🔥 The Draft Night 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Off the Court

Thank You for Reading! 💜

You made it to the bonus content—which means you’ve lived through Maya and Sloane’s journey from a training room at 10:47 PM to a penthouse with a view. Thank you for giving their story a chance.

This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

⚠️ CONTENT WARNING ⚠️

This bonus chapter contains explicit FF sexual content including multiple orgasms, oral sex, manual stimulation, power dynamics, the X tattoo as erotic focal point, praise kink, emotional vulnerability, and uninhibited hotel suite energy. This chapter is TOO HOT for Amazon.

The Draft Night

This scene takes place on draft night—the evening Sloane’s name is called second overall and Maya wears the black dress for the first time in three years.

MAYA

The hotel suite had a view of the city that went on forever, and Maya was wearing the black dress, and Sloane Maverick had just been drafted second overall in the WNBA, and for the first time in three years—for the first time in Maya’s entire life—there was nothing to hide from.

No clipboard. No polo. No swinging kitchen door. No coaching staff in the next room, no freshman with a phone, no father whose pale blue eyes could read a lie at forty paces. Just a hotel suite on the twenty-third floor with floor-to-ceiling windows and a king-size bed and a bottle of champagne sweating on the nightstand and the distant, glittering proof that the world had not, in fact, ended when Maya Rossi chose love over silence.

She stood at the window. The city below was a circuit board of light—amber and white and the occasional flash of red, millions of lives moving through their own private dramas while Maya stood above them in a dress she’d bought in Virginia and hadn’t touched since Rachel and felt, for the first time, like a woman who was allowed to want things.

The black dress was simple. Sleeveless, fitted, stopping just above the knee. It wasn’t expensive or designer or particularly remarkable on a hanger. But Maya had put it on tonight—had unzipped the garment bag in the back of her closet with hands that shook only slightly—and looked in the mirror and seen someone she barely recognized. Not Dr. Rossi. Not Coach’s daughter. Just Maya. In a black dress. Going to watch the woman she loved hear her name called on national television.

The door clicked behind her.

Maya turned.

Sloane stood in the doorway of the suite in her draft-night suit—navy, tailored, the lines clean and sharp against her athlete’s frame. She was holding the team cap they’d given her on stage in one hand and her phone in the other and her hair was still perfect from the stylist and her eyes were bright with the kind of joy that couldn’t be performed because it came from too deep a place for performance to reach.

Then she saw Maya.

Sloane stopped. In the doorway. One foot in the suite, one foot in the hallway. She stopped the way she stopped on the court when she saw a lane open up—a full-body pause, every system redirecting, every sense recalibrating to account for something that had just changed the entire geometry of the room.

“Maya.”

“Hi.”

“You’re wearing—”

“The black dress. Yes.”

“You told me about the black dress. You said it was from Virginia. You said you hadn’t worn it since—”

“Since Rachel. Three years.” Maya smoothed the fabric over her hips. A nervous gesture. A human gesture. “I thought tonight was worth it.”

Sloane let the door close behind her. Set the team cap on the desk. Put her phone face-down beside it. She crossed the suite in the same measured, deliberate strides she used on the court—the ones that looked unhurried but covered ground with startling speed—and she didn’t stop until she was standing in front of Maya, close enough that Maya could smell the hotel soap and the faint trace of champagne from the green room and underneath it all, the scent that was just Sloane, warm and specific and indelible.

“Second overall,” Maya said.

“Second overall.”

“How does it feel?”

Sloane reached out. Her fingers found the strap of the black dress on Maya’s shoulder—one finger, hooked under the fabric, tracing the line from shoulder to collarbone. The touch was so light it could have been imagined. The effect was seismic.

“It feels like you’re wearing the black dress,” Sloane said. “It feels like nothing else that happened tonight matters as much as the fact that you’re standing in this room in a dress you’ve been afraid to wear for three years, and you wore it for me.”

“I wore it for me,” Maya corrected. Quietly. Honestly. “I wore it because I’m done being the woman who keeps the dress in the back of the closet. I’m done being careful.”

“When did you decide that?”

“When they called your name. When I was sitting in the audience and they said ‘Sloane Maverick, second overall pick’ and you walked across that stage and I thought—” Maya’s voice caught. The same catch that had been happening since the kitchen, since the office, since the cliff she’d stepped off and discovered had a bottom after all. “I thought, that’s my person. On national television. And I’m sitting in the dark in a polo.”

“So you changed.”

