Overtime

An Off the Ice Bonus Chapter by Chase Power

One year later. Columbus. The same hotel bar, a letter with a second page, and a word that was supposed to be retired.

I read page two over Ohio.

Seat 14C on the team charter, forty minutes out of Columbus, with Juice asleep against the window and Tucker across the aisle losing at cards. I’d carried that letter for seven months. Two sheets of hotel stationery, folded in thirds, in the inside pocket of whatever jacket I had on. I knew page one by heart. I had never gotten past the signature.

There wasn’t much on page two. He’d started it three times.

P.S. I’m in 912 until six tomorrow morning. I won’t laugh.

P.P.S. Disregard that. You said no, and you meant it.

P.P.P.S. I find I don’t want you to disregard it.

Then nothing. Half a page of nothing, and a ring where a glass had sat.

I folded it along its creases and looked out at the dark for a while.

So I knew. That’s what I’m telling you. When I came down to the hotel bar at eleven that night, with my hair still wet and my first goal in thirteen months, I already knew where the evening was headed. I just didn’t know he would be sitting there.

The goal first, because I’ve earned it. Second period, a scramble in the blue paint, and a puck that went in off my shin pad from about eighteen inches. It was the ugliest goal of my career. Juice got the assist and brought me the puck afterward in both hands, like something he’d found in a nest. My father had texted before I got my skates off. How was today, kid? He already knew. He asks anyway.

It was the same bar. Same Marriott, same long room off the lobby, same brass rail. A year and eight months ago I had sat at the big table in the corner with two beers in me and told a joke I meant.

The big table was full again. Tucker, Juice, Bennett with a club soda and the C he’d had since September, six other guys, and a plate of wings going cold in the middle.

“Donny! Shin pad! Get over here and do Winnipeg.”

“It was Saskatoon.”

That stopped the table.

“What?”

“The bus. It happened in Saskatoon. I’ve been saying Winnipeg for six years because Winnipeg’s funnier.”

“You lied to us?” Tucker had a wing halfway to his mouth. “About the bus?“

“I’m coming clean. I’m a new man.”

“Do it anyway,” Juice said. “Do Saskatoon.”

I was going to. I had my hand on the back of a chair. Then I looked down the room, the way you check the far side of the ice without knowing why, and there was a man at the end of the bar by himself.

Gray sweater. Reading glasses pushed up on his head. A beer he wasn’t drinking and a legal pad he wasn’t writing on. He was the single person in the building who wasn’t looking at me, and he was working very hard at it.

Then you come to Columbus, I had told him once, in the stands of an empty rink. And sit in a hotel bar. And don’t laugh.

He had a Second Shift thing in Ohio this week. He’d said so at our kitchen table without meeting my eyes. He’s a terrible liar. It turned out he hadn’t been lying, exactly. He had only left out which bar.

“Rain check,” I told the table.

Bennett followed my eyes down the room. He lifted his club soda one inch and said nothing, which is the whole reason he’s the captain.

I walked down the bar. Both legs. No hitch. I took the stool beside him and didn’t touch him, and he went on not looking at me, with the corner of his mouth going.

“Is this seat taken?”

“I’m waiting for someone.”

“Yeah? What’s he like?”

“Loud.” He turned a page of the legal pad. It was blank on both sides. “He scored tonight. Off his shin. He’s going to be unbearable about it.”

“I heard it was a rocket.”

“I was in section one-oh-eight. It was not a rocket.”

“Did you stand up?”

“I clapped.”

“Like a guy at a piano recital.”

“I clapped warmly,” said Micah.

I looked at the side of his face. The silver in his beard had gotten a little further this year. I’d put some of it there.

“Can I ask you something?”

He set the pencil down in the gutter of the pad. That’s still his tell.

“You can ask.”

I had said it in this room once as a joke. I’d said it at a steakhouse to a man with a newspaper, straight. This time I knew the answer, and that changes a question.

“What do you do when you’re not good at it anymore?”

Nobody howled. Nobody threw a coaster. Micah Voss turned on his stool and gave me the whole look, the one that reads you like a box score.

“That’s a real question,” he said. “Do you want a real answer?”

“Yeah.” My throat had gone tight. I hadn’t expected that. “I do this time.”

“It takes a while. I’d have to show you.”

“Nine-twelve?”

His eyes closed for a second.

“You read page two.”

“This morning. Over Ohio.”

“Seven months, Rafe.”

“I was saving it.” I slid off the stool. “Is it really the same room?”

“I asked for it by number. The woman at the desk thinks I’m superstitious.” He left a twenty under the beer he hadn’t touched. “I’ll be up.”

He walked out of that bar ahead of me, and I gave him the length of the lobby, like a man who had learned something about waiting.

Nine-twelve was a hotel room. King bed, a desk, a long mirror on the closet door, a window full of somebody else’s downtown. I’ve slept in a thousand of them and couldn’t describe one.

