Captain of My Bad Decisions by Chase Power - MM Hockey Romance book cover

Bonus Chapter: The Morning After

Captain of My Bad Decisions — Exclusive Bonus
by Chase Power

This scene takes place the morning after the epilogue. Connor and Eli’s first morning as an official couple — no arrangement, no rules, no masks. Just two men, one too-small bed, and a morning neither of them wants to end.

⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains extremely explicit MM sexual content including graphic oral, anal, praise kink, and kitchen counter sex. 18+ only.

The Morning After

Connor

I wake up because someone is breathing on the back of my neck, and for three perfect seconds, my brain doesn’t attach a name to the warmth.

It’s just a body. A heavy arm draped across my waist, the weight of it pinning me to the mattress in a way that should feel restricting and instead feels like the only thing keeping me tethered to the earth. A chest rising and falling against my spine, each exhale stirring the curls at my nape. A hand — large, square-knuckled, spread flat against my bare stomach — with fingers curled loosely around the ridge of muscle above my hip.

Then the name arrives, and with it, a joy so enormous it borders on physical pain.

Eli.

He’s still here.

Not because the arrangement required it — the arrangement is dead, buried beneath a hoodie and a confession and the three words he said in my hallway last night that I’m going to make him repeat until he forgets they were ever hard to say. He’s here because he chose to be. Because after thirty years of sleeping alone in king-size beds and sending people home before sunrise, Eli Kovacs fell asleep in my shitty full-size bed with his face in my hair and his compass tattoo pressed against my shoulder blade and his heartbeat syncing with mine in the dark.

I don’t move. I lie in the thin morning light — gray-blue, Lake City’s eternal overcast filtering through my half-broken blinds — and catalog every point of contact the way he catalogs game film: thoroughly, obsessively, with the conviction that every detail matters.

His arm across my waist. Heavy. Possessive even in sleep, the dead weight of a man who held on through the night and didn’t let go.

His thigh wedged between mine. Warm, muscular, the rough hair on his leg prickling against the smoother skin of my inner thigh.

His cock. Half-hard against the small of my back, a warm, thick pressure through the thin cotton of his boxers that my body registers before my brain catches up. Morning wood. Involuntary. But my nervous system doesn’t care about the distinction between intentional and reflexive — it just knows that Eli Kovacs is pressed against me and my blood is rerouting south at emergency speed.

The hair tie on his wrist. Pressing into my skin where his hand rests on my stomach. The thin black elastic he’s been wearing since Denver, the talisman he’d die before admitting to, and the knowledge that he’s been carrying a piece of me on his body for weeks makes my eyes sting in a way that has nothing to do with the morning light.

He makes a sound. Low in his chest, the vibration traveling through his ribs into my spine. Not a word. The preverbal noise of a man surfacing from deep sleep, his body waking before his mind, his arm tightening around me on instinct.

His mouth presses against the back of my neck. Not a kiss. Not yet. The instinctive nuzzle of a body seeking warmth, lips parting against the knob of my spine, breath hot and damp on my skin.

Then his hand moves.

Slow. So slow. The drift of fingers across my stomach, tracing the line of hair below my navel with the absent precision of a man who’s touched this path before and knows it by memory. His fingertips follow the trail down, brushing the elastic of my waistband, and pause. His thumb draws a lazy circle on the skin above the elastic — once, twice — and the gentleness of it, the patience, the way his hand asks permission through pressure instead of words, makes my cock throb against the mattress.

I’ve been hard since I woke up. Since the first exhale hit my neck, since the weight of his arm registered on my waist, since the thick press of him against my back sent a signal to every nerve ending in my body that said his, his, his. My body is a traitor that responds to Eli Kovacs the way plants respond to sunlight: involuntarily, totally, at the cellular level.

“You’re awake,” he murmurs against my nape.

His voice. God, his voice. Rough. Morning-deep. Scraped raw by sleep, dropped two registers below his captain’s tone, the low rasp of a man who hasn’t spoken in eight hours and whose first word is an observation about me. It goes through me like a hand down my spine.

“Have been for ten minutes.”

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Because you were breathing on my neck and I wanted to memorize it.”

His hand stills on my waistband. A beat of silence — the kind that means he’s processing, filing, the kind that used to make me nervous and now makes me patient because I know what’s on the other side.