“I came back to the room and I put on the dress and I opened the champagne and I waited for you.”

Sloane’s finger was still tracing the dress strap. Back and forth. Shoulder to collarbone. The repetitive, maddening touch that built sensation the way a faucet fills a bath—slowly, steadily, each pass adding heat until the surface was trembling.

“I’m going to take this dress off you,” Sloane said. Not a question. A statement of intent, delivered in the low register that lived below the cocky game-day voice, below the charming dinner-party voice, in the place that was only for Maya. “I’m going to take it off slowly, because you waited three years to wear it and it deserves to come off with respect. And then I’m going to put you on that bed and celebrate the way I’ve wanted to celebrate since the training room.”

Maya’s breath left her body in a rush that she felt all the way to her toes.

“How’s that?” she managed.

“Loudly.” Sloane’s mouth curved. The real grin. The devastating one. “Without a hand over your mouth. Without a locked door you’re listening through. Without your father’s voice on the other side of a wall.” She leaned in. Her lips brushed Maya’s ear. “I want to hear every sound you’ve been saving for three years, Maya Rose. Every single one. This room is ours and nobody is listening and I want to make you so loud the floor above us files a noise complaint.”

Maya grabbed the lapels of Sloane’s suit jacket and pulled her in.

The kiss was a detonation. Three years of silence and six months of stolen encounters and one night of champagne and a black dress and a name called second overall—all of it compressed into the point of contact between their mouths and then released in a single, devastating explosion of want. Maya kissed Sloane the way she’d wanted to kiss her in the training room, in the kitchen, in every room where the volume had been set to zero and the timer had been set to hurry.

There was no timer tonight. There was no hurry.

Sloane’s hands found the zipper at the back of the black dress. She pulled it down slowly—excruciatingly slowly, the zipper’s teeth separating one by one, the sound of it loud in the quiet suite. The fabric loosened around Maya’s body. Sloane’s hands followed the zipper’s path, fingertips tracing the newly exposed line of Maya’s spine from nape to lower back, and Maya shivered against her—a full-body response that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the fact that Sloane Maverick was undressing her in a hotel suite with a view and the pace was unhurried and the unhurriedness was its own form of ecstasy.

“Breathe,” Sloane murmured against her mouth.

“I’m breathing.”

“You’re shaking.”

“Different thing.”

Sloane eased the dress off Maya’s shoulders. It slid down her arms, caught briefly at her hips, then pooled at her feet—a circle of black fabric on the hotel carpet, the shed skin of a woman who was done being careful. Maya stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows in nothing but black underwear and the city lights behind her, and Sloane stepped back one pace and looked at her.

Not scanned. Not assessed. Looked. The way you look at something you’ve been given that you can’t believe is yours.

“You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Sloane said. “And I just held a first-round draft card on national television. You beat it. You beat everything.”

“Take off the suit,” Maya said. Her voice had found the other register—the one that lived below clinical, below careful, in the place where authority became desire and desire became command. “You’ve been in it for four hours. Take it off.”

Sloane took off the suit.

She did it the way she did everything—with the efficient grace of a body that had been trained to perform under pressure. Jacket first, shrugged off the shoulders and tossed on the desk chair. Then the shirt, unbuttoned from the top, each button revealing another inch of skin that Maya knew by touch and by taste and by the specific geography of muscle and bone that she’d memorized in supply closets and bus seats and a kitchen counter in her father’s house. The shirt joined the jacket. The sports bra came next.

The X tattoo.

There it was. One inch of ink under Sloane’s left breast, sharp and black against warm skin. The mark that had started everything. The mark that Maya’s thumb had found at 10:47 PM on a Tuesday in January, and the world had tilted on its axis and never tilted back.

Maya crossed the space between them. Pressed her mouth to the X.

Sloane’s body shuddered. The same response. Every time. The full-body tremor that started at the point of contact and radiated outward, the involuntary reaction that no amount of athletic composure could suppress, the tell that said this is where I’m open, this is where you get in, this is the door and you’re the only one with the key.

“Co-authored,” Maya whispered against the tattoo.

“Co-authored,” Sloane confirmed. Her voice was already changing—thickening, dropping into the lower frequencies that meant her body had taken over from her brain. “Bed. Now. Please.”

“Please?” Maya looked up. Raised one eyebrow. “When did you learn please?”

“When the woman I love put on a black dress and opened champagne and stood in front of a window like something out of a movie I’d rewatch forever.” Sloane took Maya’s face in both hands. The gesture that was theirs—palms on cheeks, thumbs on cheekbones, the tender architecture of holding. “Please, Maya. Let me celebrate you.”

