The Rematch
An Ice Cold Friction Bonus Scene — Jace Wilder
This scene takes place three months after the epilogue. Contains explicit sexual content. For readers 18+ only.
Part One — Back to Garnet
Nico
The lie lasted until they hit the Montana state line.
“Team building event,” Nico had said. “Titans alumni charity thing. One night, maybe two. Out near Missoula.”
Beck had believed him for approximately six hours, which was about four hours longer than Nico had expected. The man was brilliant at reading hockey plays and terrible at reading social deception—a gap in his skill set that Nico exploited regularly and without remorse.
But when the GPS directed them off the highway onto the same two-lane road they’d driven a year and a half ago—the one with the aspens and the shrinking towns and the mountains pressing in on both sides—Beck’s hands tightened on the wheel.
“There’s no alumni event,” Beck said.
“There is not.”
“We’re going to Garnet.”
“We are.”
Beck was quiet for a mile. The aspens had turned again—gold and amber, October doing its annual performance. The road was the same. The mountains were the same. Everything was the same except the hand Nico had on Beck’s thigh, resting there without thought, without strategy, with the casual ownership of a person who had earned every inch of the body beside him.
“Anniversary,” Beck said.
“Of the blizzard. Of the mattress by the fire. Of you dragging your bed across a hardwood floor and pretending it was about thermal efficiency.”
“It was about thermal efficiency.”
“Beck.”
“It was partially about thermal efficiency.”
Nico grinned. He squeezed Beck’s thigh—high, deliberate, a promise wrapped in a touch—and watched the muscle flex under his palm. A year and a half. Fifteen months of sharing a bed and a dog and a kitchen full of recipe cards, and Beck’s body still responded to Nico’s hand like it was the first time. Every time.
The lodge was exactly as they’d left it. Timber frame. Stone chimney. The porch with the view of the valley. Walt met them at the door—older, broader, the same barrel-shaped warmth—and shook their hands and said, “Good to have you boys back,” with the uncomplicated sincerity of a man who’d been told the whole story and had decided it made him like them more.
Linda had made chili. Of course she had.
Walt and Linda left after dinner—their own place up the valley, planned in advance, because Nico had called six weeks ago and explained that he wanted to surprise his partner with a return to the place where everything started and could they have the lodge to themselves? Linda had said, “Honey, say no more,” and Nico suspected she’d been marking the days on her calendar ever since.
The door closed. They were alone.
The lodge was the same and they were not. Nico stood in the main room—the room with the fireplace, the room where they’d played cards and shared bourbon and held hands for the first time—and felt the layers of memory settle over the space like sediment. Every corner held a version of them: the versions who’d hated each other, the versions who’d wanted each other, the versions who’d been too afraid and too brave and too young and too old for what they were about to become.
Beck was building a fire. Because Beck always built the fire. His hands arranged the kindling with the same deliberate precision he brought to everything—each piece placed with intention, each action a small act of order in an uncontrollable world. The flames caught. The room began to warm.
“I believe,” Nico said, leaning against the kitchen doorway—the same doorway, the one with the threshold Beck had leaned against a lifetime ago—”that you owe me a rematch.”
Beck looked up from the fire. His gray eyes caught the new flames and went amber.
“A rematch of what?”
Nico nodded at the kitchen wall. The wall. Their wall. The plaster still slightly discolored where the mug hook had been—the one that had broken when Beck had slammed Nico against the surface hard enough to rattle the cabinets. The hook had never been replaced. Nico liked to think Walt had left it as a monument.
“You had home-ice advantage last time,” Nico said. “I want another shot.”
Beck’s eyes darkened. The shift was instantaneous—the casual, domestic warmth of fire-building replaced by something hotter and more focused. Nico had learned to read Beck’s arousal the way he’d learned to read his fear: in the eyes first, then the jaw, then the hands.
“You want to pin me against a wall,” Beck said. Not a question.
“I want to do a lot of things to you against that wall. Pinning is just the opening act.”
Beck stood. Six-three. Two-twenty-five. The body that had blocked shots and thrown punches and held Nico in the dark with a tenderness that still made his chest ache. He stood and he looked at Nico with the expression that Nico had once catalogued as the granite mask and now recognized as something else entirely: the face of a man deciding to surrender.
“Then come get me,” Beck said.
Nico crossed the room in four strides. He grabbed the front of Beck’s shirt—the same kind of henley, the same criminal fit across the shoulders—and walked him backward. Through the doorway. Into the kitchen. Until Beck’s back hit the wall with a sound that echoed off the timber.
The wall. Their wall. The site of the first time, the place where everything that was abstract became physical.
“You remember what you did to me here?” Nico said. His fist was in Beck’s shirt, pulling the fabric taut. His body was pressed against Beck’s—chest to chest, hip to hip, close enough to feel Beck’s reaction already building against him. “You slammed me into this wall and put your hand on my throat and dropped to your knees and I couldn’t walk for an hour after.”
