Off the Clock
A Full Contact Bonus Chapter by Chase Power
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after the events of Full Contact. It contains major spoilers and explicit sexual content (18+). Read the novel first for the full experience.
Set one week after the epilogue. Arden’s POV. Explicit content — 18+.
The preseason schedule arrived on a Monday, and by Tuesday evening, Kellan had taped it to the refrigerator and organized every training session into color-coded blocks in his tactical notebook with the intensity of a man planning a military operation.
“You’re color-coding your commute,” I said.
“I’m optimizing my route to the facility.”
“You have one route. It’s a left turn and a highway.”
“There are variables. Traffic patterns. Construction schedules.”
“You’ve drawn an alternate route through a cemetery.”
He looked at the notebook. Looked at me. “It saves four minutes during rush hour.”
I loved this man with a completeness that still ambushed me at unexpected moments — sitting at our kitchen counter in our Brooklyn brownstone, watching him strategize his morning commute with the same precision he applied to defensive alignments, wearing nothing but gym shorts and his reading glasses (my reading glasses, actually, which he’d stolen two months ago and which made him look like an extremely muscular, deeply confused professor).
“Your glasses are on,” I said.
“They help me focus.”
“They’re prescription. For my eyes. They make everything blurry for you.”
“Exactly. Eliminates distractions. Very productive.”
I closed my laptop. Stood up. Crossed the kitchen and took the notebook from his hands with the slow, deliberate certainty I had learned to deploy when I wanted his full attention.
He gave it. The amber eyes came up. My stolen glasses sat on the bridge of his nose, slightly crooked because his face was built at a scale my frames weren’t designed for, and behind the blurred lenses, his expression shifted. From tactical planning to the other kind of attention — the kind that started in his chest and moved southward with the specificity of a man who had spent nine months learning that attention was its own form of desire.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Eliminating distractions.”
I removed the glasses. Folded them. Set them on the counter beside the tactical notebook.
Without the frames, his face was bare. The amber eyes, the scar above his eyebrow, the trimmed beard that was slightly longer than usual because preseason hadn’t started and grooming standards were in the offseason. He looked younger without the glasses and older without the captain’s armor, and the combination — the man in between — was the version of Kellan Sayer that belonged exclusively to this kitchen and this apartment and this life.
“It’s Tuesday,” he said.
“I’m aware.”
“You have a client call at nine.”
“It’s eight fifteen.”
“That’s forty-five minutes.”
“That’s more than enough time.”
His mouth did the thing. The fracture. The almost-smile that had stopped being almost and started being fully realized somewhere around month four.
“Forty-five minutes,” he said. “That’s ambitious.”
“I’m a strategist. I work well under constraints.”
He pulled me toward him. One hand on my hip, the other finding the back of my neck with the specific, encompassing grip that made my spine dissolve. His hands were warm. They were always warm — the ambient temperature of a body that burned fuel at the rate of a professional athlete and generated heat as a metabolic byproduct. I’d spent nine months sleeping beside a human furnace and I had never once complained.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” His mouth was close to my ear. The private register — the low, rough voice that existed only in rooms where the door was closed and the world was on the other side. “You. In this kitchen. Thirty minutes ago, when you were on the phone with Paloma and you were arguing about disclosure timelines and your voice went — there’s this register you use when you’re winning an argument. It drops. Gets precise. Every syllable measured. Like you’re placing them.”
“That’s called rhetoric.”
“It’s called the hottest thing I’ve ever heard.” His thumb traced the tendon in my neck, and my pulse jumped under it. He felt it. He always felt it. “I’ve been sitting here staring at a commute plan because looking at you while you do it makes it impossible to think about anything except putting my hands under that shirt and finding out what sounds you make when I touch you before your first coffee.”
“I’ve had coffee.”
“Not enough to make you articulate. I like you before you’re articulate.”
“That’s a concerning preference.”
