🔥 Morning Skate 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from OFF THE ICE, ON THE EDGE

Thank You for Reading! 💙

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the burner phones, the hotel rooms, the penalty box staring contests, the dishwasher fight, the five AM phone call, a seven-game playoff war, and a house in Canandaigua with a cat who owns the master bedroom.

You watched Miles learn to be quiet and Eli learn to be loud. You watched them crash into each other on the ice and put each other back together in the dark. You watched two men who thought they were too much and too little discover they were exactly right.

Thank you for giving their story a chance. This exclusive scene is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

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Morning Skate

Eli’s POV — Set six months after the final chapter.
Their house in Canandaigua. A Sunday in March.

I wake up to the sound of Miles Reyes snoring.

Not delicate snoring. Not the polite, barely-there breathing of a person who sleeps like a catalog model. Full, committed, structurally aggressive snoring — the kind that rattles the headboard and terrorizes the cat and makes me wonder, every single morning, how a man who weighs 175 pounds can produce a sound that registers on the Richter scale.

I love it. I love it the way I love everything about him — completely, irrationally, with the particular devotion of a man who spent twenty-six years in silence and is now addicted to noise.

It’s early. March light through the curtains — pale, watery, the thin gold of a sun that’s still warming up. The bedroom is cool. The house is quiet except for the snoring and the distant hum of the refrigerator and Puck, who is sitting on the dresser staring at us with an expression that communicates, clearly and without ambiguity, that breakfast is late.

Miles is sprawled across three-quarters of the bed. This is his natural state — territorial even in sleep, his body expanding to fill every available inch of mattress like a gas filling a container. One arm is thrown over my chest. One leg is hooked over mine. His face is pressed into the pillow, mouth open, dark curls in disarray, and there’s a crease from the pillowcase stamped across his cheek like a temporary scar.

I watch him. This is my favorite version of Miles — the quiet one, the still one, the one that no one else gets to see. The Miles who exists only in the first few minutes of morning, before consciousness activates the machinery of his personality and the noise begins. For these few minutes, he’s just a body. Warm, heavy, breathing. Mine.

I trace a line down his arm with my fingertip. Shoulder to bicep to forearm to wrist — the left one, the one that broke, the one that healed. The scar is faint now, a thin white line on brown skin, barely visible unless you know where to look. I know where to look. I know every mark on this body — every scar, every bruise, every freckle. I’ve mapped him the way I map game film: thoroughly, obsessively, with the focused attention of a man who believes that understanding is a form of love.

He stirs. Not awake — not yet. But his body registers my touch in some sub-conscious layer, and his arm tightens across my chest, and his hips shift, and—

Oh.

He’s hard. Morning hard, the involuntary, automatic kind, his cock pressed against my thigh through the thin cotton of his boxers. The contact sends a pulse of heat through me that starts at the point of contact and radiates outward — thigh to hip to stomach to chest — and my own body responds with the Pavlovian immediacy of a man who has been waking up next to this particular person for six months and whose nervous system has been thoroughly, permanently recalibrated.

He shifts again. A slow, unconscious grind — his hips rolling against my thigh, seeking friction, his body doing what it does even in sleep. His breathing changes. The snoring stops. A softer sound replaces it — a low, humming exhalation, almost a moan, the sound of a man who’s having a very good dream.

I should let him sleep. It’s Sunday. We have nowhere to be. The responsible, considerate thing to do is lie still and let him wake up on his own schedule.

I slide my hand down his body.

Across his chest. The lean plane of his stomach, where the muscles flex under my palm even in sleep. The trail of dark hair below his navel — coarser, thicker, a guide line that I follow with my fingers until I reach the waistband of his boxers.

I slip my hand inside.

He’s hot. Thick and hard and straining against my palm, and when I wrap my fingers around him, his whole body shudders. His eyes are still closed. His mouth is still open against the pillow. But his hips jerk forward — a sharp, involuntary thrust — and the sound he makes is halfway between asleep and awake, a breathy, broken groan that I feel in my own cock like an echo.

“Mm,” he says. Not a word. A vibration. An acknowledgment transmitted through the body rather than the mind.

I stroke him. Slow. The lazy, unhurried rhythm of a man who has all the time in the world — because I do. Because we do. No checkout time. No morning skate. No ninety-minute drive home. Just Sunday. Just this house. Just the two of us in the bed we share in the life we built.

His eyes open. Hazy, unfocused, the pupils blown wide with sleep and arousal. He blinks at me. Blinks again. The awareness arrives in stages — where he is, who he’s with, what my hand is doing.

