Call the Pitch, Call Me Yours

Exclusive Bonus Chapter by Chase Power

Opening Night

Too hot for retailers. One year after the epilogue. Micah’s POV. 18+.

The tunnel smelled like fresh paint and anticipation.

Harbor City Field had undergone renovations — new concrete, updated lighting. Everything cleaner except our corridor. The one where Darius first kissed me against a wall. Where I’d found him after the shutout. Where I’d looked back once when I wasn’t sure I’d ever look at him again.

I was standing there forty-five minutes before the home opener with a hard-on building since four o’clock, when Darius traced defensive routes on the whiteboard with those thick, battered hands — the crooked index finger, the scarred thumb, the wide palms that had caught a hundred and sixty-two thousand pitches and held my face in a concrete corridor and gripped my hips hard enough to leave marks I wore beneath my uniform like a secret language. His voice carried the same directive authority it had carried the first time he said good and watched my body rearrange itself around the syllable. A year and a half together and his hands still did this to me.

He rounded the corner. “You’re supposed to be in the clubhouse.” I pressed him against the wall. “The routine now includes you. Non-negotiable.” His hands gripped my hips. “Five minutes. Then warm up.” “Yes sir.”

The words hit him the way they always did. I kissed him hard. His thumb found the tendon at the back of my neck. “Tell me what pitch to throw first.” “Fastball. Inside corner.” “And after?” His fingers slipped beneath my waistband. “You come home. Shower. Put on nothing. Wait for me. And then I show you what I’ve been thinking about since you walked into the clubhouse looking like the most arrogant, beautiful, insufferable man I’ve ever loved.”

“You’re good, Micah. Now go throw seven scoreless and come home so I can prove it.”

I threw seven scoreless innings. Then I went home.

I showered fast. Put on nothing, as instructed. Lay on our bed — where his catcher’s mask sat on the nightstand beside my gold chain — and waited.

The front door opened at 10:47. Keys on the counter. Shoes by the door. He appeared in the doorway. Still in the polo. Reading glasses on his forehead. Silver temples catching the lamp. His eyes found me and went dark.

I was on my back. Naked. Chain pooled in the hollow of my throat. Already half-hard because eighteen months had trained my body to respond to his proximity the way a tuning fork responds to its resonant frequency.

“You followed instructions.” “I always follow your instructions.” “You shook Elias off three times tonight.” “Elias isn’t you. Nobody is you. Elias will never, in his entire career, make my dick hard by putting down two fingers.”

He pulled the polo over his head. His chest — thick, dense, scarred from two decades. He’d softened slightly in retirement. Not diminished. Settled. I loved every pound. He removed his belt. The buckle hitting hardwood was the transition between Darius-the-coach and Darius-the-man-who-owned-me. My cock responded accordingly.

He undressed completely. Stood at the foot of the bed. Broad shoulders. Thick chest. Line of coarse hair from navel down. His cock heavy, thickening, framed by powerful thighs. Fully hard by the time I’d finished looking. The sight of his arousal — caused by me, naked and waiting on his sheets — made my own cock stiffen fully against my stomach.

“Seven scoreless,” he said, climbing onto the bed, straddling my thighs. “Nine strikeouts. Curveball in the fifth had twelve inches of break.” He lowered his mouth to my throat. Dragged his tongue along the chain — wet heat and cool metal arching my spine. “You threw it because you trusted the shape. The pitch is yours now.” His tongue found my nipple. Pressed flat. Circled. He bit down — suggestion, then statement, then claim. “It was always ours.”

He worked down my body with methodical devotion. Ribs where teeth made me gasp. Obliques where his tongue traced muscle. My hip bone where he bit hard enough to leave a mark and send a bolt straight to my cock, which was straining, leaking, desperate for contact he was deliberately withholding.

“Tell me what you want.” “Your mouth. On me. Now.” “Good. You asked.”

He wrapped his hand around the base — firm, calloused, the grip that had caught a hundred thousand pitches — and held me while his mouth descended. His tongue pressed flat from root to tip in a single slow stroke that jerked my hips. Then his lips sealed and he took me deep, and the world narrowed to wet heat and the patience of a man who had never rushed a sequence.

He worked me with game-plan precision. Slow strokes, each deeper, tongue hitting the exact pressure point that blurred my vision. His hand held my stomach down when my hips tried to thrust, controlling tempo the way he’d controlled every game — with positioning, patience, his refusal to let the man on the mound dictate pace. He brought me close. Held me there. Pulled off.

“Darius — fuck –” “Not yet.” He bit the inside of my thigh hard enough to make me yelp. “You said seven innings. I’m calling nine.” “That metaphor doesn’t –” “Quiet. I’m working.”

