After Hours

A Home Field Advantage Bonus Chapter by Chase Power

One year later. The new center opens in the morning. Every light in the building is off except one — in room two.

The building was dark except for one window.

Dane saw it from Front Street at ten past eleven, coming in off the river road with three hundred miles of Pennsylvania behind him and a Thursday-night win still aching in his shoulders. Every light on the sawtooth roof was off. The new glass along the north wall showed nothing but the streetlight on the turf. The south entrance was dark under its blue anchor, and the ramp was empty, and the parking lot held one ten-year-old pickup truck parked crooked across two spaces, which meant its owner had arrived before dawn and hadn’t thought about the truck since.

One window, at the back, on the hall where the treatment rooms were. A warm square of light.

He had a key. Miles had put it on his ring in August without a word, the same way he’d once left a plate on a step. Dane let himself in. The lobby smelled like new paint and new rubber and the faint chlorine breath of the pool behind its glass. The water lay dark and still under the bronze letters on the tile. He didn’t stop there tonight. He’d stopped there enough.

The hall had six doors. Five were shut. The light was coming from the second one.

Of course it was.

Miles was standing at the treatment table with his back to the door, in the gray suit trousers he’d bought for the ribbon and a white shirt rolled to the elbow, holding a laminated sheet and frowning at it. The table was new. Padded black vinyl, the electric kind that rose and sank on a foot pedal, still with a strip of plastic film on the base. The room was small and very clean. A rolling stool. A cabinet of drawers. A shelf of folded white sheets. A window onto the dark lot. On the wall, a ceiling-tile-shaped stain that somebody had painted, very small, in the corner near the light switch, roughly the shape of Ohio.

Dane stood in the doorway and looked at that for a long time.

“You had somebody paint Ohio on the wall.”

Miles didn’t turn around. “I painted Ohio on the wall. Harper held the ladder and told me it looked like a potato.”

“It looks like Ohio.”

“Thank you.” He set the sheet down. Then he turned, and his glasses caught the light, and his whole tired face changed. “You’re early.”

“It’s eleven o’clock at night.”

“You said midnight.”

“I drove fast.” He came in and shut the door behind him with his heel. “Why is this room two?”

“Because it’s room two.” Miles put his hands in his pockets, which was what he did when he didn’t want them doing something else. “Front of the hall is one. This is two. It’s a numbering system. It’s been in use for centuries.”

“There’s a window onto the alley.”

“There’s a window onto the lot. There is no alley. The building has a lot.”

“It’s the same window.”

“It’s a different window, Dane.” He was trying not to smile and losing. “I’ve been here since five. I’ve hung forty signs. A state senator is cutting a ribbon in that lobby in eleven hours, and I have not eaten since a granola bar at noon, and I’m checking the tables. All six. That’s what’s happening in this room. Table function.”

“How’s this one functioning?”

Miles looked at him. Then at the table. Then back.

“I haven’t tested the height range.”

“You should test the height range.”

“I should.” His voice had dropped about half a register. “It goes from twenty inches to thirty-eight. Rated for five hundred pounds. I read the whole manual. Twice.”

“Of course you did.”

“Shirt off,” Miles said.

It went through Dane like a hit he hadn’t seen coming. Twenty months ago, in a brown brick building on Main Street, that same voice had said those same two words in exactly that tone. He’d had a brace and a pair of crutches and a ruined leg, and he had sat on a table very like this one with the paper crackling under him and taken his shirt off for a man who wouldn’t look at his face.

Miles was looking at his face now.

Dane took the shirt off. He dropped it on the stool.

“Shoes. Jeans.” A drawer opened. A white sheet came out of it, folded square. “Drape’s here. You remember how it goes.”

“I remember.”

He stepped out of his shoes and undid his jeans and pushed them down, and for one second, as they hit the floor with a soft heavy thud, he remembered what was in the right front pocket and almost reached for them. He didn’t. He kicked them under the stool instead, a little too casually, and got up on the table in his shorts and lay back on the cool vinyl.

