🏒 The Cup, Behind Closed Doors

A bonus chapter from The Captain’s Crown by Chase Power

Before you start — this scene takes place between the end of Chapter 27 and the start of the parade in the epilogue. If you haven’t read the novel yet, start there: The Captain’s Crown.

Tyler

I woke up at eleven forty-two in the morning to the sound of Adam Mitchell’s voice, low, on a phone call in the kitchenette of our suite, saying, very politely, into a receiver:

“Yes. I understand. No, please tell them I will be there. I am telling you personally that I will be there at four. Yes. Thank you. You too.”

He hung up.

I cracked one eye.

He was at the kitchenette counter in nothing but a pair of my boxer briefs, which were too big on him in a specific way that made my brain stop being functional, and his hair was wrecked in the particular way a man’s hair gets wrecked when it has dried on a pillow after a shower he did not take, and he was pouring coffee out of the hotel percolator into two mugs. His watch was still on his left wrist. His father’s initials were visible on his ribs in the slanted noon light through the gap in the blackout curtains. And behind him, on the dresser across the kitchenette, sat a silver trophy the size of a small child.

The Stanley Cup.

Exactly where we had left it at five forty-seven in the morning.

I sat up on one elbow.

“Cap.”

He turned.

His face did the thing it had been doing since five-thirty this morning, which was not quite a smile. Adam Mitchell does not smile when he is not sure what his face is going to do, and tonight his face had been not-quite-smiling on and off for nine straight hours.

“Morning, Tyler.”

“What time is it.”

“Eleven forty-three.”

“Who was on the phone.”

“Front desk. The mayor’s people called. Parade’s moved to four. Procession route’s changed. I told them I would be there.”

“You’re going to be there.”

“I am the captain, Tyler.”

“Cap, you look like a man who had champagne poured down his spine twelve hours ago.”

“I did have champagne poured down my spine twelve hours ago.”

“By whom.”

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

He set the coffee pot down.

He came over to the bed.

He sat on the edge of it, right by my hip, and he leaned down and kissed me, once, slow, with coffee on his breath and a kind of stunned gentleness in his mouth that he had been bringing to every kiss since the horn had gone last night. Then he straightened up and he said:

“I made you coffee.”

“Yeah. I heard.”

“You want it now.”

“Cap.”

“Yeah.”

“It is eleven forty-three in the morning. You have a parade at four. The Stanley Cup is on the dresser of our hotel suite. We are never going to have this morning again.”

He looked at me for a long second.

He said, “That is a compelling argument, Tyler.”

I sat up the rest of the way.

I pulled the sheet off myself.

“Come here,” I said.

He came.

I had, at some point in the last eighteen hours, made a private promise to myself that I was going to fuck Adam Mitchell with the Stanley Cup in the room, and that I was going to take my time doing it, and that he was going to enjoy it, and I was not going to apologize for any of this to anyone ever.

I had not told him the promise.

He caught on quick.

I pulled him onto the bed by the waistband of my boxer briefs, which were, as I have said, too big on him, and I got them off him in about three seconds, and I had him flat on his back on the sheets with one thigh hooked up over my hip before he had set his coffee down. He had set it down on the nightstand, which I appreciated, because I had not wanted to explain to a housekeeper why there had been coffee on the duvet.

He looked up at me from the pillow.

His hair was a disaster. His eyes were half-closed. His mouth was bitten-red from last night and the first kiss this morning and the second kiss thirty seconds ago, and he had the specific wrung-out slack of a man who has won a Cup and fucked his boyfriend twice against various hotel surfaces and slept six hours and woken up to a schedule that had been rearranged for him, and he was, in that moment, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in a room that also contained a two-and-a-half-foot-tall silver trophy.

“Tyler.”

“Adam.”

“You are going to make me late for the parade.”

“Adam.”

“Yeah.”

“I am thirty years old and my husband-to-be just won the Stanley Cup. The parade can wait forty-five minutes. Put your hand in my hair.”

He put his hand in my hair.

I kissed the line of his jaw down to the hollow under his ear, because I had learned, over six months, that Adam Mitchell had one specific spot on his body that undid him inside of ten seconds, and that spot was the hollow under his ear, and I had not, at any point in the last six months, told him that I knew. I kissed him there now. Slow. Open mouth. The particular pressure I had figured out two months ago and had not once stopped using.

He made a sound I wanted to have on record.

“Tyler—“

“Quiet, Cap.”

“Tyler.”

“Quiet.”

He went quiet.

I want to be specific about what the room looked like, because that was the whole point.