“I like you when you can’t find the right word.” His hand moved from my hip to my waist. Under the hem of my t-shirt. His palm flat against the bare skin of my side, fingers spanning from my spine to my navel. “I like you when your vocabulary fails and the only thing left is my name.”
“Kellan—”
“There it is.”
He lifted me onto the kitchen counter. I weighed a hundred and eighty pounds and he set me on the marble like I was made of paper. The counter was cold through my boxers. His body between my knees was not.
He kissed me. Not the good-morning kiss. This was the other kiss. The one that had started in a parking lot in the rain and had been evolving for nine months into something I still didn’t have adequate language for.
“Tell me what you want,” I said. The words. Our words.
“I want all of you. I want this counter and the hallway and the bed and I want to make you come so many times that your client call becomes physically impossible.”
“That’s logistically aggressive.”
“I’m an athlete. We train for endurance.”
He kissed down my chest. Methodical. Thorough. He found the spot below my ribs that made my abs contract. Stayed there. Worked it with his lips and the edge of his teeth until my back arched off the cabinet behind me.
“There,” I breathed. “Right there. Don’t stop.”
“I don’t stop. I have a plan. Page forty-seven. Between the lineout strategy and the grocery list.” He looked up at me, his chin against my stomach, the amber eyes dark and certain. “There’s a diagram.”
“There is not a diagram.”
“There’s a diagram. I used colored pencils.”
I laughed. The sound filled the kitchen and he smiled against my skin.
He hooked his fingers into the waistband of my boxers. “Yes?”
“Yes. Take them off. Put your mouth on me. Please.”
The please. He exhaled against my skin — a visible, physical response to the word. I used please in exactly two contexts: with him, and never anywhere else.
He removed my boxers. Dropped them on the kitchen floor with tactical indifference.
Then he knelt.
The sight of him — six foot five, two hundred and forty-five pounds, on his knees on the kitchen tile with his hands on my thighs and his mouth an inch from my cock — was the most erotic thing I had experienced in thirty-eight years. Not because of the submission. Because of the choice. Kellan Sayer knelt for no one. And he was on his knees in our kitchen because he wanted to be there.
He took me in his mouth and my hand slammed against the cabinet behind me. He was good at this — nine months of the same focused study he applied to everything. He’d learned what pace made my thighs shake. What pressure made my breath stop. What angle made me grip his scalp and say things that would end my professional career if anyone heard them.
He used all of it.
“Kellan—” My voice cracked. “God, you’re — the way you — I can’t—”
He pulled off long enough to say, “Can’t what?” and the sight of his mouth — swollen, wet — made the answer evaporate.
“Can’t think. You’ve destroyed coherent thought.”
“Good. That’s the plan. Page forty-seven.”
He went back to work. My thighs were shaking against his shoulders. The kitchen counter was cold against my ass and his mouth was hot against my cock. Arden Vale, senior crisis strategist, was being reduced to a collection of sounds on a marble countertop by a man who couldn’t cook but could do this.
“I’m close,” I said. “Kellan — I’m—”
He pulled off. I made a sound that was neither a word nor a dignified contribution to human communication.
“Not yet. The counter was step one.”
“I was enjoying step one.”
“Step two is better.” He pulled his shorts off. Stood in our kitchen completely naked, and the sight of him — the full architectural scope of Kellan Sayer unclothed, the tattoos, the ridiculous scale of his body, the evidence of his arousal — made my mouth go dry.
He picked me up. Off the counter, into his arms, my legs around his waist. He carried me through the hallway. But he didn’t make it to the bedroom.
Halfway down the hall, he pressed me against the wall. His hips pinned me there and the contact — skin to skin, his cock against mine — was a full-system overload.
“Here,” he said. “Quick stop.”
“We have a bed twelve feet away.”
“The bed can wait. This wall has been underutilized.”
He kissed me while his hand found us both. Wrapped his enormous hand around both of our cocks — and the feeling of him against me, the pressure of his grip encompassing us together, the slide of skin and heat — made my head drop back against the plaster.
