The Gala — Bonus Chapter

A Full Nelson, No Regrets Bonus Scene by Chase Power

This bonus scene takes place between the final chapter and the epilogue of Full Nelson, No Regrets. It contains spoilers and very explicit content. You’ve been warned — and you’re welcome.

The Gala

GRANT

The suit was the problem.

Not my suit — mine was dark navy, well-fitted, the product of a tailor Eli had recommended after I’d confessed that the only formal clothing I owned was a ten-year-old blazer I’d last worn to a press conference where I’d announced my retirement while secretly wondering whether the man I was hiding from the cameras would watch the broadcast. The new suit fit. It served its purpose. It was not the problem.

The problem was Nico’s suit.

Black. Slim-cut. Italian, apparently, though my knowledge of fashion extended approximately as far as my ability to distinguish “fits well” from “fits badly.” The jacket was fitted through the shoulders and tapered at the waist in a way that made his body look like a weapon someone had wrapped in expensive fabric as a courtesy to the surrounding population. No tie. Top two buttons undone, exposing the hollow of his throat and the small gold chain he’d started wearing after Kingmaker — a chain I’d bought him, quietly, without ceremony, because the man who’d taught me that grand gestures were less important than consistent ones deserved to know I’d been listening.

His hair was pulled back loosely, a few dark curls escaping at his temples the way they always escaped, as though his hair had decided independently that total containment was aesthetically unacceptable. The gold hoops in his ears caught the bathroom light. His eyes, reflected in the mirror, found mine with the particular expression that had been dismantling my self-control for four months: amused, aware, and absolutely certain of the effect he was producing.

“You’re staring,” he said to my reflection.

“I’m assessing.”

“Professionally?”

“If I were assessing you professionally, I’d tell you the jacket restricts your shoulder rotation by approximately fifteen degrees and would be impractical in a ring. Since I’m assessing you personally, I’m telling you that if you wear that suit in front of three hundred industry professionals, I will spend the entire evening thinking about taking it off you, and my ability to maintain polite conversation will be significantly compromised.”

He turned from the mirror. The grin was incandescent — the real one, the one I’d been collecting since the first morning he’d sat in my kitchen without his armor and I’d understood that the man underneath the performance was more beautiful than the performance had ever been.

“That’s the best review I’ve ever received.”

“It’s not a review. It’s a warning.”

“Noted. Filed. Completely ignored.” He crossed the bathroom and adjusted my tie with the focused precision of a man who’d spent his life performing complex physical tasks under pressure. His fingers against my chest. His face inches from mine. The scent of him — cologne I didn’t recognize, something warm and dark and deliberate, chosen for tonight the way he chose everything, with an attention to effect that bordered on architectural.

“Ready?” he asked.

“No.”

“Good. Neither am I. Let’s go be terrified together.”

The gala was held in a converted warehouse downtown — the industry’s annual charity event, attended by performers, executives, media, and the particular species of entertainment-adjacent socialite whose presence at events was inversely proportional to their understanding of the industry being celebrated. The venue was dramatic — exposed brick, industrial lighting, the careful aesthetic of a space designed to communicate that the people inside it were important enough to repurpose architecture.

We arrived together.

Not separately. Not through different doors. Not with the careful, strategic distance I’d maintained for twenty years at every public function I’d attended during my career — the calculated gap between myself and anyone whose proximity might generate questions I wasn’t prepared to answer. Together. His hand on my lower back as we crossed the threshold. My hand finding his when we stopped for the first photograph.

The photographer — a young woman with sharp eyes and a professional smile — looked at our joined hands, then at our faces, and asked us to look at each other instead of the camera.

We did.

The photo would become the framed image on our nightstand, and neither of us was looking at the lens because neither of us needed the audience to validate what we were looking at.

The room watched us. I felt every pair of eyes — the curiosity, the assessment, the genuine warmth from the people who’d been waiting for this moment and the carefully concealed discomfort from the people who hadn’t. My nervous system registered each gaze the way it had registered attention for forty-five years: as data, as threat, as the raw material of a lifetime’s habit of managing visibility.

Nico’s hand squeezed mine. Not a signal. Not a correction. Just contact. The physical reminder that the man beside me was not afraid of the room and was not going to let me be afraid of it either.

“You’re holding your bourbon with both hands,” he murmured against my ear, twenty minutes in. “That’s how I know you’re nervous. One hand means comfortable. Two hands means you’re treating the glass like a security blanket.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“You’re adorably nervous and I want to devour you for it.”

“That is not helpful.”

“It’s not meant to be helpful. It’s meant to give you something to think about besides the room.” His lips brushed my ear. “Is it working?”

