After the Drill
A Coach Me Through It Bonus Chapter
by Chase Power
⚠️ This bonus chapter contains spoilers and takes place after the events of Coach Me Through It. Read the novel first for the full experience.
After the Drill
Roman was still wearing his skate guards when I pushed him through the front door.
Not roughly. Not the collision-style urgency I’d brought to our first encounters, when every touch had been a negotiation between need and restraint. This was different. This was a year of knowing exactly how to open a door, guide a man through it, and close it behind us with the deliberate precision of someone who had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.
“Declan.” Roman’s voice carried the particular tone of a man who was pretending to object and was categorically not objecting. “I haven’t taken off my—”
“Leave them.”
“I’m in skate guards. In the house.”
“You’re in skate guards in our house. And in approximately ninety seconds, you’re not going to be in anything at all, so the skate guards are a temporary concern.”
He turned in the hallway. His face was flushed from the rink — the January cold, the exertion of skating, the specific glow that Roman carried after ice time like a man revisiting a language he’d thought he’d forgotten. His dark hair was disordered. The silver at his temples was damp. He was wearing a black base layer and track pants and his reading glasses were pushed up into his hair where he’d shoved them before lacing his skates.
He looked like the morning version. The version the world didn’t get.
The version that was exclusively mine.
“You stopped perfectly,” he said. “Every time. You were showing off.”
“I was demonstrating mastery of the skills my very talented consultant taught me.”
“You were showing off. And now you’re—”
“Collecting my praise.”
I backed him against the hallway wall. The framed captain’s jersey — his jersey, the one I’d mounted six months ago in a frame he’d critiqued and then quietly touched every time he walked past it — hung two feet to his left. I braced one hand beside his head. Looked down at him.
Roman looked up. The height difference was the same as it had always been — four inches, sixty pounds, the physical disparity that should have made me the dominant one and instead made me the man who chose, every time, to let the smaller man set the pace.
Except today I was setting the pace. And Roman knew it. And the flicker in his dark eyes — the one that meant his composure was calculating how much of itself to surrender — was the hottest thing I’d ever seen, and I’d been seeing it for a year.
“Tell me your color,” I said.
“Green.”
“Tell me what you want.”
His mouth curved. The real smile. The one I’d been earning since January.
“I want you to stop asking and start showing me what you learned.”
I kissed him against the wall with the jersey watching.
His mouth was cold from the rink and tasted like the coffee he’d drunk at five in the morning before driving us to the community center. I kissed him until the cold became warmth, until his hands came to my chest, until the controlled stillness he wore like a second skin began to soften at the edges.
I pulled the base layer over his head. His skin was cool beneath — goosebumped from the rink, the fine dark hair on his chest rising. I pressed my mouth to his collarbone. His throat. The surgical scar on his right shoulder that I’d kissed so many times I could trace it blindfolded.
“Bedroom,” he said.
“Hallway.”
“Declan—”
“I want you against this wall. Under your own jersey. I’ve been thinking about it since the second lap.”
His breath caught. A small sound, but I’d spent a year learning that small sounds from Roman Calder were louder than shouts from anyone else. Each one was a brick removed from the wall he’d spent forty years building.
I dropped to my knees.
The hallway floor was hardwood. My knees protested — a year of kneeling for this man in various rooms of this house, and my body still registered the position with a jolt of recognition that was equal parts physical and Pavlovian. But today wasn’t about me kneeling for instruction. Today was about me kneeling because I wanted to take him apart from below.
I pulled the track pants down his hips. He was hard — already, from the drill, from the kissing, from whatever internal process occurred when Roman Calder watched me demonstrate control on the ice and realized that the control extended to every dimension of our life together.
I took him in my mouth without preamble.
No teasing. No gradual approach. I took him deep and held, and the sound he made — a gutted, involuntary groan that bounced off the hallway walls and filled the house we’d built together — was worth every second of patience I’d spent learning to give.