“You’re so good,” I said. The praise. Nine months and it still hit him like voltage — his breath catching, his rhythm faltering, the full-body shudder of a man hearing the words he’d been starving for.
“You’re perfect. The way you hold me — the way you touch me — you’re everything I never knew how to ask for.”
“Arden—” His hand tightened. His forehead dropped against mine. “When you say things like that I can’t last.”
“Not yet.” He released us. Resumed the carry to the bedroom.
The bedroom. The navy sheets. The morning light turning everything gold.
He set me on the bed. Stood over me. Six-five, naked, the tattoos catching the light, the compass rose over his heart.
“I want to try something.”
He took my wrist. Pressed his thumb against the pulse point — the same point, the same pressure, the same gesture from a tunnel a lifetime ago.
“I want to hold this while I’m inside you. I want to feel your heart rate change. I want to know exactly what I’m doing to you, in real time.”
“Yes,” I said.
He prepared us. Carefully, thoroughly. His fingers inside me — one, then two, then the slow, measured stretch of a man who understood bodies and force and the critical difference between using strength and using it wisely.
“Ready?”
“I’ve been ready since the counter.”
“I know. Your heart rate told me.”
He entered me. Slowly. His hand around my wrist, his thumb on my pulse. The feeling of him — the size, the heat, the overwhelming fullness — still hit me like a revelation every time.
“God,” he breathed. “You feel — Arden, you feel—”
“Tell me.”
“Like home.” A slow, deep thrust that I felt in my spine. “You feel like the only place I’ve ever belonged.”
The rhythm built — his hips rolling, deep and steady. His thumb pressed against my pulse and I felt my own heart rate climbing — seventy, eighty, ninety.
“Faster,” I said. “Kellan — please—”
The please again. His composure broke. He drove into me. Hard. Deep. The bed frame protested. My hands found his back, his shoulders, and I gripped hard enough to leave marks he’d wear under his jersey like proof.
“You’re so good,” I gasped. “Kellan — the way you move—”
“Say my name again.”
“Kellan. Kellan, don’t stop, please don’t—”
He shifted the angle and the shift put pressure on a place that made my vision dissolve into light and my vocabulary dissolve into sound.
I came. My back arching off the mattress, my hand gripping his wrist, my voice saying his name in a register I would deny using if confronted with audio evidence.
He followed. His face pressed against my neck and the sound he made was my name, broken into syllables that sounded like worship.
His thumb was still on my pulse. I could feel my own heart rate decelerating — ninety, seventy-five, sixty.
“One sixty-four at peak,” he murmured. “That’s higher than the championship match.”
“I’m glad my sexual response exceeds your athletic performance benchmarks.”
“You exceed everything.”
I showered in four minutes. Dressed in three. Opened my laptop at eight fifty-six with damp hair and a face that I hoped did not communicate the preceding forty-one minutes to Paloma Reyes, Esq.
At nine fifteen, after the call, I found a plate of eggs at the counter. Perfectly cooked. Beside it, a mug of tea — cream already added, the right shade of gold. Beside that, a ginger mint on a napkin.
And beside the ginger mint, the tactical notebook, open to a clean page. In Kellan’s careful, uneven handwriting:
Page 47. Step 1: Counter. Step 2: Wall (unplanned). Step 3: Bed. Step 4: Breakfast.
Below it, in smaller letters:
Step 5: Every morning. For the rest of our lives.
No diagram. No arrows. Just the specific, unglamorous, devastating honesty of a man who had spent thirty-two years silent and now said everything.
“The cemetery route,” I said. “It does save four minutes.”
His ears flushed. The tell. After nine months, still the tell.
“I know,” he said.
“Page forty-seven is my favorite page.”
“Full contact,” he said.
“No comment necessary,” I said.
He left. The door closed. The brownstone settled around me with the warm, specific creak of a home holding two men who had learned to take their armor off and who were building, morning by morning, egg by egg, page by page, a life that neither of them had been brave enough to want until the other one made it possible.
I opened my laptop. Went to work. And the ginger mint tasted like everything it meant.
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