It was working. The room and its three hundred opinions receded to background noise while the specific, devastating proximity of Nico Cruz’s mouth to my ear became the only data point my nervous system was interested in processing.

An hour in, a man I hadn’t seen in fifteen years approached us at the bar. Marcus Webb — a veteran from my era, retired the same year I did, a man I’d worked a hundred matches with and never once spoken to about anything personal. We’d shared locker rooms and road trips and the particular intimacy of two men who’d spent years entrusting each other with their physical safety while hiding everything else.

“Grant.” He shook my hand. Looked at Nico beside me. Looked at our proximity — the way Nico’s hand rested on my lower back, the way my body angled toward his without conscious instruction. His expression carried something I didn’t expect — not judgment, not curiosity. Recognition. The specific, painful recognition of a man seeing someone do the thing he’d wanted to do and hadn’t.

“Wish I’d had the guts,” he said. Quietly. To me. And then he walked away, and I stood at the bar with Nico’s hand on my back and the weight of a sentence that rewrote a piece of my history I’d believed was fixed.

Nico didn’t ask what it meant. He’d heard. He understood. His hand pressed slightly firmer against my back — not comfort, exactly. Witness. The physical acknowledgment that the moment had mattered and that the man beside me had seen it.

We made it three hours.

Three hours of handshakes, conversations, the social choreography of an industry event attended by the man who’d recently delivered the most talked-about public declaration of love in professional wrestling history. Every interaction required navigation — the colleagues who wanted to congratulate, the media who wanted quotes, the executives who wanted to assess whether the relationship was an asset or a liability, the retired performers who shook my hand with expressions that ranged from genuine happiness to barely concealed envy to the particular awkwardness of men who’d spent their careers in the same closet I’d occupied and weren’t sure whether my visibility made their invisibility feel chosen or imposed.

Nico handled all of it. Effortlessly. With the same charisma that made him extraordinary in the ring — the ability to make every person he spoke with feel like the only person in the room. He steered me through conversations I would have fumbled, deflected questions I would have answered too honestly, and touched the small of my back every time he sensed my composure contracting.

At the three-hour mark, he leaned close to my ear. His breath was warm. His voice was low enough that only I could hear it, and the words he chose were selected with the precise, devastating specificity that I’d taught him to apply to praise and that he was now applying to seduction.

“I need you to take me home.”

“We haven’t said goodbye to—”

“Grant. I have been watching you hold conversations in that suit for three hours. I have been watching your hands gesture and your jaw work and your throat move when you swallow your bourbon, and I have been thinking about what those hands and that jaw and that throat are going to do to me when we get home, and if you do not take me out of this building in the next ninety seconds, I am going to find the coat closet and generate a photograph that makes the last one look like a church bulletin.”

We left in sixty.

The apartment door barely closed before his mouth was on mine.

Not gentle. Not the tender, unhurried contact of two men returning home from a pleasant evening. Hungry. The specific, consuming hunger of a man who’d spent three hours performing social restraint while every nerve in his body catalogued reasons to abandon it. His hands found my lapels and pulled, and my back hit the hallway wall, and the sound his mouth made against mine — a low, urgent hum of satisfaction — vibrated through my chest and settled directly in my cock.

“The suit stays on,” he said against my mouth. “For now.”

“That seems counterproductive.”

“That seems like anticipation. You taught me patience. Let me demonstrate.”

He pushed me harder against the wall. His body a long, lean line of black fabric and warm skin, pressing against me from chest to thigh. His hips rolled forward — deliberate, precise, the physical vocabulary of a man who understood leverage — and I felt him through the layers. Hard. The evidence of three hours of wanting, delivered with the controlled specificity of someone who’d learned that anticipation was its own form of pleasure.

His mouth moved to my neck. Above the collar, along the tendon, his tongue tracing a line from the hinge of my jaw to the hollow beneath my ear. His teeth found the spot — the one he’d mapped during four months of meticulous research — and bit gently, and my hips jerked forward involuntarily, and the sound that came out of my mouth was not a sound the Iron Saint had ever made in any arena.

“You were beautiful tonight,” he said against my skin. Each word a small vibration, a localized earthquake measured on a scale that only I could feel. “In that room. Holding my hand. Letting people see you. Not the legend. Not the coach. Not the man who hid for twenty years. You. A forty-six-year-old man at a party with the person he loves, holding his bourbon with both hands because he’s nervous and not pretending otherwise. That version of you is the one I want to take apart.”

“You’re doing an effective job.”

“I haven’t started.”

