Overtime Privileges book cover by Chase Power

Morning Shift

An Overtime Privileges Bonus Chapter by Chase Power

This bonus chapter takes place after the events of Overtime Privileges. Contains spoilers and explicit content intended for readers 18+. Reader discretion advised.

Morning Shift

BRICK

The first thing I noticed about living with Evan Park was that the man could not be quiet in the morning.

Not loud, exactly. Not obnoxious. Just present in a way that made silence impossible. He hummed in the shower. He talked to Puck while making coffee—full conversations, complete with pauses for the cat’s responses, which Puck delivered via tail position and sustained eye contact. He dropped things. He opened cabinets he’d already opened. He existed at a volume that my apartment had never experienced and that I had, against every instinct I’d developed over thirty-four years of solitude, grown addicted to.

I lay in bed and listened to him wreck my kitchen.

It was a Sunday. Off-season. No practice, no skate, no reason to be vertical before nine. The sheets smelled like both of us—my soap, his cologne, the specific chemical compound of two bodies that had spent the previous night tangled together in ways that would make my trainer cry if he knew what I was doing with my allegedly rehabilitating knee. My thighs still ached from last night. The good kind of ache. The kind that reminded me I was alive and that the man responsible for it was currently ten feet away, attempting to cook.

I heard the fridge open. Close. Open again. The click of the gas stove. The hiss of butter hitting a hot pan.

He was cooking. Evan Park—the man who had burned water his first week here, who had once set off the smoke alarm making toast, who approached the kitchen with the same reckless confidence he brought to the ice and with significantly worse results—was cooking.

I got up. Pulled on sweats. Did not put on a shirt, because it was my apartment and because Evan’s attention span for cooking decreased by approximately eighty percent when I was shirtless, which was petty and strategic and I wasn’t sorry about it.

He was at the stove. Barefoot. Wearing my jersey—the old one, the practice jersey with O’HARA 44 across the back, faded and soft from a thousand washes. It hung to mid-thigh on him, the collar slipping off one shoulder, exposing the sharp line of his collarbone and the edge of his tattoo sleeve. His hair was loose and sleep-messy, falling across his forehead in dark strands that he kept pushing back with the wrist of his spatula hand. He was frowning at the pan with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb.

I leaned against the doorframe and watched. Just watched. The bare feet on the tile. The hem of the jersey shifting as he moved. The way his calf muscles flexed when he rose on his toes to reach the pepper. The curve of his ass under the thin fabric—my jersey, on his body, in my kitchen. My name across his shoulders.

Six months ago I was eating cereal standing up in the dark. Now there was a man in my kitchen who wore my clothes and talked to my cat and burned my food and I would have given every remaining year on my contract to keep this exact morning on repeat forever.

“What are you making?”

He didn’t turn around. “Omelette.”

“That looks like scrambled eggs.”

“It was an omelette. Now it’s a scramble. I’m adapting. It’s a life skill.”

“Your life skills include burning water and setting off smoke detectors.”

“Those were isolated incidents.” He glanced over his shoulder. His eyes tracked down my chest—deliberate, unapologetic, the slow drag of a man cataloging territory he’d claimed and intended to visit again. His gaze caught on my waistband, dropped to the V of muscle below my navel, and his tongue touched his lower lip in a way that was either unconscious or a precision weapon. With Evan, both were equally likely.

“You’re doing that on purpose,” he said.

“Doing what.”

“Being shirtless. While I’m trying to cook. You know what that does to me.”

“You’re wearing my jersey with nothing underneath it. We’re even.”

He stilled. “How do you know there’s nothing underneath it?”

“Because I took everything off you last night and none of it made it back on.”

The flush started at his ears and worked its way down his neck. He turned back to the pan. Pushed the eggs around with the spatula. His shoulders were set with the kind of theatrical focus that meant he was performing concentration while his body was doing something else entirely—his weight shifting, his hips canting slightly backward, the hem of the jersey riding up another inch as he reached for the salt.