His mouth opens against my nape. Warm. Wet. The scrape of overnight stubble against sensitive skin, the press of lips, the slow drag of tongue along the knob of my C7 vertebra, and the sound I make is not dignified. It’s a whimper. A full, unmasked, morning-vulnerability whimper that I would deny in any other context and couldn’t suppress here if my life depended on it.

“Good morning,” he says into my skin. His lips move against me when he talks. I feel every consonant.

“It is now.”

His hand slides under the elastic.

No preamble. No hesitation. His fingers wrap around me — firm, warm, the callused grip of a man who holds hockey sticks for a living and applies the same steady pressure to my cock — and my hips jerk forward into his fist with a force that surprises us both. The friction is immediate, devastating, his dry palm rough against the sensitive skin, and I gasp and push back against him, grinding my ass against his erection, and the groan that comes out of him vibrates through his chest into my spine and rattles something loose in my brain.

He strokes me slow. Lazy. Morning-pace, like we have all the time in the world, like there’s no practice and no schedule and no world outside this bed. His wrist rolls on each upstroke, his thumb catching the head, spreading the wetness that’s already gathering there, and his mouth works the back of my neck — open, hot, his tongue tracing the tendon, his teeth grazing the spot below my ear that makes my toes curl.

“I want you,” I breathe. “I want — Eli, turn me over. I need to see you.”

He turns me. I roll in his arms, face to face, and the morning light hits him and my chest cracks open like an egg.

His dark hair is wrecked. Pillow-flattened on one side, standing up on the other in a way that defies the laws of physics and product. His jaw is rough with overnight stubble — dark, dense, the shadow that usually appears by five o’clock given a full night to establish itself. His eyes, barely open, are the soft, warm brown they only show when every wall is down. Not black. Not the captain’s dark assessment. Brown, like coffee, like earth, like the inside of something warm.

He looks human. Accessible. Soft in places that are usually hard. The scar through his eyebrow is a pale line instead of a sharp one. The tension that lives in his jaw is absent. The control that defines every waking moment of his life has not yet reinstalled itself, and what’s left is just a man. Just Eli. In my bed. Looking at me like I’m the first thing he wants to see every morning for the rest of his life.

“Hi,” I say. Like an idiot. Like a man seeing his boyfriend for the first time, which in a way I am, because every other morning Eli was either gone or gently, devastatingly sending me home, and this — this sleepy, stubbled, bed-warm, morning-breath, unguarded version of him — is a gift I’m receiving for the first time.

“Hi.” The smile. Not the ghost. The real one — small, warm, unhurried, aimed at me from three inches away with the casual devastation of a man who doesn’t know his smile could level cities.

I kiss him. Morning breath and all. I don’t care. His mouth is warm and soft and opens for me immediately, and the kiss is slow and deep and tasting — his tongue sliding against mine, his hand still in my boxers, still around me, still stroking with that lazy, maddening rhythm that’s building heat low in my stomach like a pot set to simmer.

I reach between us. Find him through the cotton of his boxers — hard, thick, straining against the fabric — and wrap my hand around him. He makes a sound into my mouth. Low. Guttural. The sound of a man who’s been touched a thousand times and still reacts to my hand like it’s the first.

We lie face to face, stroking each other, kissing, the sheets tangled around our legs and the morning light painting everything gold. It’s unhurried. Intimate. The kind of sex you can only have when you’re not performing, when there’s no dynamic to maintain and no role to inhabit and the only thing left is two people who love each other, hard and warm and wanting.

“Shower,” he says against my mouth.

“Now? I’m kind of in the middle of something.” I squeeze him to illustrate. His hips jerk.

“I want to wash your hair.”

The sentence lands somewhere between my sternum and the base of my spine and detonates. He wants to wash my hair. The man who learned to say I love you through his hands before his mouth ever caught up — through meals and blankets and warm cloths and the meticulous, patient attention of fingers in my curls — wants to start our first morning as boyfriends with his hands in my hair and hot water on our skin.

I would follow this man into traffic. Off a bridge. Into the sun.

“Shower,” I agree, and let him pull me out of bed.

My shower was not designed for two grown men.

It’s a standard tub-shower combo in a rookie apartment that was not engineered for a six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound defenseman to share with a five-eleven winger whose spatial awareness, ironically, is better on ice than in enclosed spaces. The logistics of fitting inside it together involve pressed bodies and creative geometry and elbows in ribcages and a lot of laughing.

