Spring Training: The Private Session

A Bonus Chapter from Major League Curious by Chase Power

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue of Major League Curious. It contains spoilers for the full novel. For maximum enjoyment, read the book first.

Spring Training — The Private Session

RAFAEL

The catching clinic ran four hours.

Four hours of watching Gabriel Mercer crouch behind a miniature home plate in the Florida sun, his voice carrying across the practice diamond with the calm authority that had rebuilt my career and dismantled my certainty and replaced everything I thought I knew about myself with something truer and more terrifying and infinitely better.

He was working with three Double-A catchers — kids, really, twenty-one and twenty-two and twenty-three, all of them looking at Gabriel the way I’d looked at him the first time I’d seen him settle into his crouch in Brooklyn. Like he’d been designed for the position. Like the dirt around home plate was his native habitat and the rest of the world was just the place he visited between innings.

I was supposed to be running my own bullpen session. Owen had caught me for thirty minutes — fifty pitches, forty-three strikes. My fastball was sitting at ninety-six. But I’d finished twenty minutes ago, and instead of doing any of the hundred productive things a professional pitcher does during voluntary early workouts, I was standing behind the batting cage watching my boyfriend teach catchers how to frame a pitch.

He was wearing the chest protector. The navy-and-teal Breakers insignia was faded from a season of development work. The protector sat against his dark skin — he’d pulled it on over a T-shirt, but the shirt was damp with sweat and clinging to the thick muscles of his shoulders and the breadth of his chest, and the combination of professional equipment and visible body was doing something to me that I’d stopped pretending was complicated.

He glanced at me across the diamond. One look. Half a second. Then back to the kid he was coaching.

But the look said everything. It said: I know you’re watching. I know what you’re thinking. And when this clinic is over, I’m going to let you do something about it.

The clinic ended at noon. Gabriel stayed behind, reorganizing equipment. His T-shirt was soaked through. The chest protector was still strapped on.

I walked onto the practice field with a bucket of balls.

“Catch a few?” I said.

“You already threw your bullpen.”

“Maybe I want extra work.”

“Maybe you want something that has nothing to do with work.”

“Catch the pitches and find out.”

He pulled on his mask. Settled into his crouch. I threw a dozen clean pitches — fastball, slider, changeup. Every one crisp and located. Gabriel caught each without commentary.

Then I threw one three feet outside.

Gabriel caught it. Stood. Stared at me.

“You did that on purpose.”

“Prove it.”

“Your release point was identical to the previous twelve pitches. There is no mechanical explanation for that pitch missing by three feet.”

“Maybe my command is slipping. Maybe you should come out here and correct my mechanics.”

He removed the mask. Walked to the mound. Stopped in front of me. His hand found my hip — the same spot, always the same spot. His thumb traced the skin above my waistband.

“Your mechanics are fine,” he murmured.

“Prove it.”

“The kids come back in thirty minutes.”

“Then stop talking and start walking.”

The indoor bullpen cage had a door that locked.

I turned the deadbolt and heard the sound that had become a Pavlovian trigger over fourteen months — the click of a lock engaging, the audible transition from public to private.

Gabriel was standing between the cage netting and the pitching rubber, the chest protector still strapped over his sweat-damp body. The overhead lights were off. Afternoon sun sliced through the high windows, turning the space into a cathedral of golden dust motes and warm turf.

I grabbed the front straps of his chest protector and kissed him.

Not gently. This was the other kiss — the one that surfaced when I saw Gabriel Mercer in his catching gear with his mask pushed up and his amber eyes looking at me like he’d been waiting for me to make a move.

He tasted like Gatorade and sunscreen. His beard scraped my jaw. I used the protector straps like handles, pulling him against me.

“Protector stays on,” I said against his mouth.

“That’s becoming a tradition.”

“It was a tradition the first time. Now it’s a religion.”

I pulled his T-shirt from beneath the protector and off his head. Underneath, his chest was bare and dark and glistening, the protector sitting directly against skin. I kissed down his neck, his chest, tonguing along the border where the protector’s edge met skin.

I dropped to my knees.

The turf was warm and cushioned beneath me. I unfastened his shorts, pulled them down with his compression briefs. His cock was already hard — thick, heavy, the foreskin pulled back to expose the dark head. A bead of pre-come glistened at the tip.

I looked up at him. The chest protector framed his body — professional gear above, naked want below. The contrast was a visual that would keep me up at night for the next decade.

“Tell me what you want,” I said.

“I want your mouth. And your hands. And I want you to stop asking and start showing me what you learned in a year of practice.”

I took him deep on the first stroke — something I couldn’t do a year ago, something that had required weeks of learning the angle and the breathing. His head fell back and hit the netting. His hands found my hair, fingers curling into the curls.

I worked him with my mouth and both hands — one on his shaft, the other cupping his balls, pressing the spot behind them that made his thighs shake. I knew every trick. The twist that made his abs clench. The suction that made his hips stutter. The moment his grip in my hair shifted from holding to pulling.