The jersey lifted just enough to confirm my hypothesis. Nothing underneath. Just the bare curve of his ass and the lean lines of his thighs and the shadow between them, and my cock went from half-interested to fully committed in approximately two seconds, which was a response time that would have been embarrassing at twenty and was flattering at thirty-four.

I crossed the kitchen. Two strides. My chest pressed against his back and my hands slid under the hem of the jersey and found bare skin—warm, smooth, the flat plane of his stomach tensing under my palms. He smelled like my soap and his own skin and the faint, lingering musk of last night that hadn’t fully showered off.

“Brick.” His voice had dropped a register. The performance of concentration evaporating. “I’m holding a hot pan.”

“Put it down.”

“The eggs will—”

I rolled my hips forward. Pressed myself against his ass through the thin barrier of my sweats. Let him feel exactly how hard I was, the thick ridge of my cock settling into the cleft of him. His breath hitched. The spatula clattered against the rim of the pan.

“Put. It. Down.”

He put it down. Turned off the burner. His hands found the edge of the counter and gripped, knuckles whitening against the granite, as my mouth found the side of his neck—the spot below his ear that made his knees unreliable, the spot I’d mapped weeks ago and returned to like a compass finding north.

I sucked. Not gently. Hard enough to mark, hard enough that he’d see it in the mirror tomorrow and trace it with his fingertips and remember this exact moment—my mouth on his throat, my hands sliding lower, the morning sun warm on both of us through the kitchen window.

My right hand slid down his stomach. Past his navel. Past the fine trail of hair that I’d followed with my tongue last night until he’d begged. My fingers found him already half-hard, the shaft thickening against my palm as I wrapped my fist around him beneath the jersey. Hot. Silky. The head already slick when my thumb swept across it.

The sound he made—quiet, caught, a breath that turned into a moan halfway through—went straight to my cock.

“The eggs,” he managed.

“The eggs are done.” I stroked him. Slow. Root to tip, my fist tight, the pace deliberately unhurried. His hips rocked forward into my hand.

“They’re going to get cold.”

“Every egg you’ve ever cooked has been terrible. Cold isn’t going to make a difference.” I twisted my wrist at the top. His head fell back against my shoulder.

“That’s—fuck—that’s rude.”

“That’s accurate.” I tightened my grip. Sped up. His cock was fully hard now, pulsing in my fist, and the precome leaking from the slit was making each stroke slicker, wetter. “You’re dripping. Already. Just from my hand.”

“I’m dripping because you’re grinding your dick against my ass and jerking me off in the kitchen at nine in the morning. Context matters.”

“Is that a complaint?”

“It’s a fucking commendation.” His hand found the back of my neck, pulling my mouth harder against his throat. “Liam. Liam, I want—”

“Tell me.”

“I want you to fuck me. Right here. On this counter. Right now.”

The counter. Our counter. The geography of first times and morning coffee and the slow, domestic accumulation of a shared life. The place where I’d taught him to make pasta and he’d sat in my shirt eating scrambled eggs and we’d had our first real fight and our first real reconciliation and the cat had claimed territorial rights that neither of us contested.

I released his cock. He whined at the loss—an actual whine, the sound of a man whose body had been making promises his mouth hadn’t authorized—and I turned him around. Gripped his hips. Lifted him onto the counter in one motion.

He was light in my hands. Always lighter than I expected, the narrow hips and lean frame that I could position and move and hold without effort. The jersey rode up around his waist as he landed. His cock stood thick and flushed against his stomach, the head dark and slick, and his legs spread to make room for me between them with the automatic ease of a body that knew exactly where I belonged.

His legs wrapped around my waist. His mouth found mine and the kiss was deep and filthy—open-mouthed, wet, his tongue sliding against mine with the specific hunger of a man who had been fucked senseless eight hours ago and was already starving again.