Laughing. Eli, laughing. In my shower. A real laugh — low, surprised, startled out of him when I elbow his ribs reaching for the shampoo and he retaliates by pressing me against the cold tile and I yelp and he laughs again, and the sound vibrates against my wet skin and I want to record it and set it as my ringtone and play it at my own funeral.

He takes the shampoo from my hand. Pours it into his palm. “Turn around.”

I turn. His chest against my back, the hot water streaming over us both, and his fingers sink into my hair.

He washes my hair the way he does everything: with total focus and a determination to get it right. His fingers work the shampoo through my curls — separating, massaging, his thumbs pressing into the base of my skull, working the tension out of muscles I didn’t know were tight. It’s not sexual. Not yet. It’s something deeper and more dangerous than sexual — it’s care. The physical language of a man who spent thirty years starving for tenderness and is now practicing it with the devoted intensity of a late-starting student.

He conditions. Works the product through the ends, detangling with a patience that borders on meditative. His fingers are gentle. His chest is warm. The water runs between us, and I lean back into him, letting his body hold my weight, and the trust of that — the simple act of leaning — feels more intimate than anything we did last night.

His cock is hard against the small of my back. Has been since we stepped under the spray. Thick, insistent, the length of him pressed into the groove of my spine, and every time I shift my weight his hips twitch forward involuntarily. He’s ignoring it. Focused on my hair. Compartmentalizing the arousal the way he compartmentalizes everything, filing it under later while his fingers work conditioner through my curls.

I’m not interested in later.

“Eli.”

“Hmm.” Distracted. Still conditioning.

“If you don’t fuck me in this shower, I’m going to lose my mind.”

His fingers tighten in my hair. A reflexive clench, a pulse of want transmitted through ten points of contact, and the sharp tug against my scalp sends a bolt of pleasure down my spine that makes my cock jump against my stomach.

A beat. His hands still in my hair. His breathing changes — deeper, rougher, the controlled rhythm giving way to something hungrier.

Then he turns me around, presses me against the tile, and drops to his knees.

The visual alone nearly finishes me.

Eli Kovacs. On his knees. In my shitty apartment shower. Water running down his face, streaming through his dark hair, tracing the lines of his tattoo sleeve, dripping off his jaw. His chest is a wall of muscle, slick and glistening, rising and falling with breaths that are too fast for a man who runs his body like a machine. His hands are on my hips — both hands, thumbs pressing into the grooves beside my hip bones, holding me against the tile with a grip that says you’re not going anywhere.

He looks up at me through dark, wet lashes. His eyes are black again. Not the soft morning brown from the bed — the other ones. The ones that go dark when he wants something, the ones I’ve seen in the dark of his bedroom and the back room of a gym and an arena storage closet. Desire, concentrated and focused, aimed at me like a weapon.

“Hold on to something,” he says.

I grab the shower rod with one hand and brace the other against the tile. My cock is inches from his face, hard, flushed, bobbing with my pulse. A bead of precum forms at the tip and the water carries it away.

He leans forward. His tongue touches the head — a slow, flat lick from the slit to the underside, collecting what the water didn’t take, and my hips jerk and a sound comes out of me that echoes off tile and glass and every surface in the bathroom.

He takes me into his mouth.

Not all at once. Inch by inch. His lips stretching around me, tongue working the underside, the wet heat of his mouth enveloping me with a pressure that’s devastating and precise. He takes me deep — deeper than he usually does, his throat relaxing, his jaw opening, swallowing me until his nose presses against my stomach and I can feel the back of his throat flutter around the head of my cock and my vision sparks.

“Fuck — Eli — your mouth —”

He pulls back slowly. All the way to the tip, his lips dragging, suction tight, tongue swirling around the head in a way that makes my knees buckle. Then he sinks down again. And again. Setting a rhythm that’s devastating in its patience — slow, thorough, the methodical attention of a man who approaches sex the way he approaches game film: studying every response, cataloging what works, replicating it with precision until his partner is a wreck.

His tongue does the thing. The specific, unholy, should-be-illegal thing on the underside — a rapid flutter against the frenulum while his lips maintain suction, the dual sensation so overwhelming that my hand slips on the shower rod and I grab a fistful of his hair instead. His groan vibrates through my cock and into my spine and the sound I make is closer to a scream than a moan.

He pulls off. Looks up. Water streaming down his face, lips swollen, dark eyes hooded, a string of saliva and precum connecting his lower lip to the head of my cock. The filthiest, most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“Say please.”