His hands left my lapels. Traveled down the front of my jacket, over my stomach, finding the belt with the one-handed dexterity that I’d stopped being surprised by and started being grateful for. The buckle opened. The button followed. The zipper — and then his hand was inside my trousers, his fingers wrapping around me through the boxer briefs, and the contact — warm, firm, his grip adjusting immediately to the shape and the hardness he found — made my head fall back against the wall.

“Being shown off feels nothing like being exposed,” I said. Rough. His hand moving in a slow, exploratory rhythm, learning me through fabric the way he learned everything — with his whole attention, holding nothing back. “I didn’t know that. I spent twenty years assuming they were the same thing, and tonight you showed me they’re not.”

“I know you didn’t know.” He freed me from the briefs. His bare hand on my cock — warm, calloused at the base of the fingers from years of gripping ring ropes, the slight roughness creating a friction that was miles from smooth and absolutely devastating. “That’s why I took you. Because you deserved to feel what it’s like to be wanted in a room full of people and to know that the wanting is not a threat. It’s a fact. A fact about you. That three hundred people watched you tonight and the one who wanted you most is the one who gets to take you home.”

He dropped to his knees.

Right there in the hallway. Still in the black suit, the fabric pulling across his thighs as he knelt, his hair coming loose from the tie, dark curls falling against his cheeks. He looked up at me with an expression I’d memorized across a hundred encounters and that still, every time, made my chest feel like it was trying to contain something larger than its architecture allowed.

No performance. No theatrical seduction. Just want. Specific, focused, unhesitating want, directed at me with the full force of a man whose greatest talent was making another person feel like the only important thing in the room.

“Let me show you what else it feels like,” he said.

He took me into his mouth, and every coherent thought I’d had since the gala’s opening cocktail evaporated.

Slow. Devastating. The patience I’d taught him — the same patience I’d used to edge him on a ring apron while itemizing his technical strengths — deployed against me with the precision of a man who’d been an exceptional student and was now demonstrating mastery. His tongue traced the underside from base to tip, mapping the vein, finding the ridge beneath the head and pressing against it with a specificity that told me he’d memorized the geography and was navigating it deliberately.

His lips sealed around the head. He sucked — not hard, not soft, the exact pressure that made my thighs lock and my hands fly to his hair. The curls between my fingers. The dark silk of them, warm and slightly damp from the evening’s heat. I held without directing, because tonight was his, and the surrender was the gift.

He took me deeper. His throat opened, his jaw relaxed, and I felt the wet heat of his mouth envelop me in a way that made my vision narrow to a single point: the sight of Nico Cruz on his knees in our hallway, in a suit that cost more than my first car, with his eyes closed and his cheeks hollowed and his hands gripping my hips to hold me steady against the wall because my legs had stopped being reliable.

“Nico—” My voice. Wrecked. The voice of a man who’d spent two decades controlling every sound he produced in professional spaces and who was now producing sounds in a hallway that would have scandalized every locker room he’d ever occupied. “Bedroom. I want— I need—”

He pulled off. Slowly. His tongue trailing the underside as he withdrew, a parting gesture so deliberate it felt like punctuation. He stood. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Took my hand in his.

“Come on,” he said. And led me down the hallway in our suits — his buttoned, mine undone, both of us stumbling toward the bedroom with the graceless urgency of two men who’d spent three hours pretending to be civilized.

He pushed me onto the bed.

I landed on my back, and he was on me immediately — straddling my hips, the weight of him settling across my thighs with the precise distribution of a man who understood body mechanics at a molecular level. His hands found my jacket and stripped it off my shoulders, working the sleeves down my arms with an efficiency that would have been clinical if his mouth hadn’t been on my neck the entire time.

“Every scar,” he said, unbuttoning my shirt. His lips following his fingers, kissing each inch of skin as it was revealed. The shoulder separation. The cage match. The cracked sternum. The small, faded marks that twenty years of professional wrestling had inscribed on a body I’d spent four years believing retirement had diminished. “Every mark this body carries. They’re not damage, Grant. They’re evidence. Twenty years of the thing you loved most, written on the body of the man I love most.”

He undressed me completely. Shirt, trousers, briefs — everything removed with the focused attention of a man for whom undressing was not a prelude to the main event but an event in itself. He kissed the surgical scar at the back of my neck — pressing his lips to the raised tissue with the specific, deliberate tenderness that had rewritten my relationship with that scar across four months of being touched by someone who treated it as neither invincible nor broken.

Then he stood. At the foot of the bed. And undressed himself.

Slowly.