Puck meowed indignantly from the counter beside the stove and jumped to the floor. Good. The cat had seen enough of our depravity to file a formal grievance.

I pulled back from the kiss. Evan chased my mouth, whimpering when I held him at arm’s length. “Lube,” I said. “Bedroom.”

I started to step back. His legs locked around my waist like a vice.

“Drawer. Left side. Behind the takeout menus.”

I opened the drawer. Behind the takeout menus—behind the goddamn takeout menus, between the Thai place and the pizza joint—was a bottle of lube and a strip of condoms that I had not placed there.

“You stashed lube in my kitchen.”

“Our kitchen. And I stashed it everywhere. Bathroom cabinet, living room end table, bedside drawer, coat closet, the basket by the front door. I’m strategic.”

“You’re insane.”

“I’m prepared. You’re six-foot-four and you walk around shirtless. Preparedness is the only rational response.”

I kissed the grin off his mouth. Bit his lower lip. Felt him groan into the bite and grind his hips forward, his cock sliding against my stomach, leaving a slick trail on my skin.

I slicked two fingers. Reached between his thighs. Pressed against him and felt the heat, the tight ring of muscle, the way his body clenched and then softened as I pushed inside. He was still loose from last night—not entirely, but enough that two fingers slid in without resistance, and the sound he made when I curled them upward—a broken, guttural moan that bounced off the kitchen tile—was the sound I heard in my sleep. The sound I’d cross any distance to hear again.

“Oh fuck.” His forehead dropped to my shoulder. His fingers dug into my biceps. “Right there. Right there, Liam, don’t stop—”

I didn’t stop. I worked him open with deliberate patience, two fingers becoming three, each curl and press hitting the spot that made his thighs tremble and his cock jerk and his vocabulary reduce to fragments. His hips rocked down onto my hand, fucking himself on my fingers with a rhythm that was desperate and beautiful and shameless.

“You’re so greedy.” I twisted my wrist. He cried out. “Look at you. Taking three fingers like you were made for it. Riding my hand in the kitchen at nine in the morning.”

“I was—ah, fuck—I was made for it. For you. Your hands, your cock, all of it.” His voice was wrecked. Ragged. The golden-boy polish stripped away, leaving nothing but raw need and the absolute certainty that this man would say anything, do anything, beg for anything, as long as I kept touching him. “More. I need more. I need you inside me.”

“I am inside you.”

“You know what I mean.” He pulled back. Looked at me. Dark eyes blown wide, pupils swallowing the brown, lips bitten red. The jersey had slipped off both shoulders now, pooling around his elbows, and he was effectively naked on my kitchen counter with my fingers inside him and his cock leaking against his stomach and an expression on his face that combined desperation with a challenge. “Fuck me, Liam. Stop teasing and fuck me.”

I withdrew my fingers. He gasped at the loss, his body clenching around nothing. I shoved my sweats down—just enough, not bothering to step out of them—and rolled on the condom from the drawer. He’d stashed those too, the magnificent lunatic. Slicked myself with a generous pour of lube and gripped his hips and lined up.

I pressed in slow.

Inch by inch. Watching his face—the way his mouth fell open, the way his brow furrowed, the way his eyes rolled back when the head of my cock breached the tight ring and sank into the heat of him. His body resisted for one breath, then yielded, and the slide from there was slick and deep and relentless until I was buried to the hilt and his legs were shaking around my waist and neither of us was breathing.

“God.” Evan’s hands found my shoulders, nails biting into the muscle. “Every time. Every time it’s like the first time. You’re so thick, Liam, I feel you everywhere—”

I held still. Let him adjust. Kissed his jaw, his ear, the mark I’d already left on his throat. His inner walls clenched around me in rhythmic pulses that made my vision blur.

“Move,” he whispered. “Please.”

I moved.

