Extra Credit

A Hellfire Cheer Bonus Chapter

This bonus chapter takes place one year after the events of Hellfire Cheer. It contains explicit sexual content intended for adult readers.

The email confirmation said Room 1847.

I’d called the hotel twice to make sure—once to book it, once to verify that room 1847 was specifically, non-negotiably, the room I’d be getting and not a comparable unit on the same floor. The reservation agent had been patient in the way that service industry professionals were patient with customers who were clearly unhinged about room numbers.

“Ma’am, I’ve noted the specific room request. Is there a particular reason—”

“Anniversary.”

“How lovely. And the room is significant because—”

“It’s where I met her.”

The agent had paused. Then, with the warm efficiency of someone who’d just filed this interaction under romantic gesture, high priority: “I’ve hard-blocked 1847 for your dates. King bed, corner unit, eighteenth floor. Is there anything else I can arrange?”

“Does the bathroom door still not latch properly?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind. That’s everything.”

Now I was standing in room 1847—same layout, same window, same view of the city, same bed positioned against the same wall—and the familiarity was so precise it was almost disorienting. Like stepping into a memory and finding it three-dimensional. The wallpaper had been updated. The TV was newer. But the bones of the room were identical: the angle of the afternoon light through the corner windows, the distance from the bed to the desk, the bathroom door with its push-button lock that I already knew, with absolute certainty, did not engage properly.

I’d brought a yoga mat.

Navy blue. The same brand as the one I’d traveled with two years ago, the one I’d laid on the floor between the bed and the window on the night I first put my hands on Skye Moreno’s thighs and felt my entire life rearrange itself around the sound she made.

I unrolled it in the same spot. Exact position. Between the bed and the window, in the strip of golden afternoon light that turned the carpet into a stage.

Then I sat on the bed and waited.

She arrived twenty minutes later. I heard her in the hallway—the footsteps I’d know anywhere, the rhythm that was hers alone, slightly uneven because the left ankle would always be slightly uneven, even after two years of proper rehab and a physical therapist who’d become a family friend.

Key card. Green light. The door swung open.

Skye walked in with a weekend bag over her shoulder and her hair down and the expression of a woman who expected a nice hotel room and was not prepared for what she got.

She stopped three steps inside the door.

Her bag slid off her shoulder and hit the carpet.

“You booked our room,” she said.

“I booked our room.”

“Are you serious?” she said softly.

“Get on the floor.”

She held my gaze for two seconds. Our unit of measurement. Then she walked to the mat and stood on it.

“Same routine?” she asked.

“Same routine.”

“It’s not going to end the same way.”

“No,” I agreed, standing from the bed, crossing to her. “It’s going to end better.”

I started the way I’d started the first time. Clinical. Deliberate. The PNF sequence—hamstring stretches, hip flexor work, the systematic progression through her posterior chain that I’d used as a Trojan horse for our first physical contact.

Except this time, there was no Trojan horse. There was no pretense of biomechanics. There was just Skye on the mat and my hands on her body and two years of knowing exactly what those hands could do.

“Legs out,” I said. “Wide.”

She extended into the V. “Wider,” I said. She widened. Her breath caught—the same sound from two years ago, the sharp inhale that meant something other than her hamstrings was responding to being directed.

“Good,” I said, and watched the word land. Two years, and it still hit her like a current. Her lips parted. Her eyes darkened. The Pavlovian response I’d installed in Florida and never deactivated.

My hands slid under her shirt. Palms flat against bare skin. I pulled her shirt over her head. No bra underneath. I kissed her spine, vertebra by vertebra, while my hands pressed into the muscle on either side.

“On your back,” I said.

She rolled over. I lifted her left leg, pushed it toward her chest, and leaned in. “Push against me.” She pushed. I held. “Release.” She released. I took her deeper.

I slid her leggings down. She let me. This was the body I woke up next to every morning, and the familiarity didn’t diminish the want. It amplified it.

I settled between her legs on the yoga mat and put my mouth on her. No preamble. She arched off the mat, her hand finding my hair.

“Show me your flexibility.”

I pushed her legs wider. She went. I used my tongue the way I used my coaching notes—systematically, thoroughly, with precision calibrated to produce a specific result. I knew her. I knew the exact pressure that made her breathing stutter. I knew the pace that pushed her over the edge.

“Hold that position,” I said against her. She locked—body rigid with effort and pleasure, every muscle engaged.

“Don’t move until I tell you.”

I slid two fingers inside her. Curved. Found the spot. Pressed.