Miles shook out the sheet and laid it over him, hip to ankle, and tucked the edge under his left thigh with two fingers. Precise. Efficient. Exactly the way he had done it a hundred times on Main Street, except that his hands weren’t quite steady tonight, and both of them knew it.

“Comfortable?”

“No.”

“Good. You’re not supposed to be.” Miles pulled the rolling stool over with one foot and sat. He pushed the glasses up. “Week three and a half. February. You’d overdone the sheet and the knee was hot. You remember what we did after the swelling work?”

Dane stared up at the ceiling. The new tiles were spotless. There was nothing in them shaped like any state at all.

“Hip flexors,” he said.

“Hip flexors.” A hand slid under the sheet and settled on the front of his right hip, warm, flat, unhurried, right on the crease where thigh met body. “Tightest pair I’d ever had on that table, and I’d had a cyclist. I was working right about here.”

The thumb pressed in. Slow. Deep. Dane’s breath went out of him.

“And you,” Miles said, very quietly, “got hard.”

“I remember.”

“Under this sheet. Right there in front of me. You turned your face to the wall like a man in front of a firing squad, and I didn’t say one word. I kept working. I talked to you about your psoas for four minutes in a voice I’d use on a ninety-year-old.” The thumb rolled, and pressed, and moved an inch inward. “I went home that night and stood at my kitchen sink and drank a glass of water I didn’t want, so I’d have something to do with my mouth.”

Under the drape, Dane’s cock was already filling, thick and helpless, lifting the sheet. He could see it. Miles could see it. Neither of them pretended otherwise.

“Is that a reflex, Mr. Archer?”

“It was never a reflex.” It came out rough. “Not once. Not in February. Not ever.”

“I know.” The hand moved to his left hip and did the same thing, slower. “I had a sentence for you, that day. I had it ready in my mouth. I’ve thought about it for twenty months, and I’m going to say it now, because there’s no rule sheet in this building and the only person on that table is my boyfriend.”

“Say it.”

Miles leaned in close, over the drape, so his breath touched Dane’s ear.

“I wanted to take this sheet off you,” he said, “and suck you until you forgot your own number.”

Dane made a sound he’d never heard come out of himself in a medical setting.

The sheet went. Miles drew it down slowly, the whole length of him, and folded it over the end of the table. Then he hooked his fingers in Dane’s shorts and drew those down too, and Dane lifted his hips without being asked, and lay there naked on Miles’s new table under Miles’s new lights with his cock standing up hard against his stomach and both knees, both of them, bending exactly the way he wanted them to.

Miles looked at all of him. He took his time doing it. He looked at the long pink seam on the left knee, gone pale and flat over twenty months. He looked at the quad, which was as big as its brother now. He put one hand on it, and Dane felt the muscle jump under his palm like it recognized him.

“Look what you built,” Miles said.

“You built it.”

“I started it. You did the rest.” His thumb drew a line up the inside of the thigh. “Bex did the rest. You did every rep. Every bad morning. Every ice bag.” The thumb reached the crease and stopped, just short of everything. “Now be quiet and let me look at it.”

He bent his head.

There was no hurry in it. That was what undid Dane, every time; this man could have been anywhere in the world and he always acted as though he had nowhere else to be. A tongue at the base, wet and flat, dragging up the underside all the way to the head. A kiss there. Another. Then the slow hot slide of that mouth taking him in, inch after inch, until Dane’s head was pressed back against the vinyl and both his hands were fisted in the edge of the table, because he didn’t trust them anywhere else.

“Miles. Christ.“

A hum around him, low, pleased. Miles held him there, deep, and swallowed, and Dane’s heels skidded on the padding. Then the mouth eased off and came down again, faster, a tight wet rhythm with a twist of the fist under it, and the other hand went flat on Dane’s left knee and stayed. Holding it. Holding him.