“Hi,” he says. His voice is wrecked. Morning-rough, sleep-thick, barely functional.

“Good morning.”

“You’re—” He gasps as my thumb sweeps over the head, spreading the slick that’s already gathered there. “You’re touching me.”

“I am.”

“It’s—” He checks the clock. His eyes widen. “It’s six thirty in the morning, Eli.”

“I’m aware of the time.”

“On a Sunday.”

“I’m aware of the day.”

“You’re jerking me off at six thirty on a Sunday morning.” He says this with a combination of outrage and delight that is so quintessentially Miles that I want to laugh. “Who are you and what have you done with the man who color-codes his meal prep containers?”

“The man who color-codes his meal prep containers wants to make you come before seven AM. Do you have objections?”

“I have zero objections. I have the opposite of objections. I have—ah—I have enthusiastic and unqualified consent to whatever you’re—fuck—”

I tighten my grip. Speed up. His sentence collapses into a moan that he buries in the pillow, and his hips start moving — rolling into my hand, chasing the friction, his body taking over while his brain catches up.

I pull my hand out of his boxers.

“No,” he says immediately. Desperately. The word is a complaint, a protest, a small crime against humanity. “No, Eli, why did you—”

“Take these off.” I tug his waistband. “I want to see you.”

He strips his boxers off so fast I hear fabric tear. “Okay. Okay, they’re off, now please—”

I push the covers back. Sit up. Look at him — spread across our bed in the morning light, naked, hard, his cock dark and flushed against his stomach, his chest heaving, his eyes bright with the particular combination of arousal and impatience that I’ve spent two years learning to read and manipulate.

“You’re beautiful,” I tell him. Because he is. Because I mean it every time. Because Miles Reyes, who has been told his whole life that he’s too much, needs to hear that he’s everything.

His face does the thing. The softening. The crack in the bravado. “E—”

I lean down and take him in my mouth.

His back arches off the mattress. A sound tears out of him — loud, unrestrained, the full-volume Miles that I asked for, that I always ask for — and his hand flies to my head, fingers threading through my hair, gripping but not pushing. His thighs shake on either side of my face.

I go slow. Sunday slow. The kind of slow that turns minutes into hours, that makes every second stretch until the pleasure fills it completely. My tongue traces the length of him — base to tip, the thick vein on the underside, the ridge below the head that makes his hips stutter. I hollow my cheeks. Take him deep. Pull back until just the tip rests on my tongue, swirl, take him deep again.

“God—Eli—your mouth—”

His hand tightens in my hair. I feel his thighs trembling with the effort of not thrusting, of letting me set the pace, of surrendering control to a man he trusts with every part of himself. The surrender is the thing. It’s always been the thing — not the act itself, but the trust underneath it. Miles, who performs control for the world, letting go completely. For me. Only for me.

I pull off. Kiss his hip. His stomach. The inside of his thigh. He whimpers — actually whimpers, a sound that I will replay in my memory on every long road trip for the rest of my career.

“Eli, if you don’t—I need—please—”

“What do you need?”

“You. Inside me. I want to feel you.”

I reach for the nightstand. Lube. No condom — we don’t use them anymore, haven’t since the night before the statement, the night we removed the last barrier. The nightstand drawer of our house in Canandaigua contains lube, a phone charger, and a half-read novel. The simplicity of it. The domesticity. The fact that this is our life now — unhidden, uncomplicated, a drawer in a nightstand in a house we own.

I warm the lube between my fingers. Settle between his thighs. He draws his knees up, plants his feet on the mattress, opens for me with the easy trust of a man who has done this a hundred times and wants to do it a hundred thousand more.

One finger. The tight heat of him closing around me, his body yielding, accepting, pulling me in. He exhales — a long, slow release, his eyes fluttering shut, his lips parting. I add a second. Stretch. Curl. Find the spot and press, and his whole body jolts.

“There—right there, don’t stop—”

I don’t stop. I work him open with the patience I bring to everything — the patience that makes me a good defenseman, a good cook, a good partner. A third finger. More lube. His body relaxing around me, loosening, ready.

“Now,” he breathes. “Now, Eli.”

I slick myself. Position. Push in — slow, so slow, feeling every inch of the tight, pulsing heat of him. No barrier. Nothing between us. Just skin and warmth and the overwhelming intimacy of being inside the person you love on a Sunday morning in your own home.

He moans. Long and low and unrestrained, the sound filling our bedroom, bouncing off the walls of the house we own, reaching the master bedroom where Puck is certainly judging us. I don’t care. I want the sound to fill every room. I want the house to know what happens here — love, made physical, made audible, made permanent.