“I remember,” Beck said. His voice had dropped to the basement register—the one that existed only in private, only in the dark, only when Beck’s control was slipping and his body was taking over. “Every second.”
“Good. Now it’s my turn.”
Nico kissed him. Hard. Not the domestic morning kisses or the lazy Sunday kisses or the half-asleep midnight kisses that constituted their daily vocabulary. This was the Montana kiss—aggressive, consuming, the kiss of a man staking a claim on territory that was already his. He bit Beck’s lower lip. Felt Beck groan. Swallowed the sound.
His hands went to Beck’s belt. Efficient. Deliberate. He’d learned Beck’s body with the same obsessive thoroughness he’d brought to hockey—ten thousand reps, each one refining the technique, until his hands could navigate the landscape blindfolded. The belt opened. The button. The zipper. Beck’s head tipped back against the wall.
“Nico—”
“Don’t talk. Not yet.” Nico dropped to his knees.
The reversal was the point. A year and a half ago, Beck had knelt on this floor—the enforcer on his knees, the power inversion that had wrecked Nico so completely he’d lost the ability to speak. Now Nico was down here. Not submitting—choosing. The difference was everything. Beck had knelt out of hunger. Nico knelt out of ownership.
He pulled Beck free. Looked up. Held eye contact—the same tether they’d always used, the line that connected them across whatever distance existed between their bodies—and took him in.
Beck’s hand hit the wall behind him. Palm flat, fingers spread, the anchoring gesture that had defined their entire relationship—except now the thing he was anchoring against wasn’t fear. It was pleasure. The overwhelming, focused, devastating pleasure of Nico Salerno’s mouth, which had been trained on his body for over a year and knew exactly what it was doing.
Nico worked him slowly. Deliberately. Using every technique he’d catalogued—the pace that made Beck’s thighs shake, the pressure that made his breathing stutter, the twist at the base combined with the flat of his tongue that made Beck say his name like it was the only word left in his vocabulary.
“Nico—fuck—Nico—”
He pulled off. Beck’s hips chased him—an involuntary jerk, the body protesting the loss of heat—and Nico grinned up at him. Predatory. Entirely in control.
“Not yet,” Nico said. “Not even close to yet.”
He stood. Kissed Beck again—letting him taste himself, a deliberate provocation that made Beck’s hands come off the wall and grab Nico’s hips with a grip that would bruise. Nico let him grip. Let him hold on. Then he took Beck’s wrists and pinned them against the wall above his head.
Beck could have broken the hold. Easily. Thirty pounds and two inches of advantage. But he didn’t. He let himself be pinned—wrists against plaster, body against the wall, Nico pressing against him from chest to knee—and the willing surrender of all that strength was the hottest thing Nico had ever seen.
“Your turn,” Nico said. “On your knees.”
Beck went. Not slowly—immediately. The big body folding, the knees hitting the kitchen floor, his hands coming to rest on Nico’s hips. He looked up at Nico from the same position Nico had just been in, and his gray eyes were blown dark and his mouth was swollen from the kissing and he looked like exactly what he was: a man in love with the person standing above him, willing to do anything asked.
“Show me,” Nico said.
Beck showed him.
His mouth was devastating. Always had been—the focused, methodical intensity of a man who approached pleasure the way he approached everything: with complete attention and zero wasted motion. He took Nico deep, his hands gripping Nico’s hips hard enough to leave marks, his pace a slow, rolling rhythm that built and built and built until Nico’s knees were unreliable and his hands were in Beck’s hair and his head was back and the sounds coming out of him were not words.
Nico pulled him off before the edge. Beck resisted—mouth chasing, hands tightening—and the struggle sent a bolt of heat through Nico’s entire body.
“Fireplace,” Nico breathed. “Now.”
Beck stood. His mouth was obscene—wet, swollen, used—and the look on his face was the one Nico had fallen in love with in this very building: the raw, unmasked, undeniable hunger of a man who had stopped pretending he didn’t want.
Nico took his hand. Led him to the main room. The fire was still building—the logs catching, the light growing, the same amber glow that had illuminated the first night, the first hand-hold, the first everything.
The mattress was in the closet. Nico had checked earlier—had opened the closet while Beck was bringing in the bags and found it there, folded, stored, waiting. He dragged it out. Dropped it on the floor in front of the fire. The exact spot.
He looked at Beck. Firelight on both their faces.
“One bed,” Nico said.
Beck’s mouth did the thing. The almost-smile that had become, over fifteen months of exposure to Nico Salerno, closer and closer to the real thing.
“One bed,” Beck confirmed.
Part Two — The Fire
Beck
Nico pushed him onto the mattress and Beck let himself fall.