The kink. Woven through the love like gold thread through fabric. He’s not commanding me as the captain. He’s inviting me as my boyfriend, and the warmth underneath the dominance — the tenderness that’s always been there, even in the roughest scenes, even when the arrangement was still a fiction and the feelings were still unspoken — transforms the word please from submission into something that feels like prayer.

“Please.” My voice is wrecked. My hand is in his hair. The water is running over us and the steam is thick enough to taste. “Please, Eli. Don’t stop. I need — I need your mouth, please —”

“Good boy.”

Two words. The two words that rewired my entire nervous system the first time he said them, the two words that turned praise from a nice thing coaches say into a full-body erotic experience that I will spend the rest of my life chasing. He says them on his knees in my shower with water on his face and my cock against his lips and the love in his voice is so naked it makes me want to sob.

He takes me back into his mouth. Faster now. His hand wrapping around the base, stroking in counterpoint to the suction, his tongue relentless on the underside. My hips are moving — small, involuntary thrusts that he allows, his hand on my hip controlling the depth, letting me fuck his mouth in shallow, desperate strokes.

The orgasm builds from the base of my spine. Not the sharp, sudden peak of a fast encounter — the slow, gathering, tidal wave of pleasure that only comes when the person touching you knows your body better than you do. He reads the signals — the hitch in my breathing, the tightening of my fingers in his hair, the way my abs clench — and adjusts. Tighter grip. Faster suction. His tongue pressing flat against the underside on every stroke.

“Eli — I’m going to — I’m —”

He doesn’t pull off. He looks up at me through wet lashes — holds my gaze while his mouth works me, while his throat opens, while his eyes say give it to me — and I come down his throat with my hand fisted in his hair and his name ricocheting off every surface in the bathroom.

He swallows. Every pulse. His throat working, his eyes closed, his grip on my hip gentling as the aftershocks roll through me. When he pulls off, he presses a single kiss to the inside of my thigh — soft, almost chaste, a gesture so tender after what he just did that my eyes burn.

“Your turn,” I manage, my voice destroyed.

“You don’t have to —”

I drop to my knees. The tile is cold and hard under my kneecaps and I don’t care. I look up at him — at this man standing above me in my shower, his cock thick and flushed and straining, water running down his chest, his face open and wanting — and I take him into my mouth the way he taught me. The way I learned in his bed on the night everything changed: weight on my tongue, jaw relaxed, breathing through my nose, my hand wrapped around the base for what my mouth can’t reach.

His hand lands on the back of my head. Gentle. Not pushing — holding. His fingers thread through my wet curls and the tremor in his hand tells me everything his composure doesn’t: he’s close. He’s been close since he woke up hard against my back. Since he washed my hair. Since he dropped to his knees and put his mouth on me and swallowed every drop.

I take him deeper. Relax my throat the way I’ve practiced, the way I’ve learned over weeks of wanting to be good at this, of wanting to give him what he gives me. His hips stutter forward and the sound he makes — that low, shattered groan, bitten off behind clenched teeth, the most vulnerable noise this man produces — vibrates through my skull.

“Connor — I’m —”

I look up at him. Hold his gaze. Pull him deeper.

He comes with my name on his lips and his hand tightening in my hair and his whole body shuddering against the tile, and I take it — all of it, the taste of him salt-sharp and bitter and his — and swallow, and keep swallowing, and when his hand goes slack in my hair and his breath comes in ragged gulps I rise and kiss him.

He kisses me back. Tasting himself in my mouth. Not flinching. Deepening it, his tongue sliding against mine, his hands on my face, holding me under the water with a desperation that says I can’t believe I almost lived my life without this.

He cooks breakfast in nothing but boxer briefs.

I need this noted for the historical record: Eli Kovacs, the most disciplined man in professional hockey, is standing in my tiny kitchen with the morning light painting his tattoo sleeve in gold, wearing nothing but gray Calvin Kleins that ride low enough to show the trail of dark hair below his navel, and he is making me scrambled eggs.

Scrambled, because my stove runs hot and over-easy requires precision that a pan with a permanent layer of Bryce’s fossilized stir-fry can’t deliver. He seasons them with whatever he finds in our sparse spice rack — garlic powder, a half-dead thing that might once have been oregano, and salt applied with the careful hand of a man who treats cooking the way he treats everything else: as a problem to solve correctly.