His mouth returned. Deeper — deep enough I felt his throat working around me, and the sensation combined with the visual — his silver-templed head between my thighs, lips stretched around my cock, eyes closed in concentration — nearly ended it.

His hand slid between my thighs. Slick lubricant palmed from the nightstand without my noticing, because Darius Cole prepared for every contingency including making me incoherent. One finger pressed inside while his mouth worked. Dual sensation — fullness below, heat above, pressure from within, suction from without. My nervous system overloaded. The sounds I made were not words.

Second finger. Scissoring gently. Finding the angle he’d discovered in St. Louis and exploited ever since — the spot that arced my spine, pulsed my cock in his mouth, dissolved every coherent thought into static. My back bowed. My hand gripped his head.

“I need — please –“

He pulled off. Swollen lips. Dark eyes. Calm, focused, completely in control. “Tell me exactly what you need.”

“You. Inside me. All of you. I’ve been waiting since four o’clock when you traced routes on a whiteboard and I almost came in the clubhouse, since the tunnel when your fingers were in my waistband, since the sixth inning when I saw you writing in your notebook and knew you were writing about me. Please. Darius. I need you to fuck me.”

“Good. That’s all you had to do. Ask.”

He withdrew his fingers. I whimpered. He positioned between my thighs. I watched him roll the condom on — thick fingers working latex with the attention of a man who treated preparation as care. Watched him slick himself — his fist around his own cock, the image so aggressively erotic my legs opened wider without my brain’s participation.

He pressed forward. Tip against me. Pressure building. Resistance preceding the opening. The opening itself — slow, gradual, my body accepting him in increments. His hands cradled my hips. His eyes held mine.

“Eyes on me.”

I watched his face. Tension in his jaw. Sweat at his temples. Tendons in his forearms. The moment he was fully seated and his expression was not composure but surrender. Eighteen months and being inside me still affected him like my curveball affected hitters — shock, wonder, the beautiful incomprehension of something his preparation hadn’t accounted for.

“Move. Please move.”

Slow, deep strokes. Angle found on the second thrust because he’d memorized my body the way he’d memorized lineups. Each stroke hitting the spot, each impact sending shock waves through pelvis, spine, skull — detonating into white light.

“You pitched a perfect game,” he said, voice ragged, rhythm building. “And the only thing I could think about for seven innings –” deeper, harder, my back bowing, my cry filling the room — “was this. Getting you home. Getting you under me. Hearing this exact sound.”

“You’re so good.” Thrust driving air from my lungs. “You have always been so good. On the mound. In this bed. Every time you trust me, every time you let me see you undone, desperate, mine — you are the best thing that has ever happened to me. And I have never once, in eighteen months, stopped wanting you.”

Pace increasing. Composure fracturing — breathing ragged, grip tightening to bruise, thrusts harder, patience abandoned for raw need. I wrapped my legs around his waist. Pulled deeper. Met each thrust. Hand finding his face — jaw, scar, beard. Forehead to forehead. Breathing each other’s air.

“I love you.” Just truth during the act.

“I love you.” Voice cracking the way it always did, because Darius Cole could control everything except his own voice when telling me the truth inside my body.

He reached between us. Hand around my cock, stroking in time. Fullness, friction, his hand, his voice, his eyes. “Come for me. Show me. Let me have every part of you.”

I came with force radiating through every nerve. Body clenching around him. His name tearing from my throat — prayer and profanity. The spasm pulling his orgasm like a tide. Shudder through his thighs. Groan buried in my neck. Hips driving forward one final time. The pulse of him inside me the last sensation before my brain ceased operations and the world went quiet the way it only went quiet when Darius Cole had taken me apart completely.

We lay tangled. His full weight on me. The most grounding force I’d ever known. More grounding than the chain. More settling than the pregame meal. More real than any ritual, because he was the ritual now.

Minutes later. His face in my neck. My hand tracing silver at his temples.

“I threw a curveball in the fifth. Twelve inches. No one called it. I just threw it.” “That’s how it works. I teach you the pitch. You make it yours. Trust becomes instinct.”

“Except here.” I pressed his hand against my chest, over my heart. “Here, I still need the fingers.”

He smiled. The full one. The one that changed his entire face.

“Here,” he said, pressing harder, “you’ll always have them.”

On the nightstand, my gold chain rested beside his catcher’s mask. Both retired from their original purpose. Both kept because some things you hold on to even after they stop being necessary. Not as souvenirs. As proof that the man who wore the mask once called a pitch that changed his life, and the man who threw it trusted a voice he’d known for three weeks more than an arm he’d known for twenty-six years, and together they’d built something that survived every breaking and was stronger for the repair.

Some things about us would never change.

The best things never needed to.