The first stroke was long and slow—a full withdrawal until only the head remained, then a deep, steady push back in that seated me completely. Evan’s head dropped back, mouth open, a low moan rolling out of him. I set a pace that was deliberate and devastating—each thrust deep enough to hit the place that made him shatter, each withdrawal slow enough to make him feel every inch of the absence.

“Yes.” His voice was climbing. “Yes, right there, don’t change—fuck, Liam, that angle—”

I gripped his hips harder. Changed the angle anyway—tilting his pelvis, lifting him slightly off the counter so I could drive upward, and the sound he made when I hit his prostate dead-on was a sound the neighbors would be discussing over brunch.

The counter rattled beneath us. A salt shaker toppled. The spatula clattered to the floor. I didn’t care. I fucked him steady and deep, my hands bruise-tight on his hips, his legs locked around my waist, his jersey bunched uselessly around his arms. The slap of skin against skin filled the kitchen—rhythmic, obscene, punctuated by Evan’s moans and my own ragged breathing and the wet, filthy sounds of my cock driving into him.

“Harder.” He was pulling at my shoulders, trying to drag me closer, deeper, as if the laws of physics were negotiable. “Liam, harder, I need—”

I gave him harder. Snapped my hips forward with the force I’d spent twelve years channeling into hits and was learning, with Evan, to channel into this. He cried out—sharp, loud, his spine bowing, his cock jerking between us. I wrapped my hand around him and stroked in time with my thrusts, doubling the input, and his body went rigid.

“You’re so good.” The words I’d learned to say without flinching. The words that wrecked him every time—not because they were dirty, but because they were true, and because I’d spent thirty-four years never saying them to anyone and now I said them to him and meant every syllable. “So good, Evan. Taking me so well. You’re perfect like this.”

His body clenched around me so hard I saw stars. “Fuck—Liam—when you say that I can’t—I’m going to—”

“Then come.” I drove deep. Held. Rolled my hips in a tight circle while my fist worked him fast and slick. “Come for me. I want to feel it.”

“Look at me,” he gasped. “I need you to look at me.”

I looked. Dark eyes, shattered open, the pupils blown so wide they were nearly black. His face was flushed from his hairline to his chest. His lips were parted and wet and trembling. His expression was the one I lived for—stripped of every performance, every mask, every layer of golden-boy armor. Just Evan. Raw and defenseless and completely surrendered, looking at me like I was the only solid thing in a world that was coming apart.

“I love you,” I said. And then I drove deep and twisted my wrist and Evan detonated.

He came hard. Harder than last night, harder than the hotel, harder than any of the hundred times before. His back arched off the counter and his mouth opened on a cry that was my name and his cock pulsed in my fist—hot, rhythmic, spilling between us in streaks that hit his chest, his stomach, the jersey that was already ruined. His body clenched around me in waves that were so tight, so relentless, that my own orgasm was dragged out of me like a riptide.

I buried myself to the hilt and came with his name in my mouth. The orgasm started at the base of my spine and rolled through me in pulses that whited out my vision and locked every muscle and left me shaking, grinding forward, emptying into him while his arms wrapped around my neck and his face pressed against my shoulder and we held each other upright on a kitchen counter that was not designed for this but was performing admirably under the circumstances.

We stayed connected. Breathing. His heartbeat slamming against my chest. My arms around his waist, holding him on the counter, holding him together. The morning sun streamed through the kitchen window and landed on both of us like a benediction.

“The eggs,” Evan murmured against my neck, “are definitely cold now.”

“I’ll make new ones.”

“You always make new ones.”

“Because yours are always terrible.”

He lifted his head. Kissed me—slow, soft, the kiss of a man who had nowhere to be and no one to perform for and all the time in the world. “They’re not terrible. They’re rustic.”

“They’re carbon.”

“Carbon is a building block of life. I’m cooking life, Brick.”

“You’re cooking evidence for the fire department.”