“Rafe —” His hips pushed forward. I let him fuck my mouth with shallow thrusts while I hummed around him. “Right there — don’t stop —”

I pulled off. His cock was slick and glistening.

“Turn around. Hands on the netting.”

He turned. The chest protector covered his back. Below it, his ass was bare, muscular — the powerful glutes of a man who’d spent twenty years in a catcher’s crouch. He gripped the cage netting, fingers threading through the steel mesh.

I pulled a lube packet from my pocket.

“You brought lube to the facility,” Gabriel said.

“I brought lube to a building where you were going to be wearing catching gear for four hours. That’s not planning. That’s survival.”

I prepared him — one finger, two, working him open with the efficiency of a man who’d learned his partner’s body so thoroughly the preparation was a conversation rather than a negotiation. His body opened for me. A year of trust encoded in muscle memory. I curled both fingers against his prostate and he jerked forward, the netting rattling, a curse falling from his mouth that echoed off the turf and the high ceiling.

I stood. Rolled on the condom. Positioned myself behind him — the hard plastic shell of the chest protector pressed against my bare torso. The feeling of gear against skin sent a pulse of heat through me that made my cock throb.

I pushed in.

Gabriel’s head dropped forward. His fingers turned white on the netting. The sound he made was the sound I’d fallen in love with before I’d fallen in love with anything else — a low, full-body exhalation that carried the weight of surrender.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “Every time — it’s every time —”

“Tell me.”

“Every time you do this I think I know what it’s going to feel like and then you’re inside me and it’s —” His voice broke as I began to move. “— more.”

The pace was hard. Fast. My hips drove into him with each stroke, the chest protector absorbing the impact, the netting swaying under his grip. The sounds were obscene — the wet slap of skin, the metallic rattle of the cage, his breathing and mine, the groans neither of us bothered to suppress.

My hand reached around. Found his cock. Stroked him in time with my thrusts — the dual stimulation that took Gabriel apart faster than anything else because his body couldn’t prioritize, couldn’t decide which sensation to chase, and the overwhelm of both at once stripped his composure more efficiently than any single act.

His moans became continuous. A raw, breathless stream of sound he’d stopped trying to control. His hips pushed back against my thrusts and forward into my hand, caught between two sources of pleasure.

I drove deep and held. Buried to the hilt. My mouth at his ear.

“Good boy.”

He came against the netting. His cock pulsed in my hand — hot, thick, his release streaking the steel mesh while his body clenched around me and his hands gripped the cage so hard the frame groaned. The sound he made was the low, fractured groan of a man letting go of control, letting someone else hold him, letting himself be caught.

The clenching pulled me over. I drove in one last time and came with his name in my mouth — Gabriel, Gabriel — the syllables breaking apart as the orgasm tore through me, forehead pressed against the hard plastic of his chest protector.

We stood there. Breathing. Connected. The afternoon sun poured through the windows and painted us in gold.

We collapsed onto the turf mat. Sweaty, laughing, his gear scattered around us.

“We need to clean the netting,” he said.

“I’ll get the hose.”

“There’s no hose in here.”

“There should be. For exactly this reason.”

“For the reason of two grown men having sex in a professional sports facility during business hours?”

“For the reason of maintenance. General maintenance. Of the netting. Which has been… maintained.”

He kissed me — soft, slow, the tender version. His mouth moved against mine and I felt his smile before I saw it.

“How long until the kids come back?” I asked.

“Eight minutes.”

“Plenty of time.”

“For what?”

“To lie here and look at you.”

His expression softened. I lay on the turf mat and looked at Gabriel Mercer for three of those eight minutes. The silver at his temples. The crooked little finger. The scars on his forearms. The body that had spent twenty years catching everything thrown at it and had finally caught the one thing that mattered.

Me.

“Come on,” he said. “Help me pick up the baseballs before somebody asks why the catching instructor’s equipment is lying in a pile next to two sweaty men with turf burns.”

“Romantic.”

“Practical. There’s a difference.”

“There really isn’t,” I said. “Not with you.”

He smiled. The real one — the one that cracked his composure and showed the man behind the catcher. The one I’d earned in a bullpen in Brooklyn and kept every day since.

We unlocked the door and walked into the Florida sunlight like two professionals who’d spent their lunch break reviewing catching mechanics.

A Double-A kid waved. “Hey Coach Mercer! Ready for the afternoon session?”

Gabriel waved back, his voice steady and professional, carrying no trace of the man who’d been pressed against a cage netting four minutes ago.

“Ready when you are,” he said.

My phone buzzed. Text from Gabriel.

Same time tomorrow?

I typed back: Bring the mask too.

His response was a single emoji: 🎯

I pocketed my phone and walked into the weight room grinning like a man who’d just thrown a perfect game.

Close enough.

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