Road Game — Bonus Chapter

A bonus scene from The Tight End Is Flexible by Chase Power

This scene takes place six months after the events of The Tight End Is Flexible. Rafael and Malachi are openly together. Rafael has signed his final one-year contract extension. They are spending their first real vacation — no football, no media availability, no curfew — at a beachfront rental in Cabo. Spoilers ahead.

Road Game

MALACHI

The problem with Rafael Vega in swim trunks was that he looked like an argument for early retirement from thinking.

Not the retirement he’d announced — the professional kind, the planned and press-conferenced kind, the version with a timeline and a farewell tour. I meant the other kind. The kind where a man stands on a balcony overlooking the Sea of Cortez at sunrise in nothing but low-slung navy trunks and the surgical scar at his right shoulder, and every higher brain function you possess throws up its hands and says we’ll be back on Monday.

I watched him from the bed. Our bed. A king-size in a rental villa where nobody knew our names and nobody cared, and the door to the balcony was open and the morning air was warm and salted and I had been awake for eleven minutes, eight of which I’d spent cataloging the way the sunrise hit the silver at his temples and turned it into something I wanted to put my mouth on.

“You’re staring,” he said without turning around.

“You’re standing in front of a sunrise in swim trunks. What else would I be doing?”

“Sleeping. We’re on vacation. Sleeping is the point.”

“The point of vacation is doing whatever I want without a schedule. Right now what I want is to look at you.”

He turned then. Leaned against the balcony railing with his arms crossed and the ocean behind him and an expression that was half amusement and half the particular heat that lived in his eyes when I said something that landed in the right place.

“Come here,” I said.

“I’m watching the sunrise.”

“The sunrise will be there tomorrow. I’m asking you to come here now.”

Something shifted in his posture. The crossed arms loosened. The lean against the railing became a push, and then he was walking toward the bed with the unhurried authority that had made me fall in love with him on a practice field in Phoenix eleven months ago — that particular stride, compact and deliberate, the walk of a man who expected the world to wait.

He stopped at the foot of the bed. Looked down at me — sprawled on my back, sheets at my waist, wearing absolutely nothing, because Cabo mornings didn’t require clothing and neither did mornings with Rafael Vega.

“You look obscene,” he said. “Six-foot-six of obscene.”

“Compliment or complaint?”

“Both.” He climbed onto the bed. Settled between my legs with his knees on either side of my thighs, straddling me, and the weight of him — solid, warm, smelling like the salt air and the sunscreen he’d applied with quarterback precision — made my hands go to his hips automatically.

“I have something to tell you,” he said.

“If it involves the words defensive scheme, I’m pushing you off this bed.”

“It doesn’t involve football.” His hands found my chest. Palms flat, fingers spread, feeling my heartbeat the way he’d felt it a hundred times. “I talked to a realtor yesterday.”

“About what?”

“About a house. In Scottsdale. Four bedrooms, a pool, and a kitchen large enough for a man who eats standing up and a man who keeps threatening to teach him to cook.”

My hands tightened on his hips. “You’re asking me to move in with you.”

“I’m telling you I found a house with a second refrigerator already installed.”

The laugh that came out of me was the real kind — full, warm, originating in the chest of a man whose heart was doing structural renovations. “The ginger ale refrigerator.”

“Dedicated. Separate thermostat. The realtor looked at me strangely when I listed it as a requirement.”

I pulled him down. Kissed him with the morning still on both of our mouths and the ocean crashing below the balcony and the particular sweetness of a man who’d spent thirty-five years hiding and was now house-hunting with a second refrigerator as a non-negotiable.

“Yes,” I said against his mouth.

“I haven’t officially asked yet.”

“Yes anyway. Yes to the house, yes to the kitchen, yes to the refrigerator. Yes to waking up next to you in a place that belongs to both of us instead of alternating between apartments like divorced parents sharing custody of ourselves.”

He laughed. The sound was warm and private and mine. “The realtor wants to schedule a showing when we get back.”

“Schedule it. And then stop talking about realtors, because you’re sitting on me in swim trunks and I have plans that don’t involve square footage.”

“What kind of plans?”

I gripped his hips and rolled. The bed shifted, the sheets tangled, and then he was beneath me — six inches shorter, forty pounds lighter, looking up at me with those dark eyes and the silver temples and the particular expression of a man who enjoyed being beneath me as much as he enjoyed being above me, which was to say: completely, without reservation, with the full investment of a person who’d learned that surrender was its own kind of strength.

“The kind where I take my time,” I said, and lowered my mouth to his throat.

He tasted like salt and sunscreen and the coffee he’d made at 5 a.m. because Rafael Vega did not take vacations from his circadian rhythm regardless of the time zone. I kissed down his neck, across his collarbone, to the scar at his shoulder — the shoulder that had thrown me the most important ball of my career, the shoulder I’d kissed the night he let me take control, the shoulder that was retiring in four months and would never throw a football professionally again.

“This shoulder,” I said against the scar, and felt him shiver. “When it’s done throwing footballs, it’s going to hold grocery bags. And carry boxes into our house. And wrap around me at 3 a.m. when you can’t sleep because you’re not used to the quiet yet.”

“Malachi—”

“And I’m going to kiss this scar every morning for the rest of my life, because this shoulder chose me.”