The result is, against all probability, delicious.

I sit on the counter. Legs dangling, bare except for the boxers I pulled on to answer a call of nature and couldn’t be bothered to supplement with additional clothing. He stands between my knees while we eat, his hip against my thigh, passing me bites of toast from his plate because my plate is already empty and he notices things like that.

“Hey, Eli?”

“What.” He doesn’t turn. Focused on the pan. The attention to cooking as an expression of care, as a replacement for the words his mouth is still learning to automate.

“I love you.”

He goes still. The spatula hovers over the eggs. The kitchen is quiet except for the hiss of the stove and the distant sound of a neighbor’s television.

Then he turns, and his face — morning-soft, unguarded, still carrying the marks of a night spent in a bed he chose to stay in — does the thing. The real smile. Not the ghost, not the twitch, not the almost-smile I’ve been cataloging and chasing since the first week. The full expression — warming his eyes, lifting the scar through his eyebrow, transforming the granite into something alive and open and so beautiful I want to photograph it and frame it and hang it on every wall I’ll ever own.

“I love you too,” he says. Simply. Like he’s stating the temperature. Like the words that took him thirty years to unlock and a lifetime of pain to earn are already becoming easy, already losing their sharp edges, already settling into his vocabulary the way his hand settled on the back of my neck the first time: naturally, like they were always supposed to be there.

Then he turns back to the eggs because they’re about to overcook, and Eli Kovacs’s priorities are, in order: my wellbeing, my protein intake, and my orgasms, and he takes all three very seriously.

The dishes are what break us.

We eat at my counter, knees touching, wearing nothing but boxers and the specific, ridiculous, ungovernable happiness of two people who fought for this and won. After, I carry the plates to the sink. He follows — because he’s going to wash them, because of course he is, because the man cannot witness a dirty dish without his entire nervous system mobilizing to address it.

He reaches past me to turn on the faucet. His chest presses against my back. Hip to hip. His arm brushing mine, the hair on his forearm prickling against my skin, and the contact is casual and domestic and so far removed from the kink-forward, power-exchange territory of our arrangement that it shouldn’t be erotic.

It’s the most erotic thing that’s happened all morning.

Because it’s normal. It’s a boyfriend reaching past you at the kitchen sink, his body warm against yours, his breath on your neck, and the normalcy of it — the ordinariness, the quiet domesticity that Eli Kovacs has never had and Connor Jameson never thought he deserved — sends heat through me that pools low and heavy.

“Leave the dishes,” I say.

“They’ll get crusty.”

“Eli. Leave. The. Dishes.”

He reads the tone. His hand leaves the faucet. Both hands land on my hips — gripping, pulling me back against him, and he’s hard. Again. Still. The thick, insistent press of his erection against my ass, the heat of it through two thin layers of cotton, and my body arches back into him on instinct, grinding, and the sound he makes against my ear is a rumble that I feel in my teeth.

“Here?” he asks. Low. Against the shell of my ear, his lips brushing the tragus piercing, his breath hot and unsteady.

“Here.”

He hooks his thumbs into my waistband and pulls my boxers down. They pool at my ankles. His follow. And then it’s just us — bare skin, his cock hard and heavy against the cleft of my ass, his hands on my hips tilting me forward until my palms hit the counter and my back arches and I’m bent over my own kitchen sink like this is a normal Tuesday morning activity for normal people.

We are not normal people. We are two professional hockey players who spent three months pretending they weren’t in love while having the most intense, boundary-demolishing sex of their lives, and now we’re doing it over a kitchen counter with the morning light streaming through the window and the dishes unwashed and the neighbor’s television clearly audible through the wall.

His mouth traces down my spine. Vertebra by vertebra, the wet drag of his tongue mapping the path of bone, and his hands spread me open and I hear the click of a cap behind me — because Eli Kovacs brought lube from the bedroom while I was carrying plates to the sink. Because this man plans everything. Even morning sex in his boyfriend’s kitchen has a logistics component.

His fingers are warm and slick when they find me. One first, pressing in with the patient, thorough attention that I will never stop craving, the steady stretch that my body recognizes and opens for. He adds a second. Scissors them gently, working me open, and his other hand strokes my cock in a lazy counterpoint that keeps me hard and aching and teetering on the edge of too much.

“Ready?” he asks.

“I’ve been ready since I woke up with your cock against my back. Get inside me.”