This one had an armchair.

It was square and gray, and he had already been at it. I could tell, because it wasn’t where a hotel puts a chair. He’d dragged it out of its corner and turned it to face the mirror.

“You moved the furniture,” I said.

“One thing a day.” He hung his coat in the closet and shut the door, and the mirror swung back to show me the two of us. “I’m told it’s good for me.”

His laptop was open on the desk beside a folder with a green tab. Eleven names, a rink in Dublin that would give him Wednesday nights, a meeting at nine in the morning. So it was a real thing. Good. I’d have been sore if he had driven three hours down I-70 only for me.

“One,” I said, before he could open his mouth. “It’s a one. I scored on it.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“You were inhaling to ask.”

“I was breathing, Rafe. I do that.” But his ears had gone red.

I had a thing prepared. I’d been working on it since Ohio.

“There’s a rule on the legal pad at home,” I said. “Coach, retired. Banner hung. And under it, smaller, in my handwriting—”

“Road trips: negotiable.”

“This is a road trip.”

“It is.”

“So I’d like to negotiate.”

He took the glasses off his head, folded them, and set them on the desk. He looked at me for a good while. Then he went and sat down in the armchair, knees apart, forearms along the armrests, hands hanging loose off the ends. Sweater, jeans, boots.

I hadn’t seen him sit like that in a year. I felt it at the bottom of my spine.

“Here are my terms,” Micah said. “On the road, you can have the word. As often as you like. Every time you use it, it’s a minor.”

“A what?”

“Two minutes. I stop whatever I’m doing, wherever I am, and you serve the whole thing. You don’t move. You don’t touch yourself. You don’t talk me out of it.” His voice hadn’t changed at all. “I’ll keep the clock.”

“That’s a penalty.“

“That’s the idea.”

“What if I score while I’m in the box?”

“You won’t.”

Christ. I was hard already, standing in a Marriott in my game-day suit.

“And stop still works,” he said. “Both ways. That one isn’t negotiable anywhere.”

“Agreed.”

“Then take your clothes off. You’ve only got the one audience, and he isn’t in any hurry.”

I didn’t give him the billboard. I’d like that on the record. I took my suit off like a guy getting undressed, jacket over the desk chair, tie, shirt, the rest, and stood there on a hotel carpet with nothing on and my cock standing up against my stomach. He looked at all of it. He took his time over the right leg. Shah had measured in September, and the thigh was back to within a quarter inch of the left. He looked at that quarter inch like a man reading a grant he’d been awarded.

“Hands on the mirror,” he said.

I put my palms flat on the glass, either side of my own face.

“Feet apart. Further.” I heard him get up. I heard his knees crack behind me, and then I understood where he was going, and my breath fogged the glass. “Look at yourself. Not at me. That’s the entire instruction.”

He knelt on the carpet and put his mouth on me.

He had never done that. A year, every room in that house, and he never had. His hands spread me open, thumbs firm, and his tongue went over me slow and flat and hot, and my knees nearly went. Then again. Then the point of it, circling, pressing, working its way in while his beard scraped the insides of my thighs, and I made a sound that fogged the mirror from my chin to my eyebrows.

“Fuck. Micah—”

He hummed. I felt it in my teeth. He ate me like he had the whole night and a nine o’clock he didn’t care about, wet and thorough and filthy, licking into me, pulling back to bite the curve of my ass and going in again deeper. My cock was drooling onto a hotel carpet. I watched it happen. That was the thing about the mirror. I couldn’t get out ahead of it. There was only a guy with his mouth open and his forehead on the glass, flushed to the chest, shaking, with nothing arranged.

I wanted to see what he would do. I’ve always been like that.

“Yes, Coach,” I said.

Everything stopped.

His mouth left me. His hands left me. I heard him sit back on his heels, and the small click of his watch.

“Two minutes.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Eyes on the glass. That’s where you serve it.”

So I stood there. Wet, open, cold where he’d been, with my palms on a mirror and my cock jerking at nothing, and I looked at myself for two full minutes. It’s a long time. Try it. At around forty seconds I started to beg, and he said, pleasantly, “That isn’t how a box works.” At around ninety I quit looking for an angle. There wasn’t one. There was a man who wanted something so badly he could hardly stand up, and for once in his life it was all over his face.

I’d spent twenty years checking that face before I let anybody have it.

“Time,” Micah said, and pushed two slick fingers into me to the knuckle.

I shouted. He’d had the bottle in his pocket the whole time, the bastard. He stood up behind me with one arm around my chest and worked me open, his mouth on the back of my neck, his fingers curling, finding it on the first try and stroking it until my hands slid on the glass.

“That’s one,” he said in my ear. “How many do you think you’re going to take?”

“All of them. Coach.”