The blackout curtains were half drawn. The slanted noon light was coming in in one long rectangle across the end of the bed. The bed was a king, white sheets, duvet crumpled on the floor where it had ended up in the second scene last night, two mugs of coffee now cooling on nightstands. Our clothes were in a trail from the doorway to the bathroom. His tuxedo shirt was on the reading chair. My championship t-shirt, which was mine now that it had been wet through, was in a ball at the foot of the bed. The Stanley Cup was on the dresser across from the foot of the bed.

Mike had set it there personally. He had not wrapped it. He had not fussed with it. He had handed it to Adam at four fifteen in the morning with the particular reverence of a man who had been handling this trophy for thirty years and who knew exactly what it weighed, and Adam had taken it, and Adam had put it on the dresser, and he had not moved it.

It was looking at us.

I am going to say that because I want to. It was looking at us. The Cup has a specific posture. The Cup is three and a half feet of ceremonial silver, and the barrel of it has been engraved with the names of every team that has ever won it, and its personality in a room is the personality of an absolute matriarch. It was looking at us and it did not disapprove.

I got down on the bed between Adam’s thighs.

I put my mouth on him.

Adam

I am going to let him narrate most of this, because he is better at it than I am, but I want to say for the record that I was not prepared for the first thirty seconds.

Tyler Richardson is, I have learned across six months, a man who goes slow when he has made a decision to get you somewhere specific. He had decided. I do not know when he had decided. He had maybe decided it last night when he had kissed me against the window with Boston lit up forty-two stories below us. He had maybe decided it in the shower we had not taken. He had maybe decided it this morning when he had walked into our bathroom at four forty in the morning to find me brushing my teeth with one hand and holding his hip with the other, and he had looked at the Cup in the mirror over my shoulder and had said, quietly, we are doing this before the parade.

I had not, at the time, understood what this was.

He was showing me now.

He had my hands pinned one-handed above my head by the wrists, my forearms crossed, his palm flat on both of them at once, which was a position he had gotten me into roughly three times in our relationship and which I had, each time, been reluctant to admit I was going to think about for the next week. He was holding them loosely. He was not pinning me in a way that would have stopped me from getting away. He was holding them in a way that was saying: stay there.

I was staying there.

His other hand was on my hip.

His mouth was on me.

He was doing a thing with his mouth that was new. It was not rushed and it was not performing. It was a slow, specific, patient thing that was designed to put me exactly where he wanted me and keep me there, and after about a minute of it I made a sound that was not a word, and he lifted his head just enough to say, against my hipbone:

“Look at me, Adam.”

I looked.

He was looking up at me from between my thighs. His hair was a mess. The light was across half his face. His mouth was red. His eyes were a specific shade that I had learned, in the last month, was the shade they went when he was going to take something for himself.

He said, “Keep looking.”

Then he lowered his head and he kept going, and he did not break eye contact, and I did not break eye contact, and the Stanley Cup, across the room, sat on the dresser, and I do not know if it was watching us but Tyler had been right, it was in the room, and it was not the point, and it was also absolutely the point.

When I came I said his name.

I said it loud.

I did not mean to say it loud. I said it loud because I had been saying be quiet, Tyler for six months and tonight, at noon, the day after we had won the Stanley Cup, in the suite at the team hotel, I was not being quiet.

He pulled back.

He looked at me.

He smiled.

The small private one. The third one. The fourth. The one I had been losing count of since January.

“Good, Cap,” he said.

Tyler

I let him come down for about forty seconds.

He was boneless on the pillows, his chest rising and falling, his eyes closed, his arm thrown up over his forehead in the specific way he did when he had given up entirely, and I knelt up on the bed between his thighs and I looked at him for a minute, because I was not, in my lifetime, going to look away from this on purpose.

Then I said, “Cap.”

“Yeah.”

“Roll over.”

He cracked one eye.

“Tyler.”

“Roll over. Hands on the headboard.”

“Tyler, I am thirty-two years old, I was on skates for seventy minutes last night—“

“Adam. I have asked you for one thing since you won the Stanley Cup. One thing. Roll over. Put your hands on the headboard.”

He looked at me for a long second.

Then he did what I had not been sure he was going to do, which was roll over.

He went up onto his knees in front of me. He put both hands on the headboard slats. He was already hard again. He was thirty-two and he had, in fact, been on skates for seventy minutes the night before, and I had been keeping careful tabs on what that body was doing and what it needed, and I knew, because he had told me three weeks ago on a porch, that he was not actually tired right now.

He was showing off.

I am going to say that, because he is not going to say it, and he is going to read this later and he is going to object, and I am going to let him. He was showing off. Adam Mitchell had been waiting eighteen hours for a private room with me and the Cup in it, and he was going to give me a demonstration.

I opened the drawer of the nightstand. I took out the lube we had brought because we are adults who plan. I took out the condom for the same reason.

I put one hand on the small of his back.

I leaned over him.

I pressed my mouth to the nape of his neck, where the gray at his temples was starting to creep, and I whispered:

“Good boy.”

