The Connecting Door

An Enemies in the Penalty Box Bonus Chapter
by Chase Power

This scene takes place between Chapters 12 and 13 of Enemies in the Penalty Box. The relationship is new. The praise kink is fully activated. The world doesn’t know yet.

⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains extremely explicit sexual content including graphic MM sex, praise kink, body worship, oral sex, penetrative sex (including role reversal), and detailed sexual descriptions. This is the uncut version — significantly more explicit than the published novel. For readers 18+ only.

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The first thing Rory became aware of was the finger.

Not a whole hand — just one finger. Tracing a line down the inside of his forearm, following the ink, the slow path of the compass tattoo from the point of the needle to the curve of the dial. The touch was feather-light, exploratory, the touch of a man who was awake and patient and in no rush to share either condition.

Rory kept his eyes closed. He was on his stomach, face half-buried in a pillow that smelled like Ethan’s shampoo and the particular, unreplicable scent of a bed that had been occupied by two bodies doing things that left traces in the sheets.

The finger reached his wrist. Paused. Pressed against his pulse point — their pulse point, the spot that had started everything — and held.

“You’re staring,” Rory said into the pillow.

“I’m observing.” Ethan’s voice was close. Soft. The morning voice, unhurried, stripped of every frequency the public version carried. “There’s a difference.”

“You observe very loudly.”

“I’m not making any sound.”

“Your attention makes sound. It has a frequency. I can hear it from across the room. From across the ice. Definitely from six inches away.”

The finger lifted from his wrist. Then Ethan’s mouth replaced it. A press of warm lips against the pulse, and Rory’s heart rate kicked up a notch.

“Morning,” Ethan murmured against his wrist.

“Morning.”

Rory opened his eyes. Turned his head on the pillow. Ethan was lying beside him, propped on one elbow, wearing nothing but the compass pendant and the particular, unguarded expression that only existed in this room, in this bed, in the early-morning hours before the world started making demands.

“What time is it?” Rory asked.

“Just after eight.”

“Do we have anywhere to be?”

“Nowhere. All day. The whole weekend.”

Rory fed Biscuit. Ethan made coffee — with Rory’s beans, using Rory’s instructions. They stood in the kitchen in various states of undress — Rory in boxers, Ethan in Rory’s Iron hoodie that swallowed his frame and slid off one shoulder.

“You’re staring,” Rory said without turning from the stove.

“You’re shirtless and making me breakfast. I’m allowed to stare.”

They ate omelets at the island, knees touching. The morning was normal, domestic, perfect.

Then Ethan said: “I want to show you something.”

The apartment next door — 32B — was mid-renovation. Ethan led him to a connecting door in the hallway. A plain, painted-over door with a deadbolt that hadn’t been turned in years.

“The unit next door is empty,” Ethan said. “Mid-renovation. Nobody’s been in it for weeks.”

“I’ve been thinking about it. The connecting door. Since us. Since the hotels, when we had connecting rooms and neither of us opened the door because we were too scared.”

“I want to open this one.”

“Open it,” Rory said.

Ethan turned the deadbolt. The click was small, domestic, unremarkable. He pulled the door open.

The apartment beyond was empty. Completely, beautifully, stunningly empty. Hardwood floors, bare and gleaming. White walls, freshly primed. Floor-to-ceiling windows — the same harbor view, shifted one unit to the east, the light catching the water from a new direction.

The space was luminous. September sun poured through the uncovered glass and pooled on the hardwood in great, warm rectangles.

“This is what it looks like,” Rory said quietly. “When you stop decorating. When you stop arranging everything to look a certain way.”

“Space,” Ethan said.

“The thing you get when you stop filling every surface with evidence that you’re living the right life.”

Ethan turned to him. His eyes were bright. “I want—”

He didn’t finish, because Rory was kissing him.

Not gently. The empty room, the open door, the bare floors and white walls and unfiltered light — all of it had activated something in Rory’s body that bypassed the gentleness circuit and went straight to now.

He walked Ethan backward. Toward the window. The floor-to-ceiling glass, the harbor beyond. Ethan’s back met the glass and his breath caught — the surface was cool, a contrast to the heat of his body.

“The glass is cold,” Ethan said.

“Good. You’re too hot.”

Rory dropped to his knees on the hardwood. The floor was hard against his kneecaps. He didn’t care.

“I’ve been thinking about this since the first shoot day,” Rory said, pulling the boxers down slowly. “You sat on that bench and your thigh was against mine and I couldn’t think about anything except what you’d sound like if I did this.”

He took Ethan into his mouth. Slow. The first inch, the taste of him, clean and warm and specific. He let his tongue work the underside, flat pressure, and Ethan’s hand found his hair and gripped.

The praise was constant, murmured between strokes — narrating memories of last night, describing what Ethan looked like, what he tasted like. Ethan came against the glass with Rory’s name on his lips.

Ethan pulled Rory up. Kissed him. Got him off with his hand, the slick slide devastating, Ethan’s mouth at Rory’s ear giving specific, detailed praise about Rory’s body with a confidence that was growing fast.

