Hot Takes & Housemates — Bonus Chapter

The Christening
by Chase Power

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The Christening

Set after the epilogue of Hot Takes & Housemates. Drew and Kai have a new apartment, a new couch, and new rules.

Kai

The couch was two thousand dollars and Drew was about to ruin it.

Not through negligence — Drew ruined things through enthusiasm. He ruined toast by refusing to adjust the settings. He ruined my sleep schedule by existing in the next room. He ruined my entire life by sitting down next to me at a party in junior year and asking me about math with those brown-gold eyes, and I’d been a disaster in his orbit ever since.

Now he was sprawled on our new couch — our couch, in our apartment, every possessive pronoun earned and deliberate — looking at me with the expression that meant he was about to propose something that would void the warranty.

“New couch rules,” I said, standing over him with my arms crossed. “I’m in charge.”

“Is that so.” Not a question. A grin. The grin that had launched a thousand thirst tweets and was currently aimed at me with the precision of a weapon.

“The data is clear. You destroyed the last couch. The middle cushion had a permanent Drew-shaped impression.”

“That impression was load-bearing. It was structural.”

“It was a crater. This couch deserves better.”

“This couch deserves to be christened.” He reached for me — hand extended, palm up, the gesture that had become ours. The reach. The invitation. The question that was always the same: will you come to me?

I always came to him.

I took his hand. Let him pull me down until I was straddling his lap — the position. Our position. The one that started as a podcast dare and became the axis around which our entire relationship rotated.

“Hi,” he said. Looking up at me with those eyes.

“Hi.”

“You said you’re in charge.”

“I am.”

“Then what are the rules?”

I leaned down. Put my mouth against his ear. Felt him shiver — the full-body kind, the kind that started at the back of his neck and rolled through his shoulders and his chest and his hips.

“Rule one,” I whispered. “You don’t move unless I say.”

His hands tightened on my waist. “Okay.”

“Rule two. You don’t come until I say.”

“Kai.” Already wrecked. Already breaking. Drew Callahan, who performed control for a living — coming apart under the weight of two sentences whispered in his ear.

“Rule three.” I pulled back. Looked at him. “You tell me everything. What feels good. What you want. No performing. Just you.”

“Just me,” he echoed.

I kissed him. Not gently — the way you kissed someone you owned. Deep, controlling, my hands in his hair, tilting his head where I wanted it. He groaned against my mouth and his hips pushed up — seeking friction, seeking me — and I pulled back.

“Rule one,” I reminded him.

“You’re going to kill me.”

“Statistically unlikely. But I appreciate the hyperbole.”

I pulled his shirt off. Ran my hands down his chest — the chest I’d mapped a hundred times and still found new territory in. His skin was warm under my palms, the muscle firm, the softness over it something I loved with a specificity that bordered on clinical.

“Your body,” I said, tracing the line between his pecs, “is my favorite dataset.”

“That’s either the most romantic or the most unsettling thing you’ve ever said.”

“Both. I contain multitudes.”

I kissed down his chest. Lower. The trail of hair below his navel that I followed with my tongue while Drew’s hands gripped the couch cushions and his breathing went ragged.

“Kai — please —”

“Please what? Use your words. Full sentences. Subject, verb, object.”

“I want your mouth on me. Please.“

“See? Grammar isn’t that hard.”

I pulled his joggers down. He was hard — flushed and straining — and the sight of Drew Callahan desperate and obedient on our new couch was a visual I filed away in the highest-priority archive my brain possessed.

I took him in my mouth. Slow. The specific, methodical slow that drove him insane because I knew — I had data — that Drew’s threshold for controlled stimulation was approximately four minutes before he started begging.

His hips jerked. I pulled off.

“Rule one.”

“Fuck — Kai — I can’t —”

“You can. You will.” I wrapped my hand around the base. Took him again — deeper this time, tongue flat against the underside, the technique I’d perfected through weeks of enthusiastic research.

“Kai — Kai — Kai —”

I brought him to the edge three times. Three times I felt the telltale tension and three times I pulled back, kissed his hip, and waited while he swore and trembled and looked at me with eyes that were equal parts fury and worship.

“You’re a menace,” he gasped.

“I’m a researcher. Edging is a valid methodology.”

“It’s torture.”

“I’d say it’s rigorous experimentation with a favorable outcome trajectory.”

I stood up. Stripped. Climbed back into his lap. The slide of his cock against mine — hot, slick — drew a sound out of me that I couldn’t control and didn’t want to.

“Inside me,” I said. “Now.”

His hands found the lube on the side table — I’d placed it there earlier, because I was Kai Morrow, and I planned. His fingers prepped me with the eager, thorough focus he brought to everything that mattered.

When I sank down onto him, we both stopped breathing.

Full. Complete. Connected. His forehead pressed against my chest, his arms locked around my waist, his body trembling with the effort of staying still — because the rule was still the rule.

“Move,” I said.

He moved.

Up into me — deep, controlled thrusts that I felt in my spine, in my chest, in the place behind my ribs where I kept everything I felt for him. I rode him with the same precision I brought to analytics, and the output was pleasure so intense it rewrote my definition of the word.

“Tell me,” I gasped. “Rule three.”

“You feel like coming home.” His voice was raw, destroyed. “Every time. Every time I’m inside you, I feel like I spent twenty-eight years lost and then I found you.”

I kissed him to stop him from finishing, because if he finished I was going to cry, and crying was not part of the christening protocol.

He shifted the angle. Found the spot. I shouted — loud, raw, the sound I used to be embarrassed by and now made without apology.

His hand wrapped around me. Stroked in time. The dual sensation — him inside me, his fist around me — was the specific, devastating frequency that our bodies had discovered together.

“Rule two,” he breathed. “Can I — Kai, please —”

“Yes. Together. Now.”

We came together. The way we always did — synchronized, matched, two systems reaching peak output at the same moment. His face in my neck, both of us shaking, both of us making sounds the neighbors were absolutely going to file a complaint about.

The couch held.

After.

We lay tangled on the new couch and Drew’s hand was in my hair and the apartment smelled like us and sweat and the pasta we’d burned earlier.

“The couch survived,” Drew said.

“I checked the weight rating, the frame material, the cushion density, and the warranty terms regarding ‘unusual wear.'”

“You planned this.”

“I plan everything. You know that.”

“What’s next? Kitchen counter?”

“The counter is granite. It’ll hold.”

“Shower?”

“Tested. Adequate drainage.”

“I love you,” I said. “Your data is very consistent on that point.”