“Declan — fuck —”
Roman swearing was rare enough to be an event. Roman swearing while my mouth was on him was a trophy I intended to collect repeatedly.
I worked him slowly. Using everything he’d taught me and everything I’d learned on my own — the pressure he liked at the base, the attention he needed at the head, the specific rhythm that made his hips move against his will. His hands found my hair. Not guiding — holding. Gripping.
I pulled off. Looked up at him. His face was wrecked — flushed, eyes half-closed, lips parted, the composure reduced to rubble.
“You’re beautiful,” I told him. “The silver. The scar. The glasses in your hair. Every single year that made you this man. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Don’t redirect. Hear it.”
He heard it. I watched the praise land — watched the acceptance arrive, and the acceptance looked like a man closing his eyes and pressing the back of his head against the wall beneath his own framed jersey and letting himself be loved loudly.
I took him back in my mouth. Deeper. Faster. His hips pushed forward and I let them.
“I’m close,” he managed. “Declan, I’m—”
I pulled off again. He made a sound of protest that was so undignified that I grinned against his hip bone.
“Not yet,” I said.
“If you are edging me in a hallway at seven in the morning—”
“I am absolutely edging you in a hallway at seven in the morning. Consider it a drill.”
“I will end you.”
“You’ll have to catch me first, old man.”
His eyes flew open. Dangerous.
“Bedroom,” Roman said. “Now.”
We made it to the bed in a tangle of limbs and discarded clothing. I landed on my back. Roman was above me instantly — straddling my waist, his palms flat on my chest.
“You called me old man,” he said.
“Affectionately.”
“You called me old man while edging me in our hallway after a drill I designed.”
“It sounds like a man who needs to be reminded who taught him everything he knows.”
He ground his hips down against mine, and the friction — both of us bare now, his cock sliding against mine with deliberate pressure — made me arch off the bed.
“I can do anything I want,” he murmured against my ear. “That is the benefit of being old. Experience.”
He reached between us and wrapped his hand around both of us together, and the sentence I was forming evaporated.
“Tell me what you need,” he murmured.
“I need to be inside you. I need to watch your face when I tell you you’re good.”
His composure didn’t crack — it opened. “Then take care of me.”
I prepared him slowly, thoroughly. One finger. Two. His body opening by degrees, his breath adjusting to the four-four-six.
“Green,” he said before I asked. “Very green. Impatiently green.”
“Impatiently is not a standard color.”
“It is when your boyfriend has been stretching you for eight minutes while looking like that.”
“Finish the sentence, Roman.”
“It makes me want to surrender everything. Not because you’re bigger. Because you’re careful.”
I entered him slowly. “Stay with me,” I said. His phrase. My voice.
“You’re good.”
The word landed. It always landed. Good while I was inside him, watching the last traces of his legendary composure dissolve into the expression of a man being loved without condition.
I moved. Long, deep strokes. His legs wrapped around my waist. His hands found my face. We breathed together — the same count, the rhythm of our breathing matching my hips.
“Harder,” he said. “I want all of you. Every version.”
I stopped trying to be careful. My hips drove deeper. His back arched. His hands gripped my shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
“Come for me,” I said. “You’re good. You’re so good. You don’t have to earn it. You never had to earn it.”
Roman came with my name on his mouth. I followed seconds later, carrying everything — the drill, the hallway, the year, the man — with it.
We lay tangled. Breathing. Not counting.
“Was that sufficient praise?”
“Adequate. Deductions were warranted for the old man comment.”
I pressed my face into his neck and laughed until my ribs ached.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you, Declan. Even when you edge me in hallways.”
“Now go make coffee. I have a player-transition meeting at nine.”
I kissed his forehead. Made coffee wearing nothing but boxer briefs and the particular satisfaction of a man who had learned to ask for what he wanted and was living with the answer.
The reading glasses were on the bathroom counter. The jersey was on the hallway wall. The house was full.
It was.
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