He grinned. That grin—the real one, the private one, the one that had nothing to do with cameras or sponsors or the twenty-year performance of being Evan Park. The grin that was just for me, in this kitchen, on this morning, with come drying on his stomach and my jersey hanging off his arms and his hair in his eyes and his heart beating against mine.

I pulled out carefully. Cleaned us both up—warm cloth from the sink, the domestic choreography that I’d learned was as important as the sex itself. He sat on the counter and watched me with the drowsy satisfaction of a man who’d been thoroughly handled and was in no hurry to resume vertical living.

I made eggs. Properly. Scrambled soft with butter and chives from the windowsill, the way my grandmother taught me—low heat, constant stirring, patience as an ingredient. Evan sat on the other counter—the un-christened one, though its days were numbered based on the strategic lube placements—in the ruined jersey, legs dangling, stealing bites off the spatula every time I turned around.

Puck had returned. The cat sat on the floor between us, tail wrapped around his feet, radiating the judgmental tolerance of a creature who had accepted that his humans were perverts and had adjusted his expectations accordingly.

“I had a dream last night,” Evan said, licking butter off his thumb. “The Zamboni driver was hosting a black-tie gala on center ice. Danny was there in a ball gown. Full tulle. He looked incredible.”

“Danny would absolutely wear a ball gown.”

“He’d accessorize. Matching gloves. Possibly a tiara.” Evan reached for the spatula again. I held it out of reach. He leaned forward, stretching, and the jersey rode up his thigh. I looked at the stripe of bare skin—the muscle, the tan line, the faint bruise on his inner thigh from where I’d gripped too hard last night—and felt my cock stir again, which was medically impressive and logistically ambitious given that we’d finished four minutes ago.

Evan caught me looking. His mouth curved. “Again?”

“Eat your breakfast.”

“That’s not a no.”

“Eat your breakfast, Evan.”

He ate his breakfast. My eggs, not his. He made sounds while he ate that were either genuine appreciation or a calculated attempt to get me hard again, and based on the way he licked the fork, it was the latter. This man had weaponized eating. He had turned scrambled eggs into foreplay. I was in love with a sociopath.

We ate in comfortable silence—the silence of two people who had run out of things to prove and were resting in the aftermath. Evan’s bare feet swung against the cabinet. Puck jumped into my lap and I fed him a piece of egg that he sniffed, considered, and rejected with the disdain of a creature with standards.

“Brick?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m happy.”

Two words. Simple. No qualifiers, no performance, no golden-boy packaging. Just the fact, stated plainly, by a man who had spent his entire life being praised for what he did and was discovering, in this kitchen, that being happy was something he was allowed to be without earning it first.

I looked at him. Sitting on my counter in my jersey with my eggs on his plate and my cat between us and my last name across his back. The kid from Southie who used to eat cereal standing up in the dark would not recognize this morning. Would not believe it was possible—the jersey on someone else’s body, the laughter in the kitchen, the hand that reached across the counter and lingered on his wrist because touching was allowed now, because touching was the whole point.

“I’m happy too,” I said.

It was the truest sentence I’d ever spoken. And the easiest. And the one that would have been impossible six months ago, before a golden-boy rookie with a tattoo sleeve and a Colgate smile walked into my locker room and refused to flinch.

Not expendable. Not anymore. Not ever again.

He grinned. I grinned back. We were sitting in our kitchen, half-dressed and full and warm, with a cat between us and lube behind the takeout menus and a life that was messy and loud and domestic and completely, irreversibly ours.

Tomorrow there would be training camp and new seasons and the slow, grinding machinery of a sport that measured men in numbers and discarded them when the numbers stopped working. Tomorrow the world would resume its indifferent rotation and the ice would be cold and the questions would be the same ones they’d always been: are you fast enough, are you strong enough, are you worth keeping?

But this morning, in this kitchen, with this man—the answer was yes. To all of it. Forever.

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