He laughed, low. He drew his fingers out.

“Two minutes.”

I’ll be honest. I took three more. I couldn’t leave it alone; it was like a loose tooth. I took one with three of his fingers in me, and he held them there, still as a wall, while I shook around them and the red numbers on the nightstand took a year to change. I took one for mouthing off about the first two. And I took the last one in the chair.

He sat down in it with his jeans open and his sweater shoved up his chest, and that was all he took off. He slicked himself, thick and dark and already wet at the head. He turned me by the hips to face the mirror and brought me down into his lap, my back against his chest, my thighs spread wide over his, both my feet flat on the carpet.

“Slowly. You’re driving. I’ve got you.”

I sank onto him. Christ, the size of him, still, after a year: that thick, blunt stretch, inch after inch, until I was sitting in his lap with all of him in me and his arm locked across my chest. In the mirror I could see everything. Him behind me, dressed, his eyes dark over my shoulder. Me, naked, split open on him, my cock flushed and leaking against my stomach. The place where we were joined. He put his chin on my shoulder and looked, too.

“There,” he said. “That’s what I see. Every time. You’ve never once gotten to.”

I had lain on a couch six feet from an armchair and come apart for a man who wouldn’t leave it. I had never been in one with him.

“Say it,” he said quietly. “You’re dying to.”

“Coach.”

His hand closed around my cock, loose and warm, and didn’t move.

“Two minutes.”

That was the worst one, and the best. Full of him. His heartbeat going against my back. His hand around me, doing nothing. I could feel every twitch of him inside me and every one of mine around him, and I wasn’t allowed to chase a single one. I watched my own stomach shake. I watched a tear go down my own face and didn’t know when that had started. He kissed the side of my neck and counted the last ten out loud, very low, like a man reading to me.

“Time. Move.”

I moved. I planted my feet and rode him, and the leg held. It did more than hold. It drove. I fucked myself down onto him with both thighs, hard and fast, the chair legs stuttering on the carpet, and I watched it. I watched the muscle work in a leg they had told me might not come back. I watched his fist strip me in time. I watched his face over my shoulder, his mouth open on my skin, the most careful man in Pittsburgh coming apart in a chair he had carried across a room.

“Listen to you,” he said, rough. I was loud. I’d quit being quiet in April. “Now look at him. Who’s that for?”

“Nobody.”

“Who’s it for?”

“You. Me. Fuck. Us.“

“Good.”

Once. He had held it back all night, and it went through me the way it had the first time, like a cross-check from behind.

“Come for me, Rafferty.”

I did, with my eyes open. I watched it take me: my whole body locking, my mouth going wide, come striping my chest and his fist and the carpet between my feet. I didn’t fix one thing about my face. There I was. I’d been looking for that guy for years, and he’d been in a mirror in Columbus the entire time.

Micah followed me over with his teeth in my shoulder and a groan I felt all the way down, buried deep, his arm crushing me back against him.

Somebody in the next room knocked twice on the wall.

We both started laughing and couldn’t stop.

He cleaned me up with a warm washcloth, in a king bed, with a hotel’s worth of pillows. Some things don’t change. I let him. I’ve gotten good at it.

My phone lit on the nightstand.

Walls. Careful, Bennett had written. Then: Nice goal.

I typed back with one thumb. Term: indefinite.

“Who’s that?”

“The captain. He’s in nine-fourteen.”

“Of course he is.”

Micah put his glasses on to inspect the bruise coming up on my shoulder, and then the print of his watchband on my hip, with great interest. He was a seven, he told me when I asked. A real seven: a long drive and a good day. I was whatever comes after ten. He still hasn’t gotten the new scale.

“What time’s your thing?”

“Nine. Eleven men and a Zamboni driver who wants to be the coordinator.”

“Are you ready?”

“I’m in it this time,” he said. “Page one. I checked.”

I got the letter out of my jacket and brought it back to the bed. Both sheets. I laid page two on his chest.

“You never sent this.”

“You’d said no.”

“I said nah, I’m good. That isn’t a no. That’s a guy with eight teammates watching.” I lay down with my head on his shoulder, the good one. “It took me a year and eight months to get to this room. I want that noted.”

“It’s noted.” His hand came up into my hair. “I had to just want you for a while. It was awful. I highly recommend it.”

He stole that. I’d lent it to him.

The heater ticked. Down on High Street somebody was leaning on a horn. I had a rebuilt knee and one ugly goal and a man whose hand was going heavy on my head.

He had a nine o’clock. I had the day off. Nobody in Ohio needed either of us for anything.

“Night, Coach,” I said to the ceiling.

He wasn’t asleep after all.

“That’s two minutes.”

“I’ll serve it in the morning.”

“Yes,” said Micah. “You will.”

Haven’t read the book yet? Start with the gala, the service corridor, and a hand on the back of his neck.

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