Maya led her to the bed.

The king-size mattress was an ocean after months of narrow exam tables and office desks and a queen in Maya’s apartment. They fell onto it together—Sloane on top, Maya underneath, the arrangement they’d discovered in the hotel room during the tournament, the one where Sloane’s weight pressed Maya into the mattress and Maya felt held instead of trapped and the X tattoo sat directly over Maya’s heart.

Sloane kissed her way down Maya’s body. Not fast. Not slow. At the pace of a woman who had been given the gift of time and intended to use every second of it. She kissed Maya’s throat, the notch between her collarbones, the center of her chest. She kissed the curve of each breast—first through the fabric of Maya’s bra, a teasing pressure that made Maya’s back arch, and then skin to skin after Sloane unhooked the clasp with one hand and dropped the bra over the side of the bed.

“Beautiful,” Sloane murmured against Maya’s sternum. The word vibrated through Maya’s ribcage. “God, you’re beautiful.”

“You’re the second overall pick and you’re worshipping me.”

“First overall in this room.” Sloane’s mouth moved lower. Over Maya’s stomach. Over the soft skin below her navel that she still felt self-conscious about and that Sloane kissed like it was sacred. “First overall in every room.”

She hooked her fingers in the waistband of Maya’s underwear. Looked up. Amber eyes in the city light, the glow from the window painting her face in shades of gold.

“Loud,” Sloane said. “Remember? That’s the rule tonight. No silence. No hand over your mouth. No biting your own arm.” She tugged the fabric down Maya’s hips. Slowly. Watching Maya’s face as each inch of skin was revealed. “I want to hear you, Maya. All of you. Every sound this room can hold.”

Maya lifted her hips. Let the last barrier go. She was naked on the hotel bed with the city behind her and the second overall pick between her thighs and the black dress on the floor like a promise kept.

“Then make me loud,” Maya said.

Sloane made her loud.

She started with her mouth on Maya’s inner thigh—the left one, then the right, building the anticipation with the strategic patience of a point guard running a play, each kiss a pass that moved the ball closer to the basket without committing to the shot. Maya’s hands were in the hotel sheets—white, expensive, the thread count of a suite booked on a first-round signing bonus—and her fingers twisted the fabric the way they’d twisted exam table paper and office carpet and her own bedsheets, the universal language of a body that was reaching for something to hold onto.

When Sloane’s mouth finally found her—warm, deliberate, devastating—Maya’s voice broke open.

Not the muffled sounds of the bus. Not the bitten-back cries of the closet. Not even the released freedom of her own apartment. This was something new. This was the sound of a woman who had been given explicit permission to be heard, in a room where being heard carried no consequences, and whose body had been waiting for this permission for longer than she knew.

She was loud.

The sounds came from somewhere deep—from the place where three years of silence had been stored, compressed, pressurized until it was waiting for the slightest fissure to erupt through. Maya moaned and gasped and said Sloane’s name in variations she didn’t know she had—whispered and shouted and broken and whole, the same three syllables rearranged by pleasure into a language only they spoke.

Sloane’s tongue was unhurried and precise. She’d learned Maya’s body the way she learned a defensive scheme—through repetition, through study, through the attentive cataloguing of what worked and what didn’t and what made Maya’s hips lift off the mattress like gravity had taken the night off. She applied that knowledge now with the focus of a woman playing the most important game of her career, and the results were immediate and catastrophic.

Maya came the first time with her back arched off the bed and both hands in Sloane’s hair and a sound that started as Sloane’s name and ended as something beyond language—raw, animal, the frequency that lived below words in the place where pleasure was indistinguishable from release. The orgasm rolled through her in waves that kept coming, each one pulling a new sound from her throat, and Sloane held her through every wave with her hands on Maya’s hips and her mouth gentle now, gentling, easing Maya down from the peak with the same care she’d used to build her up.

Maya lay on the bed. Breathing. Staring at the ceiling of a hotel suite that cost more than her first month’s rent. Her body was humming at a frequency she’d never experienced—not satisfied, not spent, but unlocked. As though the first orgasm had been a key turning in a lock she hadn’t known was there.

“Again,” Maya said.

Sloane looked up from between her thighs. Grinned. The grin of a woman who’d just been told to run the same play twice. “Yeah?”

“Again. And then it’s your turn. And then—” Maya pulled Sloane up by the shoulders, kissed her, tasted herself on Sloane’s mouth and felt the intimacy of it like a punch. “Then I want you against the window.”