“Don’t,” Dane got out. “I’ll—I’m gonna—”

Miles came off him with a soft wet sound and sat back on the stool. His mouth was red. His glasses had slid down his nose. He looked absolutely wrecked, and absolutely in charge, and he reached up without breaking eye contact and opened the top drawer of the cabinet.

He took out a white plastic bottle with a printed pharmacy label.

“Ultrasound gel,” Dane read.

“It is not ultrasound gel.”

“You labeled it?”

“Harper restocks these drawers. Harper is a curious woman.” He popped the cap. “I put it in every room. In case I needed to test the table function.”

Dane laughed so hard the table rocked. It turned into a groan halfway through, because Miles had poured the slick over two fingers and set them right where Dane wanted them, and pressed, and slid in.

He knew this now. That was the thing. For thirty-one years he had not known it, and then a man had spent forty patient minutes in a dark bedroom in May teaching him, and now his body opened to those fingers as if it had been waiting all day. Miles crooked them. Found the place first try. Stroked it, slow and sure, and Dane’s spine bowed clean off the vinyl.

“There you go,” Miles said. “You know what this is. You know exactly what this is.”

“Please.”

“In a minute.” A third finger, and the stretch of it, and Dane panting at the ceiling. “Feet up. Heels on the edge. Knees wide. You can do that now.”

He could. He did it. He planted both heels on the edge of the table and let his knees fall open, the left as wide as the right, and lay there spread out for the man who had once measured that knee by the degree. Miles looked at the angle of it. Dane watched him look, watched the clinician in him check the line of the joint without meaning to, and then watched the clinician go away entirely.

“God, look at you,” Miles said, rough. “Look at that knee. Do you know what you look like?”

“Tell me.”

“Like I’m going to fuck you on my table.” He stood. He undid his belt one-handed. “Like I’m going to do it right now.”

The trousers went. The shirt stayed half on, open, hanging from his shoulders. His cock was flushed and hard and wet at the tip, and he slicked it with what was left in his palm, and then his foot found the pedal under the table, and the motor hummed, and the whole table rose under Dane. Slowly. Smoothly. One inch, two, three, until Dane’s hips were level with Miles’s hips, exactly level, to the half inch.

Dane stared at him.

“You measured.”

“I measured on Tuesday.” Miles took him by the backs of the thighs and pulled him to the very edge of the vinyl. “Thirty-one and a half inches. Hold still.”

He pushed in.

It was so slow it was nearly cruel. The blunt pressure, and the give, and then the whole thick length of him sliding home in one long deliberate stroke until his hips were flush against Dane’s ass and there was nothing left between them. Dane’s mouth fell open. His hands came off the table edge and went up blind and found Miles’s open shirt and held on.

“Breathe,” Miles said.

Dane laughed. He couldn’t help it. It came up out of his chest wet and helpless, and it squeezed everything inside him, and Miles swore through his teeth.

“Don’t you dare,” Dane said. “Don’t you dare do the—”

“Breathe,” Miles said again, lower, right against his mouth. “Good.” He drew out, long, nearly all the way, and slid back in, so deep Dane’s vision blurred at the edges. “Again.”

He came apart a little. Not all the way. A little, enough that his eyes stung and his heels slipped and he had to grab Miles’s wrist to keep from floating off the table altogether. Twenty months. Twenty months of that voice telling him what to do with his breath and his body and his weight, and this was where it had been going the whole time. Right here. This room.

Miles fucked him like he’d been planning it since February. Maybe he had. Long, heavy strokes at first, rolling and deep, every one dragging over the place that made Dane’s thighs shake. Then faster. He got Dane’s left calf in his hand and lifted it, put it up on his own shoulder, the bad knee, the knee that had been rebuilt out of nothing, and held it there, kissed the inside of it, and drove into him at an angle that knocked the breath clean out of him.

“Is this okay? The knee. Tell me if—”

“I’ll tell you.” Dane could barely talk. “It’s not the knee you need to worry about. Fuck. Miles. There.”

“I know where.”

