and became a weather system and was now the climate—permanent, pervasive, the default condition of a woman who had stopped counting and started living.

“Zero,” she confirmed. “The distance is zero.”

The lamp burned. The apartment held them. The compass pointed north.

They were home.

THE END