Later, back in the empty apartment after breakfast. Ethan pushed Rory against the bare wall. Kissed him hard. The aggression was new — not anger-fueled. Confidence-fueled. The confidence of a man who’s been told he’s good enough times to believe it.

Ethan sank to his knees. Looked up at Rory with an expression that was equal parts desire and determination.

“I want to be good at this,” Ethan said, and the word good — loaded, layered, carrying the full weight of a lifetime spent chasing approval — was the most erotic thing Rory had ever heard.

“You’re already good—”

“I want to be great. I want you to lose your mind. I want you to need me the way I need you.”

He took Rory into his mouth with a slowness that was its own torture — deliberate, analytical, calibrated to every sound Rory made. The precision was annihilating. Ethan’s hockey IQ applied to the specific, personal, devastating project of Rory’s pleasure.

“Tell me I’m good at this,” Ethan whispered, lips wet, eyes blazing.

“You’re incredible,” Rory said, and meant it with every cell. “Your mouth is — God, Ethan. The way you learn. The way you watch and adjust. You’re the most attentive person I’ve ever—”

Ethan took him deep. The praise was fuel — each compliment producing a more enthusiastic response, the enthusiasm producing more sensation. A perpetual motion machine of mutual destruction.

Rory came with Ethan’s name on his tongue, and the sound filled the empty apartment like something that had been waiting a long time to be released.

They ended up on the hardwood floor. Rory’s jacket balled up as a pillow. The sunlight had shifted — mid-morning now, the rectangles moving across the floor like slow-motion spotlights.

“I want you,” Ethan said. “Inside me. I want to feel you. All of you.”

Rory’s breath caught. “You want me to—”

“Like this. I want to see you. I want to watch your face.”

Ethan sprinted to the nightstand in the other apartment and back in thirty seconds, barefoot and naked and clutching supplies.

“You just ran naked through two apartments for lube,” Rory said. “That’s the most romantic thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Ethan prepared him with meticulous, patient attention — reading every signal, adjusting pressure, his fingers working with the focused gentleness that Rory had spent months earning.

Then Ethan was inside him. Slowly. The initial stretch, the fullness, the consuming slide — inch by deliberate inch. The sunlight poured over them. The empty room amplified every sound.

“Tell me what you see,” Rory whispered.

“I see you,” Ethan said, moving, the rhythm slow and grinding and deliberate. “I see Captain Rory Kincaid letting someone in. And you’re — God, Rory — you’re the bravest person I know. Not for the fighting. For this. For trusting me with the part of you that nobody else gets.”

Rory’s vision blurred. The orgasm was building — not just physically but emotionally, the two streams converging.

“You’re good, Rory.” Ethan’s voice was barely there, his own orgasm approaching. “You were always good. Before the ice. Before the hits. Before anyone told you what to be. You are good.“

Rory came in silence. Nearly. The sound he made was small — strangled, contained, devastating — and Ethan caught it with his palm and kissed it through his fingers. Ethan followed seconds later, the cascade of Rory’s orgasm triggering his own.

They lay on the hardwood. Side by side. Sweating. The sun had shifted again.

“We just had sex on our neighbor’s floor,” Rory said.

“Technically it’s the developer’s floor. Nobody lives here yet.”

“We should buy it.”

Ethan turned his head. Looked at Rory. The suggestion had arrived casually, but Rory’s face was serious. The expression of a man who’d never had a permanent home and was, on this sunlit floor, imagining one for the first time.

“Knock out the wall. Double the space. Your kitchen on one side, my library in the connecting room. Biscuit gets her own wing.”

“You want to build a home with me.”

“I want to build a home with you. The apartment is just the logistics.”

“One true thing,” Ethan said.

“One true thing.”

“I’ll call the developer on Monday.”

Rory’s dimple appeared. The full smile. The one that was Ethan’s and only Ethan’s.

“One true thing: I’ve been looking at the listing for three weeks.”

Ethan laughed. The sound filled the empty apartment — the apartment that was going to become a library, or a guest room, or Biscuit’s wing, or whatever they decided.

They got dressed. Returned to Ethan’s apartment through the connecting door.

Rory paused in the doorway. Looked back at the empty room.

“The connecting door,” he said. “We spent months on either side of one. In hotels. Locked from both sides. Too scared to open it.”

“And now we opened it.” He looked at Ethan. “And on the other side was this. Space. Light. Room to build.”

Ethan took his hand. Led him through the door.

“One true thing,” Ethan said, closing the connecting door behind them. Not locking it. Just closing it. Because the door didn’t need to be locked anymore.

“Home was always on the other side of the door I was too afraid to open.”

Rory pulled him close. Biscuit headbutted their ankles. The afternoon stretched ahead — no obligations, no cameras, no performance. Just a man and a man and a dog and a kitchen and a future that started in a penalty box and grew into something that no box could contain.

The connecting door stayed unlocked.

It stayed unlocked forever.

Thank you for reading the bonus chapter of Enemies in the Penalty Box by Chase Power.

Ty Rhodes never expected to fall for the one person who could complicate everything. But when a trade lands him on a rival team and the coach’s son won’t stop looking at him like that, the quietest observer in hockey is about to discover what happens when you stop watching and start wanting.

Offside — coming soon from Chase Power.

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