I move. Slow. Deep. The rhythm of a Sunday morning — unhurried, intentional, each thrust a complete sentence rather than a fragment. His legs wrap around my waist. His hands find my arms, my shoulders, my face. He pulls me down until our foreheads are touching and we’re breathing the same air.

“I love you,” he says. Between breaths. Between thrusts. The words synchronized with our bodies, with our breathing, with the morning light that’s strengthening through the curtains and turning his skin to gold.

“I love you,” I say back. And I move inside him, and his hands grip my face, and his eyes are open and bright and looking at me — really looking, the way he learned to look during the last night of hiding, the night he promised to keep his eyes open. He’s kept that promise. Every time. He looks at me when the pleasure builds. He looks at me when his body starts to shake. He looks at me and lets me see everything — the joy, the vulnerability, the love so big it makes the room feel small.

“Close,” he gasps. “So close—”

I reach between us. Wrap my hand around his cock. Stroke in time with my thrusts, and the dual stimulation — inside and out, full and held — pushes him over the edge.

He comes with my name in his mouth and his eyes on mine and his body clenching around me in rhythmic, pulsing waves. I feel every contraction. Every spasm. The hot rush of him spilling over my fist and across his stomach, and the sight of it — Miles, coming apart underneath me, golden in the morning light, in our bed, in our house — pulls me under.

I bury myself deep and come. Inside him. My face in his neck. His hands in my hair. The groan that escapes me is the one he described once as something cracking open, and that’s exactly what it is — every time, every single time, the same beautiful, terrifying, irreversible breaking-open of everything I used to hold behind the Wall.

We lie there. Tangled. Sticky. Breathing hard. The morning light is full now — bright, warm, the particular gold of a March Sunday that has decided to be kind. Puck yowls from the master bedroom. We ignore her.

“That,” Miles says, “is how every Sunday should start.”

“Noted.”

“I’m serious. I want this in the calendar. Recurring event. Sunday, six thirty AM: Eli ruins me.”

“I’ll add it to the shared Google Calendar.”

“Between meal prep and grocery run. Perfect.”

I laugh. He laughs. We lie in the wreckage of the sheets and laugh together, naked and sweaty and unbearably happy, and this — this — is the thing. Not the sex, though the sex is extraordinary. Not the house, though the house is everything we imagined. The laughter. The ease. The complete, unperformative, unremarkable normalcy of two people who love each other, existing in the same space, making each other laugh at 6:47 on a Sunday morning.

This is what we hid for two years. This is what the burner phones protected and the hotel rooms contained and the Wall held back. This ordinary, devastating, impossible joy.

It was worth every mile. Every lie. Every locked bathroom stall and coded text and sleepless night.

All of it. For this.

We shower together. More kissing than actual washing — his mouth on mine under the hot spray, my hands on his hips, his back against the tile. We make out like teenagers, unhurried, tasting water and each other, and by the time we actually use soap, the hot water is running low and neither of us cares.

Breakfast. I cook — eggs, toast, the sourdough I made yesterday. Miles makes coffee, badly. This is the arrangement: I handle anything that requires precision, temperature control, or a knife. He handles the espresso machine, which he operates with the same chaotic energy he brings to hockey — pressing buttons at random, adjusting settings by feel, producing a beverage that is either sublime or undrinkable with no middle ground.

Today it’s sublime. He hands me a cup and I taste it and nod approvingly, and the grin he gives me — proud, boyish, absurdly pleased with himself — is the grin I fell in love with in a ballroom two and a half years ago.

We eat on the porch. The morning is cold — March cold, the kind that bites your fingers but not your mood — and we sit in the Adirondack chairs with blankets over our legs and plates on our laps and Puck at our feet, finally fed, finally satisfied, tolerating our existence with her usual benevolent contempt.

At 7:30, we drive to our respective rinks. Opposite directions. My car east, his car west. At the end of the driveway, our cars pause side by side. He rolls down his window. I roll down mine.

“Kick ass today,” he says.

“You too.”

“Love you.”

“Love you more.”

“Not possible.” He grins. And drives away. And I watch his taillights for a moment before pulling onto the road.

The radio comes on. I turn it up. Something Miles put on my playlist — something loud, something with bass, something that fills the car with the specific frequency of the man I love.

I’m driving to practice. My boyfriend — my loud, impossible, too-much, perfect boyfriend — is driving to practice in the other direction. And tonight we’ll meet back here. In our home. With our cat. And our life.

I smile. It’s the kind of smile I used to save for when no one was watching.

Now I do it whenever I want.

Thank you for reading Off the Ice, On the Edge 💙

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