The table creaked. The motor ticked under it. Out in the dark building, something settled, a duct or a pipe, and neither of them heard it. Miles was loud, which he always was once he stopped caring, a low broken sound on every thrust. Dane was louder. He had found out last year that he could be, and that the man above him liked it more than anything, and now he didn’t hold a single sound back. Not one. The whole new building could hear him if it wanted to.

“Tell me,” Miles said, ragged. “Tell me what you want. Whole sentence.”

“Your hand. On me. Now. And don’t slow down when I tell you I’m close.”

Miles laughed, breathless, because he’d said almost exactly that himself once, upstairs in his mother’s house, the week of the pool, and he wrapped his slick hand around Dane’s cock, tight, and did exactly what he’d been told.

It didn’t take long. It couldn’t have. The fist and the cock and that steady merciless angle and the voice above him saying good, you’re so good, look at you, you’re mine, all of you, every inch of you is mine, and Dane’s whole body drew up tight as a bowstring and broke. He came with his heel locked over Miles’s shoulder and his back off the table and Miles’s name torn out of him in two pieces, spilling hot over that fist and up his own stomach and chest, clenching so hard around the cock inside him that Miles cried out like he’d been hit.

“Don’t stop. Don’t you stop—”

Miles didn’t. Three more strokes, four, deep and wild and out of rhythm. Then he buried himself all the way and held there, shaking, and came inside him with his forehead pressed to the inside of Dane’s knee and his breath sobbing out against the scar.

They stayed like that. The motor clicked off. Somewhere in the lobby, the pool filter hummed to itself.

Eventually Miles lowered the leg, carefully, back to the table. He eased out of him. He stood there between Dane’s knees with his shirt hanging off and his glasses crooked and his hair everywhere, and he put his palm flat in the mess on Dane’s stomach, as if he was checking something.

“Well,” he said. “Table functions.”

Dane laughed until it hurt. Then he reached up and got a fist in that open shirt and dragged him down, and Miles came, and they lay there together on five hundred pounds of rated capacity, sticky and stupid and breathing like they’d run the length of the field.

“There’s a senator,” Miles said into his neck, “in ten and a half hours.”

“He can have a different room.”

“He’s not getting a treatment. He’s cutting a ribbon.”

“Then he doesn’t need this one.”

Miles lifted his head. He looked at Dane for a long moment in the plain white light of room two. Then he kissed him, very softly, on the mouth, the way he had kissed him in a tunnel in Philadelphia in front of forty people.

“Get up,” he said. “I have to disinfect this table. Twice. And then I have to never tell Bex.”

“Bex knows.”

“Bex does not know.”

“Bex knows everything. She’ll walk in here tomorrow and look at this table and look at you and say mm.”

Miles groaned and dropped his forehead back onto Dane’s chest.

Dane got up eventually. He found his shorts. He found his shirt on the stool. He crouched to drag his jeans out from under it, and Miles, already pulling on his trousers, reached down out of pure lifelong habit to pick them up and fold them.

Dane got there first. He took them out of his hand, a little fast.

“I’ve got these.”

Miles looked at him. “You’ve never folded a pair of pants in your life.”

“I’m starting.”

“What’s in your pocket?”

“Keys.”

“Your keys are on the counter. I watched you put them there.”

“Different keys.” He stepped into the jeans and buttoned them, and patted the right front pocket once, without thinking, and stopped himself doing it. “Spare keys. Very important spare keys. Go disinfect your table.”

Miles narrowed his eyes. He held the look for three full seconds. Then he let it go, the way he’d learned to let some things go, and reached for the spray bottle and the paper towels.

Dane leaned in the doorway and watched him do it. Twice, the way he’d said. Methodically, corner to corner, the way he did everything. A tired man in a rumpled white shirt, the night before the biggest day of his life, wiping down a table in a room with a little painted Ohio on the wall.

Tomorrow afternoon, Dane was going to get down on one knee in the grass out back.

He already knew which one.

“Room two,” Miles said, straightening up, tossing the towels in the bin, switching off the light. “Open for business.”

Haven’t read the book yet? Start with the hit that changed everything.

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