His hand found the back of my head. Fingers in my braids, holding me against his skin, and the sound he made was quiet and full and carrying the specific frequency of a man being told something his body needed to hear.

I moved lower. Down his chest — the compact musculature of a man who’d spent decades in peak condition. His stomach, where my tongue traced the line between abdominal muscles and drew a sound out of him that was definitely not about football. The waistband of the swim trunks, where my teeth caught the elastic and tugged.

“Off,” I said, and he lifted his hips, and I pulled the trunks down his legs and tossed them toward the balcony, where they landed on the railing and hung like a flag of surrender over the Sea of Cortez.

He was hard. Already, from the kissing and the shoulder and the words — because Rafael Vega responded to being told what he meant to someone the same way I responded to being told I was good at something: with a full-body reaction that bypassed every defense he’d ever built.

“You’re beautiful,” I told him, because he was, and because saying it still made his breath catch every single time, ten months in, like the compliment was new, like nobody had said it with this specific sincerity before I did. “You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen and I’m going to take you apart this morning because we have nowhere to be and no one to hide from and I want to hear every sound you make without worrying about thin walls.”

The villa had thick walls. I’d checked.

I took him in my mouth. Slow — the agonizing, deliberate slow that made his hand fist in my braids and his hips lift off the mattress and the sounds start: low, rhythmic, building in volume with each stroke, the uninhibited version of Rafael Vega that only existed when the world was somewhere else.

Except the doors weren’t locked. The balcony was open. The ocean was audible. The morning was fully present, and the man I was worshipping with my mouth was making sounds that carried into the warm salt air without shame, without caution.

“Come up here,” he said, breathless, pulling me by the braids. “I want you. I want everything.”

I kissed my way back up his body. Found his mouth. Tasted the coffee and the want and the particular flavor of a man who’d been waiting for this — not the sex, which we’d had a hundred times, but the version of it that came without conditions. No curfew. No game tomorrow. Just two men in a bed in Mexico with the whole morning ahead of them.

I prepared him with the patience he deserved. My fingers slicked and careful, his body opening for me with the trust we’d earned through months of learning each other.

“Now,” he said when he was ready, his legs around me, his hands on my face, his dark eyes holding mine. “Look at me. I want to see you the whole time.”

I pushed into him. Slow. Watching his face — the way his eyes widened and his lips parted and the composure dissolved in real time, replaced by the raw, unguarded expression of a man feeling something too large for control.

“Te amo,” he said, and the Spanish came out the way it always came out during sex — instinctive, unfiltered, the first language surfacing when the second one couldn’t hold the weight. “Te amo, Malachi. No puedo creer que eres mío.“

I can’t believe you’re mine.

“I’m yours,” I said. “Every morning. Every room. Every house with a second refrigerator.”

He laughed and moaned at the same time — the particular hybrid sound of a man experiencing pleasure and joy simultaneously, the sound I’d been collecting for a year and would keep collecting for the rest of our life.

I moved. Deep, slow, the rhythm set by the ocean and the morning and the unhurried certainty of two people who’d fought for this — through locked doors and frosted glass and press conferences and three-second silences and nine-word denials and the specific, irreversible act of choosing each other when the choosing cost everything.

“Harder,” he said, and I gave him harder. “There — God, Malachi, right there.” I held the angle and watched him come apart beneath me, his composure gone completely, his body arching off the mattress, his voice carrying through the open balcony door into the Cabo morning where anyone walking on the beach below could hear a thirty-six-year-old retired quarterback calling the name of the man he loved at a volume that had nothing to do with discretion.

Nobody checked who was listening.

I wrapped my hand around him. Stroked in time with my hips. The dual sensation built him toward the edge with a speed that said he’d been thinking about this since the balcony, since the swim trunks, since the moment he’d woken up and decided to stand in front of a sunrise looking like the answer to every question I’d been asking since I was twenty years old.

“I love you,” I said, and his body seized around me, and he came with my name in his mouth and my hand on him and the ocean crashing and the sunlight pouring through the open door, and the sight of him — undone, released, glowing in the morning light — pulled me over the edge behind him, both of us falling together the way we’d been falling since June.

The aftermath was warm. Tangled. His head on my chest, my arm around him, the ocean providing the only soundtrack a morning like this required.

“The house has a pool,” he said, drowsily.

“You mentioned.”

“I’m going to use the pool every day.”

“You’re going to use the pool once, decide you prefer the cold tub, and spend the rest of the year pretending you use the pool. I know you, Rafa.”

“You do.” He pressed his mouth to my chest. “Nobody else does. Not like this.”

I held him tighter. The morning expanded around us — warm, salted, carrying the particular light of a place where nobody knew their names and nobody cared, and the anonymity was, for the first time in their shared history, not a hiding place but a holiday.

“Breakfast?” he asked.

“In an hour. I’m not done holding you.”

“What’s the rush?”

“There’s no rush. That’s the whole point.”

He smiled against my skin. The private smile. The one I’d been collecting since the film room in June and would keep collecting in every room of a house that didn’t exist yet but already felt like home.

The ocean crashed. The sun climbed. The swim trunks hung on the balcony railing like a flag.

Nobody was hiding. Nobody was counting hours. Nobody was checking who was watching.

They had time.

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