“Good girl.”

She came on the yoga mat in room 1847, one year after the first time I’d touched her in this exact spot—not the bewildered release of discovery, but the deep, rolling, confident climax of a woman who knew she was loved and safe and being held by hands that would never shake.

“That’s what I wanted to do the first time you touched me in this room,” she said.

“I know. I knew the second you made the sound.”

“We were idiots.”

“We were careful.”

“Same thing.” She looked at me—flushed, undone, satisfied. “My turn.”

She pulled me to my feet. Kissed me. Then she turned me around and pressed me back down onto the mat.

“Arms above your head,” she said. Her voice was different—calm authority she’d learned from me and made her own.

She stripped me slowly. Ran her hands down my arms, pressing them into the mat. “You spend your whole life holding everyone up. Your squad. Your mom. Your athletes. Me. You’re always the base. Always the foundation. Always the hands underneath.”

Her mouth moved lower. “Stay still,” she said—my command, my cadence, turned back on me like a mirror.

“I’m going to coach you through this,” she said. “And you’re going to follow my instructions, because you’re good at following instructions when you let yourself.”

“Breathe in.” I breathed in. “Breathe out.” I breathed out. “Good. See? You’re so good at following instructions. Look at how well you take this.”

She put her mouth on me and I made a sound I would have suppressed a year ago—a raw, open moan. Her tongue worked in the patterns I’d taught her, filtered through her own instinct and hunger.

“You’ve been holding everyone else up your whole life,” she said against me. “Let me hold you. I’ve got you, Reese. I’ve got you.”

I let go. Completely. I came with her name in my mouth and her fingers inside me and her praise in my ears. She held me through it. Stayed with me. Didn’t let go.

We ordered pad thai. Ate it in bed, naked, sharing a single container.

“Remember when you ate my pad thai the first time? You made a face like you were experiencing a religious conversion but you called it ‘adequate.’”

“Your eyebrows had a spiritual awakening over peanut sauce.”

“My eyebrows are neutral instruments of facial architecture.”

“Your eyebrows are liars.”

We kissed. Tasting peanut sauce and each other and the memory of who we’d been in this room two years ago.

“Bed,” she said. “The real bed. Not the mat.”

I brought the harness. She saw it and her face did the thing—surprise, hunger, focused intensity.

“I want to ride you,” she said.

I tightened the straps. Lay back against the pillows. Skye climbed over me. “Guide me. Like you do.”

I put my hands on her hips—thumbs on the iliac crests, the bones I’d first touched during PNF. “Sink down. Slow. Let me set the angle.”

She lowered herself onto me. Slowly, controlled. I adjusted the angle underneath her.

“Roll your hips forward. Like a stunt entry. Smooth. One continuous motion.”

She rolled. The movement was liquid—her core engaging, hips driving forward in a wave. Cheerleading mechanics repurposed for sex, and the result was devastating.

“There. Like that. Hit that mark.”

“You’re so strong,” I told her, guiding her rhythm, thumbs pressing into her hip bones the way they did during corrections. “Look at you. Taking me so well.”

“More. Talk to me more.”

“You’re incredible. You’re the best thing I’ve ever felt.” My hand moved between us, thumb finding her clit, pressing in tight circles. “Look at me. Don’t close your eyes.”

“I love you,” I said.

She came with her eyes open. Looking at me. Her mouth forming my name without sound. The orgasm moved through her in visible waves—abs, chest, face—like a stunt sequence hitting every mark.

I followed. The machine was off. The woman was on.

She collapsed against my chest. I caught her. Always.

“Happy anniversary.”

“Same room. Different us.”

“Better us.”

She got up to use the bathroom. The door didn’t latch. Drifted open an inch. She looked back at me through the gap. Dark eyes. The faintest smile.

She didn’t close the door. She left it open—the gap an invitation, a callback, a private joke between two people who’d built an entire love story on the other side of a door that never quite latched.

She came back to bed. I pulled her against me—center of the mattress, our territory.

I reached for my journal. Opened to a fresh page and wrote one line.

Same room. Same bed. Different us. Better us.

“You’re going to need a bigger journal,” she said.

“I’m going to need a bigger life.”

She pressed her face into my neck and laughed—the real laugh, with the canines—and whispered:

“Best overbooking in hotel history.”

I closed the journal. Turned off the lamp. Pulled her closer in the dark.

Room 1847. One king bed. No invisible line. No ground rules. No pretense.

Just us.

The way it was always supposed to be.