The jacket first. Shrugged off the shoulders and dropped to the floor. Then the shirt, unbuttoned from the top, each button a small revelation — the hollow of his throat, the collarbone, the lean chest with its dark hair, the tattoo on his ribs that I’d been tracking through glimpses since the first week and that I now knew intimately enough to trace in the dark. His stomach, tight and defined. The line of dark hair below his navel that disappeared into his waistband like a road sign pointing toward a destination I intended to visit.

The trousers. His belt. The sound of the buckle — metallic, specific, the sound I’d learned to associate with the moment before everything became skin.

He stood naked at the foot of the bed. The bedroom light catching the planes of his body — lean, muscular, the warm brown skin that I’d spent four months learning with my hands and my mouth and the diagnostic attention of a man who’d spent twenty years studying bodies and had never found one that rewarded study this thoroughly.

“You’re staring again,” he said.

“I’m always staring. You’re always worth staring at.”

“Professionally?”

“Get on the bed, Nico.”

He retrieved the lube from the nightstand — our nightstand, in our apartment, the one we shared, where the framed gala photo would sit by morning — and climbed onto the bed. Straddled me again. His cock against my stomach, hard and flushed, the heat of him searing against my skin.

He slicked his fingers. Reached behind himself. And I watched — because watching Nico prepare himself was one of the things I would never, for as long as I lived, tire of seeing. The way his face changed. The initial concentration giving way to pleasure, the pleasure deepening as he added a second finger, his hips shifting, his lips parting, his eyes half-closing while his body opened for something it wanted with an urgency that had nothing to do with performance.

“Let me,” I said. Reaching for him.

“Tonight I do the work.” He caught my wrist. Guided it back to the mattress. “You spent twenty years doing the work. Controlling every interaction. Managing every outcome. Tonight you lie there, and you feel it, and you let someone else decide the pace.”

He positioned himself. Sank onto me slowly.

The heat. The pressure. The tight, wet grip of his body accepting mine with a trust that I felt in my chest as clearly as I felt it in my cock. His hands braced on my stomach, fingers spread, and he descended inch by inch — unhurried, savoring, his face telling the story of every sensation in real time because he’d learned, from me, that transparency was more intimate than performance.

He seated fully. Held. The fullness and the connection and the specific, devastating fact of two men joined completely in a bed they shared, in a home they’d built, after a night where the world had seen them and the world was still intact.

“You held my hand in front of three hundred people tonight,” he said. Beginning to move. Slowly. Rising and falling with the controlled rhythm that matched his heartbeat, that matched mine, that matched the pace of a man who intended to make this last. “You let Marcus Webb see you. You let the cameras see you. You let every person in that room see what I see — a man who is extraordinary and afraid and choosing to be both at the same time.”

I gripped his hips. My scarred, imperfect hands on his body — the lagging ring finger and the strong ones, all of them working together to hold the man who had taught me that being held didn’t require being hidden. The grip tightened as he increased the pace, his body rising higher, falling harder, the angle shifting until the downstroke produced a sound from his throat that I recognized as the specific, involuntary response to the precise internal pressure I’d learned to create.

“Harder,” I said. Not a command. A request. The vocabulary that had shifted, finally and permanently, from control to collaboration.

He braced his hands on my chest and moved faster. The rhythm building with the controlled precision he brought to the ring — instinctive, responsive, reading my body the way he read a crowd. His thighs flexing against my hips. His cock heavy and hard against my stomach, leaving a wet trail across my skin with every downstroke. The visual was obscene and specific and belonged entirely to us — Nico Cruz riding me in our bedroom with the gala still on his skin and the taste of bourbon still in my mouth and the sound of his breathing filling the room like a language we’d invented together.

I reached between us. Wrapped my hand around his cock. Matched the rhythm. The dual sensation — his body around me, hot and gripping; his cock in my hand, hard and slick — built a current that flowed in both directions without anyone steering it.

“Tell me something,” he breathed. Not a demand for praise. Not the hunger that had driven our early encounters — the desperate need to hear specific approval from the one person whose judgment mattered. Something different. The request of a man who had learned to give himself the validation he needed and who now wanted to hear it from his partner not because he required it but because sharing it was part of the joy.

“You are the bravest person I have ever known,” I said. My hand moving. His body moving. The words and the rhythm inseparable, the praise and the pleasure fused into a single act of intimacy that had been the architecture of our relationship since the first night in the ring. “Not because you’re fearless. Because you’re afraid and you do it anyway. You walked into that gala tonight and held my hand because you decided that visibility was worth the cost, and you decided it at twenty-three, and you’ve never wavered, and the fact that your courage made mine possible is the thing I will be grateful for until the day I die.”

