Bench Me, Praise Me by Chase Power - MM Baseball Romance book cover

Bench Me, Praise Me — Bonus Chapter

Spring Training, Room 412 — An Exclusive Scene
by Chase Power

This bonus chapter takes place during the epilogue, two years after the events of the novel. Logan is coaching catchers at spring training. Ty is an established starter. They’ve survived their first day back in camp together — and the door to Room 412 just closed.

Spring Training, Room 412

The hotel key card beeped green on the first try, which Ty took as a sign from the baseball gods that tonight was going to go well.

Room 412. The original. Logan booked it every spring training, the dead-end room past the ice machine with sightlines on the hallway — and Ty had stopped pretending it was strategic approximately eighteen months ago. It was sentimental. The man was sentimental. He would deny this until the heat death of the universe, and Ty would let him, because some lies were load-bearing.

He was barely inside, door swinging shut behind him, when two hands caught his hips from behind and walked him three steps forward into the room.

“You’re early,” Logan said, mouth already at the back of his neck.

“You gave me a key card.”

“I gave you a key card for after dinner. It’s six-forty.”

“I ate fast.” Ty tipped his head back against the man’s shoulder. Ten hours in the same complex, forty feet apart all day — Logan in the staff polo running cage sessions with the new kid, Ty taking BP and being professional — and every single one of those forty feet had been a personal insult. “You fixed his load today. The new prospect. I watched you do the hands-on-the-stomach thing.”

“It’s a coaching technique.”

“It’s my coaching technique. I have feelings about it.”

The hands on his hips tightened. “Possessive.”

“Learned from the best.” Ty turned inside the grip, face to face now — two years of him, the renovated knees, the reading glasses pushed up in his hair, the staff polo that fit across the shoulders in a way that should have been regulated — and kissed him properly, the kind they couldn’t have anywhere a lanyard existed.

Logan kissed him back like a man who’d been counting the forty feet too. The kiss went from hello to hello in about four seconds, and Logan walked him backward until his calves hit the bed, and tipped him onto it, and stood over him doing the old inventory, the searchlight, gray eyes traveling down him with the same unhurried authority they’d had in a batting cage three years ago.

“Tell me about your day,” Logan said, perfectly conversational, unbuttoning his polo.

“My day was ten hours of watching my boyfriend teach a twenty-two-year-old to breathe into his hand while I pretended to stretch.”

“Forty feet is regulation distance.”

“Forty feet is inhumane. You put your hands on his hips, Logan.”

“I know what it is.” Ty sat up and pulled the man down onto the bed, onto him, the familiar weight settling like a key into every lock he had. “I’m jealous of the technique. I want the technique. Right now. Full seminar.”

Something banked and hot moved behind the gray. The reading glasses came off, folded, set on the nightstand with the old precision. “You want the seminar.”

“The whole curriculum. I’ve been a very good player today, Coach Price.”

“The whole sermon,” Logan repeated, and his voice dropped to the register — the holster, the one that had been Ty’s since a tape room in May. “Okay. Hands behind your head.”

Ty laced his fingers behind his head on the pillow, and the position did what it always did — the inspection stance, two years refined, his whole body an offering and an answer.

“Good,” Logan murmured, and took his time.

What followed was the full seminar, spring training edition — unhurried, comprehensive, narrated in gravel from start to finish. Logan worked him over with meticulous attention, deploying the praise in measured doses that hit Ty’s bloodstream like something prescription-grade, two years in and not one milligram less potent: Good. Look at you. Two-time All-Star and you still come apart on the first one. That’s not a flaw, sweetheart, that’s a feature — I built that, I get to admire the engineering —

“You did NOT build —”

Quiet. I’m conducting an evaluation.

The evaluation was thorough. The evaluation took its time. The evaluation left Tyler West, franchise player, face of the organization, making sounds that would have gotten him fined by the league if they’d been recorded, while a retired catcher with perfect hands and a voice like aged whiskey demonstrated that some curricula do not expire.

“Say it,” Ty breathed, at the end, at the edge, hands still behind his head because the rules were the rules.

“Say what?” Perfectly innocent. The man was never innocent.

“Logan. Please.”

And Logan pressed the words into his ear like a seal into wax, the stamp retired and given freely, the oldest new thing in their whole vocabulary:

“Good boy. You earned every second of this.”

Ty went over the edge and took Logan with him — both of them, together, the system long since decommissioned, the love language it had always been running clean and permanent underneath.

After — tangled, wrecked, the Florida night pressing warm against the windows — Ty lay across the man’s chest doing the pulse readings.

“How’s the new kid? Your honest read.”

“He’s terrified and he listens and he fishes at sliders.” Ty pressed his grin into the broad chest. “Sound familiar?”

“Vaguely.”

“He’s going to be good. And you’re going to fix him, and I’m going to come back to this room every night and make you pay for every single hands-on correction.”

“That sounds expensive.”

“It’s going to be ruinous.” Ty tipped his head up. “But the scouting report says you can take it.”

Logan looked at him — through three years, through the system and the wreck of it, through a tunnel and a folder and an armchair and a walk-off — and the smile arrived, the full tectonic event, the one that had stopped being expensive years ago.

“Same time tomorrow?” he said.

“Same time forever,” Ty said, and the two-finger tap landed against his chest, right over the heart — and room 412, the original, held them the way it always had: completely, privately, with sightlines on everything that mattered.

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