He shuddered.

I had not said it to him. I had said it to myself, about him, three times in six months, in my head, in the dark, when he was already asleep. I had never said it to his face. He had been saying it to me, in specific voice registers, for a hundred and seventy nights in a row, and I had decided, on the porch three weeks ago after the proposal that had not technically happened yet, that I was going to give it back to him one time, eventually, at a specific moment. Today was the moment.

He said, into the headboard, ”Tyler.”

I said, “Yeah.”

“Say it again.”

“Good boy, Cap.”

“Jesus.”

I worked him open slow.

I took my time.

I talked to him through it in the specific voice I had learned, in February, did particular things to him, which was quiet and low and completely calm, and I said specific things into the nape of his neck with my mouth, which I am not going to walk through the full transcript of because he is going to read this, but the key ones were look at you and you took that so well and I am going to take my time with you because you asked me to.

When I was inside him he was gripping the headboard so hard I watched his knuckles go white, and his head dropped forward between his arms, and he was not making a sound, because he had, somewhere in the last twenty minutes, remembered every single time I had told him to be quiet over the last six months and had decided, silently, that it was my turn to give the orders.

I was.

I set a slow pace.

I did not look at the Cup. I had been joking, an hour ago, about the Cup, but now I was in the actual scene and the Cup was not in it. The scene was just us. His hands on the headboard. My hand on the small of his back. The heel of my other hand on his hip. My chest pressed to his spine. His name in my mouth. My name in his.

I told him to come for me.

He came.

He came on the sheets with his forehead pressed to his own forearm and my name in a low, wrecked voice into the mattress, and I followed him inside a minute after, with both arms wrapped around his ribs and my forehead at the base of his skull, and we stayed like that for a while without moving.

Eventually I pulled out. I dealt with the condom. I rolled him onto his back. He was half asleep already, arm thrown over his eyes, and I went to the bathroom and got a warm washcloth and cleaned him up the way he had cleaned me up six months ago in his apartment, and I pulled the sheet over him and I climbed back into bed and I put my head on his chest.

He said, with his eyes closed, very quietly:

“Tyler.”

“Yeah.”

“You called me a good boy.”

“I did.”

“Was that premeditated.”

“I made a plan for it three weeks ago.”

“…Tyler.”

“Yeah.”

“I am going to be thinking about that for a very long time.”

“I know, Adam.”

“Okay.”

I kissed the tattoo on his ribs, where his father’s initials were.

We lay there.

At twelve fifty-four he said, “Parade’s in three hours.”

“I know.”

“I have to shower.”

“I know.”

“You should shower with me. Logistically.”

“Logistically.”

“Tyler. Get up.”

I got up.

We showered together. It was the specific shower of two men who have just spent forty-five minutes making sure neither of us was going to have to think clearly again for twenty-four hours, which is to say it was efficient, and warm, and he washed my hair because he likes to, and I washed his because he always lets me now, and we did not kiss very much in the shower because we had to be in a motorcade at four and we were both grown men who understood arithmetic.

We got out. We got dressed. He put on the suit he had been given to wear for the parade, which the organization had messengered to the hotel at ten this morning, and I put on mine, and he stood in front of the mirror tying his tie, and I sat on the edge of the bed watching him, and behind me, in the mirror, I could see the Stanley Cup still on the dresser.

He caught my eye in the mirror.

He said, conversationally, still tying his tie:

“Tyler.”

“Yeah.”

“Do not tell anyone what we just did next to that thing.”

“Cap. I am not going to write it down.”

“Good.”

“I am going to remember it in detail until I die.”

“That is fine.”

“Also I am going to take one picture of you in that suit, in this room, with that trophy, before we leave.”

He looked at me in the mirror.

He said, “Okay.”

I took the picture.

It is in the folder on my phone labeled Cap. It is not in this book. You are not going to see it. Adam is never going to see it either, because I have never shown him that folder, and I am not going to start now.

At three-oh-two, Mike the keeper knocked on the door. Adam handed him the Cup. Mike winked at Adam. Mike left.

At three fifty-five, we went downstairs.

At four, we got in the lead vehicle of the Stanley Cup parade.

At five-oh-nine, as we were rolling down Causeway Street with the city lit up gold along the route and a million people screaming, Adam took my hand, on camera, in front of the entire Eastern Seaboard, and he did not let go.

And I thought, very clearly, in the back of a convertible:

The Cup in a room with me. The man in a suit beside me. The parade down a street he’s loved since he was six. The rest of our lives.

Okay.

Okay.

—Ty Richardson, Boston, June

That’s all of it.

If you want the whole story — the nine years before, the office scene, the confession at five a.m. on empty ice — the full novel is live now.

And if you want more from Chase Power, there’s plenty waiting for you on the author page.

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