He pushes in. One slow, deep stroke that seats him fully inside me, and I grip the edge of the counter and drop my head between my arms and the sound I make is long and low and grateful. The fullness. The stretch. The specific, irreplaceable feeling of Eli Kovacs filling me, his hips against my ass, his hands on my waist, his chest curving over my back.

He fucks me slow. Deep. Each thrust deliberate, controlled, angled to the spot that sends white sparks through my vision. This isn’t the rough, headboard-rattling intensity of the kitchen-counter fight sex or the frantic desperation of the arena storage room. This is something new. Something that only exists on the other side of I love you — unhurried, tender, his mouth pressed between my shoulder blades, his hands sliding from my waist to cover mine on the counter. Our fingers lace together on the laminate.

He says my name. Not Jameson. Not the captain’s address. Connor. Spoken like a prayer, pressed into my skin between thrusts, each syllable vibrating through the contact points where our bodies meet.

I say his back. Eli. Like an answer. Like a response to a call I’ve been hearing since the first morning he watched me from the tunnel with those dark eyes and I felt the world shift on its axis.

His pace builds. Still deep, still controlled, but faster, his hips snapping forward with more force, and I push back to meet him, and the sound of our bodies is obscene in the quiet kitchen — wet, rhythmic, the slap of skin on skin underscored by the running faucet that neither of us remembered to turn off.

His hand slides from the counter to wrap around my cock. Stroking in time with his thrusts, his grip firm, his thumb catching the head on each upstroke, and the dual sensation — filled and stroked, taken and held — is building toward something enormous.

“I love you,” he says against my spine. Not a whisper. Full voice. The voice of a man who has decided to stop whispering the truth and start saying it at volume. “I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere.”

I come with his words in my ear and his hand around me and his body inside me, and the orgasm is a demolition — total, structural, the kind that takes the walls down and doesn’t rebuild them. I spill over his fist and onto the counter and my knees buckle and he catches me, both arms, holding me upright while his own hips stutter and he follows, burying himself deep, groaning my name into the space between my shoulder blades, and the heat of him pulsing inside me is the last sensation I process before the brain-silence descends.

Complete. Perfect. Warm.

The silence I’ve been chasing my entire life. The quiet that only he gives me. The off switch that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world except in the aftermath of Eli Kovacs loving me with his whole body.

After, he washes the dishes.

I sit on the counter, boneless, wearing nothing but his hair tie on my wrist because I stole it while he was cooking and I’m keeping it. He stands at the sink in his boxers, scrubbing the pan with the focused attention of a man who has just had two orgasms before 9 a.m. and is still constitutionally incapable of leaving a dirty dish in the sink.

I watch him. The tattoo sleeve — the geometry, the flowers, the birds, the compass. The muscles in his shoulders shifting under damp skin. The line of his jaw, rough with stubble. The way he holds the sponge: firmly, precisely, like even dishwashing is a discipline he refuses to perform carelessly.

This man. This ridiculous, stubborn, emotionally constipated, egg-scrambling, hair-washing, dish-cleaning, praise-dispensing, secretly-tender, infuriatingly-controlled man. My boyfriend. The word is new enough to sparkle. Boyfriend. Eli Kovacs is my boyfriend. He wears my hair tie and sleeps in my bed and washes my dishes and tells me he loves me while he’s inside me and it’s the best bad decision either of us has ever made.

“You know what?” I say.

“What.” He doesn’t turn. Rinsing.

“You’re still the best bad decision I ever made.”

He looks over his shoulder. The smile. Real. Full. Permanent. The expression that took thirty years to surface and three months to become the default setting, the face I fell in love with and fought for and earned.

“Damn right,” he says.

He turns back to the dishes. I lean against the cabinet, heart full, brain quiet, body wrecked. The morning light fills the kitchen. The faucet runs. Somewhere outside, the city goes about its business, and in here, in a too-small apartment with terrible stove burners and a pan that will never be clean, two men are building a life out of all the things they used to be afraid of.

Tenderness. Visibility. Staying.

I set my alarm for 4:45. He sets his for 4:44. We’ll race to the rink tomorrow. And the day after. And every day until the ice melts or we do.

Neither of us is going anywhere.

Thank you for reading the bonus chapter for Captain of My Bad Decisions.

Niko’s story is next. The goalie. The reporter. Seventeen unread messages.
Ty’s story follows. The defenseman. The rival enforcer. Some hits stay with you.

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