The surface was familiar—the same give, the same firmness, the same mattress that had held them through the first hand-hold and the first kiss and the first time Beck’s body had learned what it meant to be touched by someone who stayed until morning. His back hit the cotton and the firelight found him and Nico was above him, straddling his hips, pulling his own shirt over his head with a single motion that left him bare from the waist up and illuminated by flames.
Beck reached for him. Instinct—the hands going to the waist, the hips, the warm brown skin that he’d memorized by touch and never stopped wanting. But Nico caught his wrists. Pinned them above his head against the mattress. Leaned down until his mouth was an inch from Beck’s.
“I’m running this,” Nico said. “You’re going to lie there and take what I give you and not move your hands until I tell you. Understood?”
The command went through Beck like voltage. His hips bucked—involuntary, the body responding before the mind could manage it—and Nico pressed down against the motion, weight on Beck’s hips, holding him still.
“Understood?” Nico repeated.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Nico released his wrists. Beck left them where they were—above his head, pressed to the mattress, the voluntary restraint of a man who had spent his life in control and had learned, through months of patient unlearning, that releasing control could be its own kind of power.
Nico undressed him. Slowly. Each piece of clothing removed with the deliberate attention of a man unwrapping something precious—the henley pulled up and over, the jeans worked down the hips, the boxers last, Nico’s fingers hooking the waistband and dragging the fabric down with an agonizing lack of urgency. Beck was fully exposed—hard, aching, lit by the fire—and Nico was still half-dressed and looking at him with the focused hunger of someone who intended to take his time.
“Look at you,” Nico said. His hands ran up Beck’s thighs. Over his hips. Across his stomach—the thick, solid core of an enforcer’s body, scarred and powerful and trembling under Nico’s palms. “Fifteen months and I’m still not used to this. You’re so goddamn beautiful.”
“Nico—”
“I said don’t move your hands. I didn’t say don’t talk.” Nico leaned down. Pressed his mouth to the scar on Beck’s chest—the white line across his pec, the one from junior hockey, the one that had a story Nico had asked about on a night like this and that Beck had told because Nico was the person he told everything to. “Tell me what you want.”
“You know what I want.”
“Say it.”
Beck’s jaw worked. Even now—even after everything, the presser, the public, the year of living without the wall—the words still required a push. Not because he was afraid anymore. Because the words were so big that saying them felt like opening a valve on something that had no limit.
“I want you inside me,” Beck said. “The way we did it here the first time—except you. I want you to take me on this mattress in front of this fire and I want to feel it tomorrow.”
Nico made a sound. Low, involuntary—a groan that started in his chest and escaped through his teeth. He stripped his remaining clothes in seconds. Found the supplies he’d packed—because Nico prepared for things the way other people breathed—and knelt between Beck’s legs.
“Hands stay,” Nico said.
“Hands stay.”
Nico prepared him with the same care he always used—slow, thorough, reading Beck’s body for the signals they’d developed over hundreds of nights. The sharp inhale that meant more. The flex of his thighs that meant right there. The moment his eyes fluttered closed and his mouth went slack that meant he was past thinking and into feeling, which was the place Nico always wanted him—the place below the control, below the management, where Beck was just a body and a heart and a man being touched by the person he trusted most in the world.
“Now,” Beck said. “Nico, now.”
Nico pushed inside him.
The sound Beck made was the same one he’d made the first time—the shattered exhalation, the full-body release, the sound of a man breaking the surface after years underwater. Nico held still. Gave him time. His hands were on Beck’s hips, fingers pressing into the muscle, and his face was strained with the effort of restraint—the effort of being inside Beck Callahan and not moving, because the moment deserved a pause. The fullness. The connection. The two of them joined in the same place where everything had begun.
“Move,” Beck breathed. “Please.”
Nico moved.
Not gently. Beck had asked to feel it tomorrow and Nico intended to deliver. He set a pace that was hard and deep and relentless—the rhythm of a man who knew this body intimately and was using every piece of that knowledge. His hips drove forward with a force that shifted Beck on the mattress, that sent sparks of sensation radiating through every nerve, that made the room shrink to nothing but the sound of their bodies and the heat of the fire and the taste of each other’s breath.
Beck’s hands were still above his head. The restraint was costing him—the tendons in his forearms straining, the knuckles white, every fiber of his body wanting to reach for Nico and hold on. But he’d been told to stay and he was staying. Surrendering. Letting Nico have the control that Beck had hoarded for decades and now gave away freely because giving it to Nico was the most liberated he’d ever felt.
“You feel—” Nico’s voice was ragged. Barely language. “You feel so fucking good. Beck. God.“
“Harder.”