“Grant—” His voice cracked. The rhythm stuttered. His body tightened around me with a force that told me he was close — not just physically but emotionally, the two things linked in him the way they’d always been linked, the orgasm and the vulnerability arriving together because Nico Cruz experienced pleasure as a full-body event that included his heart.

“I love you,” I said. Not at the climax. Before it. In the rising, in the building, in the space where the words could be heard and felt and absorbed into the body rather than lost in the noise of the ending. “I love you, and the words are easy now, and I will say them every day, and the ease is the gift you gave me.”

He came.

His body seized around me — the tight, rhythmic contractions that I felt along my entire length. His cock pulsed in my hand, hot and urgent, spilling across my stomach and my chest in long, shuddering waves. His face was open and wrecked and radiant — beautiful in the way that had nothing to do with bone structure or symmetry or any of the external qualities that had made him famous, and everything to do with trust. The face of a man who had allowed himself to be completely seen by the person he loved, and who had discovered that being seen was not the catastrophe his childhood had taught him to expect.

I followed him. The orgasm rolling through me like something tectonic — deep, structural, originating in a place that had been locked for forty-five years and that Nico had opened with specific praise and steady hands and the absolute, uncompromising refusal to let me hide. I came inside him with his name on my mouth and his heart under my hands and the understanding that this — this room, this bed, this man — was the thing I’d spent my entire career being afraid of, and the thing that, now that I’d stopped being afraid, felt less like a risk and more like the first safe place I’d ever occupied.

He collapsed against my chest. Both of us breathing hard. Both of us slick and trembling and tangled in the ruins of an evening that had begun with terror and ended with the specific, private, unreplicable peace of two people who had chosen each other in public and then come home and chosen each other again in the dark.

We lay tangled in the sheets. His head on my chest. The suits crumpled on the floor like shed skins. The apartment quiet except for our breathing and the city beyond the window and the intermittent hum of the refrigerator that I’d been meaning to get serviced for three weeks and that Nico had threatened to name if I didn’t.

“How did it feel?” he asked. Eventually. His voice lazy, satisfied, the voice of a man who had been thoroughly and specifically loved and who was in no hurry to do anything other than exist. “Being shown off.”

I pressed my mouth against his hair. Breathed in. The cologne he’d worn for the gala, fading now, mixed with clean sweat and the specific, warm scent that was simply Nico — the olfactory signature of the man who had rearranged my understanding of what a life could contain.

“It felt like being seen,” I said. “By choice. For the first time.”

He was quiet for a moment. His fingers traced a slow pattern on my chest — circles, maybe, or letters, the kind of absent, intimate gesture that belonged to the vocabulary of two people who’d been together long enough that touch no longer required intention to be meaningful.

“Marcus Webb,” he said. “When he said he wished he’d had the guts.”

“Yeah.”

“You know that’s not your fault. That he didn’t.”

“I know.”

“But you’re thinking about the years. The ones where you didn’t either. And you’re wondering whether his years and your years add up to the same thing, and whether the difference between you and Marcus is courage or luck or timing.”

I looked at the ceiling. The ceiling of our apartment, in our bedroom, above our bed. The ceiling that held no answers and required none because the man lying against my chest had already provided them.

“The difference,” I said, “is you. A twenty-seven-year-old wrestler who walked into a training ring and refused to let a forty-five-year-old legend hide from him. That’s the difference. Not courage. Not timing. You.”

He lifted his head. Looked at me. His eyes — the real eyes, the ones that existed beneath every performance and every mask and every layer of theatrical confidence — were bright and clear and holding me with the specific attention that had been the foundation of everything since a midnight ring and a pair of hands on the ropes.

“Say it again,” he said.

“I love you, Nico.”

“Once more.”

“I love you. And the gala photo goes on the nightstand. And next year we go again. And the year after that. And I hold your hand in every room until holding it feels as natural as taping my wrists before a match, which it already does, and I’m just now letting myself admit it.”

He kissed me. Gently. The gentle kind — not the prelude to another round, not the strategic deployment of mouth-against-mouth for a specific physical objective. Just a kiss. The kind of kiss that two people share when they’ve said everything that needs to be said and the kiss is the seal on the silence.

He settled back against my chest. His breathing slowed. His body softened into sleep with the rapid, complete surrender of a man who trusted the surface beneath him absolutely.

I held him. The gala photo would be framed by morning. The suits would be dry-cleaned. Marcus Webb’s sentence would live in my memory as proof that the hiding had cost others too, and that the ending of it — mine, specifically, in a ring, on camera, with a microphone and three words and the man I loved standing across from me — had been witnessed by people who needed to see it as badly as I’d needed to do it.

None of it touched us here.

Here was ours.

← Back to Full Nelson, No Regrets