Sloane’s eyes darkened. “The window.”

“Floor-to-ceiling glass. Twenty-three floors up. The whole city below.” Maya’s voice had found the authority register—the one that lived in her clinical training, in the part of her that knew how to give instructions and expect them followed. The voice that made Sloane’s body go still and pliant. “I want to see your reflection. I want to see your face when you come and the city lights behind you and no wall between us and the world.”

“Maya Rossi.” Sloane’s voice was awed. Wrecked. “What happened to careful?”

“Careful is in the closet with the dress. It’s not coming back.” Maya pulled Sloane down. Kissed her neck. Bit the tendon—hard enough to feel, soft enough to not mark, the calibration she’d perfected in the kitchen. “Now give me what I asked for.”

“Yes ma’am.”

The second time was Sloane’s fingers. Two, curling inside Maya while her thumb worked steady circles and her mouth was on Maya’s breast and the combination of sensations—internal and external, pressure and friction, Sloane’s voice murmuring against her skin—built a different kind of orgasm. Deeper. Slower. The kind that started in Maya’s core and radiated outward like heat from a furnace, warming every limb, every nerve, every cell until her entire body was a single point of concentrated pleasure.

Maya came with her eyes open. Looking at Sloane’s face. Watching the expression of focused devotion that Sloane wore when she was inside Maya—the furrowed brow, the parted lips, the amber eyes tracking every micro-expression on Maya’s face the way they tracked a defensive formation on the court. Reading her. Responding. Adjusting in real time.

“I love you,” Maya gasped as the wave crested. “I love you and I see you and you’re not replaceable and the X is mine and you’re mine and—”

The orgasm swallowed the rest. Sloane held her through it. Kissed the tears off her cheeks—because there were tears, there were always tears now, the emotional faucet that silence had sealed shut now permanently, blessedly, irreversibly open.

“Your turn,” Maya said. Before the aftershocks had fully subsided. Before her breathing had steadied. “Window. Now.”

She pushed Sloane off the bed. Not roughly—firmly. With the authority of a woman who had spent three years giving clinical instructions and was now redirecting that competence toward a purpose that would have given the ethics board a collective heart attack.

Sloane stood. Maya stood. They crossed the suite together—naked, unashamed, past the desk where the draft cap sat and the champagne bottle sweated and the phones lay face-down and forgotten—to the floor-to-ceiling window.

The city was below them. Twenty-three floors of vertical distance between their bodies and the world, and the glass was cool against Sloane’s skin when Maya pressed her against it. Sloane’s palms went flat on the window. Her breath fogged a circle on the glass. Her reflection stared back at her—dark-haired, wide-eyed, the X tattoo visible over her heart like a target.

Maya stood behind her. Pressed against her back. One hand flat on Sloane’s stomach. The other tracing the X through its reflection in the glass.

“I can see you,” Maya whispered against Sloane’s shoulder blade. “In the glass. I can see everything. Your face. The tattoo. Every expression you make when I—”

Her hand slid down Sloane’s stomach. Past the navel. Into the heat between Sloane’s thighs, where Sloane was already wet—had been wet since the black dress, since the doorway, since the moment she’d walked into the suite and seen Maya standing at the window like something she’d been promised and hadn’t dared believe she’d receive.

Sloane’s forehead fell against the glass. Her reflection was a ghost in the city lights—transparent, luminous, layered over the skyline like a double exposure. Maya watched the reflection’s face as her fingers found their rhythm—slow, deep, the same rhythm she’d used in the office after the blackmail, the rhythm of a woman who knew this body and loved this body and was never, ever going to be careless with it.

“Look,” Maya said. “Open your eyes and look.”

Sloane opened her eyes. In the glass, their reflections were overlaid—Maya behind Sloane, skin against skin, Maya’s hand moving between Sloane’s legs, their faces side by side in the dark mirror of the window. The city stretched below them, indifferent and brilliant, and above it their bodies were visible and unashamed, and the image—the sight of them, together, in a window that faced the world—was the opposite of every closet and every bus seat and every room where they’d hidden.

“This is us,” Maya said. Her fingers curled inside Sloane. Sloane’s hips jerked. The glass fogged. “This is what we look like when nobody’s watching. This is what we look like when we stop hiding.”

“Maya—I’m going to—”

“I know. I can see it. I can see it in your face.” Maya pressed harder. Faster. Her other hand found the X tattoo and pressed flat against it, palm over ink, palm over heart. “Come for me, Sloane. With the light on. With the window open. With the whole city underneath us and nobody to hide from.”