Nico gripped Beck’s thighs. Pushed them higher. Changed the angle—and Beck’s vision went white. A sound tore out of him that he didn’t recognize—guttural, desperate, the sound of a body being taken exactly the way it needed. Nico hit the spot again. And again. Each thrust precise, devastating, building a pressure that was gathering in Beck’s spine and his chest and his throat.
“Touch me,” Beck gasped. The restraint finally breaking—not because he was weak but because the pleasure was too much and he needed Nico’s hand the way he needed air. “Nico—please—touch me—”
“Hands,” Nico said. One word. Permission.
Beck’s hands came down. They went where they always went—to Nico’s body, his shoulders, his back, pulling him down until they were chest to chest and face to face. The pace changed. Deeper now. Slower. Nico’s hips rolling instead of driving, each movement a complete sentence, his body communicating something that existed beyond words.
His hand found Beck. Wrapped around him. Stroked in the same rolling rhythm—the synchronization of two bodies that had learned each other so thoroughly that separate movement had become almost impossible. They moved together. Breathed together. Every exhale a shared thing, every sound a conversation.
“I love you,” Nico said. Against Beck’s mouth. Between breaths. The words worn smooth by a year of daily use and still, somehow, capable of shattering him. “I love you. In this room. On this mattress. In this stupid, beautiful, freezing lodge where you held my hand and changed my entire life.”
Beck’s eyes were open. Locked on Nico’s. The gray and the brown. The fire making them both gold.
“I love you,” Beck said. Not a whisper. Not a murmur against skin. Full voice. Full volume. The way he’d said it at the presser—out loud, where the world could hear, except the world right now was a mattress and a fire and the only person who mattered. “I love you and I’m going to love you on this mattress every October until we’re too old to get down here.”
“We’ll get a thicker mattress.”
“We’ll get a thicker mattress.”
Nico laughed. Mid-thrust. The laugh dissolved into a moan that dissolved into Beck’s name and then there was no more talking because the edge was there—right there—and Nico’s hand tightened and his hips drove deep and Beck felt the wave crest.
Nico went silent.
Their signal. The thing that had started in this room, on a night when Nico’s voice had seized and his body had locked and Beck had understood for the first time that the silence was the loudest thing Nico would ever say. The silence meant: I am past performance. I am past armor. You are seeing the real thing.
Beck watched it happen. Watched Nico’s mouth open and no sound come out. Watched his body arch and his eyes go wide and his face become the most honest version of itself—unguarded, overwhelmed, beautiful beyond any word Beck had ever learned.
He followed. Pulled over by the sight of it—the silence, the face, the person he loved falling apart in his arms. The orgasm hit him like a tide—long, rolling, devastating—and he held Nico through it, both of them shaking, both of them silent now, the quiet of two people who had been taken past the place where sound existed and were floating in whatever was beyond.
They collapsed. Tangled. The mattress was too small—it had always been too small for two grown men, one of them built like an enforcer—and their legs hung off the edges and the blanket was somewhere on the floor and neither of them cared. The fire crackled. The lodge settled around them with the creaks and sighs of old timber.
Nico’s head was on Beck’s chest. The configuration. Their position. The place where Nico’s ear was over Beck’s heart and Beck’s hand was in Nico’s hair and the rhythm of both—the heartbeat and the fingers—was the same.
They lay there for a long time. The fire burned down to the deep red glow that Beck remembered from the first night—the stage where the heat was steady and the light was low and the world outside the windows was dark and silent and utterly irrelevant.
Nico traced the scar on Beck’s chest. The white line across his pec. His finger followed the ridge slowly—the way he always traced it, the way Beck had come to love, the gentle repetition of a touch that said I know this story. I know all your stories. None of them scare me.
“Same time next year?” Nico said.
Beck looked at the ceiling. The timber beams. The same beams he’d stared at on the night he’d held another person’s hand for the first time in thirty-four years and felt something rearrange itself in his chest.
“Every year,” Beck said.
“That’s a lot of mattress-dragging.”
“I’ll manage.”
Nico smiled against his chest. Beck felt it—the movement of Nico’s mouth against his skin, the particular shape of the real smile, the private one, the one that only existed in the spaces they’d built together.
Beck pulled Nico closer. Pressed his mouth to the back of Nico’s neck—the spot, the seal, the place where his lips fit against Nico’s skin like something that had been designed for this purpose and no other.
“I love you,” Beck murmured against the skin. Not for the first time. Not for the last. Just said—the way you said something that was so true it had become the air. The thing you breathed without thinking. The thing that kept you alive.
The fire burned. The lodge held them. Outside, the Montana night was clear and cold and full of stars, and inside, on a mattress by a fire, two men who had found each other in a blizzard held on and didn’t let go.
They never let go.
Thank you for reading Ice Cold Friction. If you loved Beck and Nico’s story, please consider leaving a review — it helps more readers find their way to Garnet.