Sloane came against the glass.

Her palms slid on the window. Her forehead pressed hard against the cold surface. Her body shuddered between the glass and Maya’s body, caught between cold and heat, transparency and touch. The sound she made was loud—gloriously, unapologetically, building-code-violatingly loud—and it bounced off the window and the walls and the ceiling and filled the suite with the evidence of a woman who had spent her whole life being afraid of being seen and was now being seen and loved and held against a window on the twenty-third floor.

Maya held her through it. Both arms wrapped around Sloane’s waist, face pressed between her shoulder blades, lips against the knob of Sloane’s spine. She felt every tremor. Every wave. Every gasping breath that fogged and cleared and fogged again on the glass.

When it was over, Sloane turned in Maya’s arms. Her back against the window. The city behind her like a halo. Tears on her cheeks—the ones that always came after, the ones she’d stopped apologizing for.

“Point guards don’t cry,” Sloane said. The old line.

“Second overall picks are allowed to cry on draft night.” Maya kissed the tears. Left cheek. Right cheek. The corner of her mouth. “It’s in the bylaws.”

Sloane laughed. Wet. Broken. Perfect. “I love you.”

“I love you. Congratulations on the draft.”

“Congratulations on the black dress.”

“It’s on the floor.”

“Where it belongs.” Sloane pulled her close. Forehead to forehead. The X tattoo pressed between their chests, heartbeat to heartbeat, the shared signature that had started in a training room and now lived in a hotel suite above a city that didn’t care and two women who cared enough for everyone.

“Champagne?” Sloane asked.

“After.”

“After what?”

Maya smiled. The real one. The one that had been locked behind polos and protocols for three years and was now, permanently, free. She took Sloane’s hand and led her back to the king-size bed and the city lights and the rest of the night that stretched ahead of them—unhurried, unmonitored, theirs.

“After everything,” Maya said.

The champagne got warm. Neither of them noticed.

They opened it at 2 AM, sitting cross-legged on the destroyed bed, passing the bottle back and forth because neither of them had thought to pack glasses. The city was quieter now—the circuit board dimmed, the traffic thinned, the world settling into the small-hours hush that made hotel rooms feel like planets of their own.

Sloane took a swig. Passed the bottle. “Maya?”

“Hmm.”

“I’m going to buy us a penthouse.”

“You haven’t played a game yet.”

“I’m going to buy us a penthouse with a view and a kitchen where I make pasta on Thursdays and a bedroom with a door that locks and floor-to-ceiling windows because—” She glanced at the glass. At the fog that was still clearing from where her forehead had pressed. At the handprints that were still visible, ghostly and incriminating. “Because apparently I have a thing about windows now.”

Maya laughed. The full laugh. The one that came from the unlocked place. “You have a thing about windows.”

“I have a thing about you and windows. It’s a specific kink.”

“I’ll add it to your file.”

“I have a file?”

“You’ve always had a file.” Maya took the champagne. Drank. The bubbles were flat and the temperature was wrong and it was the best champagne she’d ever tasted. “Since the training room. 10:47 PM. Patient presents with fabricated rib pain and a tattoo that changes the attending clinician’s entire life.”

Sloane took the bottle back. Set it on the nightstand. Took Maya’s face in both hands—the gesture, their gesture, palms on cheeks, the architecture of holding.

“Thank you,” Sloane said. “For the black dress. For the window. For every closet and every bus seat and every room where you were brave enough to choose me even when it cost you everything.”

“It didn’t cost me everything. It cost me the parts I needed to lose.”

“The mask.”

“The mask. The silence. The version of me that kept the dress in the closet.” Maya turned her face and kissed Sloane’s palm. “Those parts are gone. This is what’s left.”

“What’s left is everything.”

They lay down. In the king-size bed, in the twenty-third-floor suite, in the city that was already forgetting about the draft and the draft picks and the names that would fill arenas for the next decade. They lay tangled together with the champagne going flat and the handprints fading on the glass and the X tattoo pressed between their hearts like a seal on a letter that had finally been delivered.

Maya didn’t set an alarm. There was nowhere to be. No practice. No game day. No swinging kitchen door. Just morning, eventually. And a woman in the bed. And the rest of everything, beginning now.

She slept with Sloane’s heartbeat under her ear and the city lights on the ceiling and a black dress on the floor that was never going back in the closet.

THE END