🔥 The Return Visit 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Penalty Box Confessions

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You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the medical room, the bus ride, the breakup duffel bag, and a center ice kiss seen by 340 million people. You’ve watched a man who hasn’t cried in fourteen years break apart on a kitchen floor. You’ve traced the blue toothbrush and the Monster Ultras and the BU hoodie folded with military precision. Thank you for giving Roman and Kyler your time. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

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⚠️ Content Warning: This bonus chapter contains explicit MM sexual content including oral sex, handjob, throat-holding, wrist-pinning, dirty talk, praise kink, possessive dynamics, and emotional vulnerability that will destroy you. Set after the epilogue — Roman and Kyler return to the medical room where it all started. Intended for readers 18+ only.

The Return Visit

Set during preseason, September — after the epilogue.
Kyler POV.

The medical room hadn’t changed.

Same eight-by-ten box. Same exam table with that paper cover that crinkled if you breathed near it. Same supply cabinet, same rolling stool, same overhead fluorescents casting everything in that greenish-white glow that made the room feel like the exact kind of place where bad decisions were born.

Or, in our case, the best bad decision either of us had ever made.

It was September. Preseason. The building still had that end-of-summer quiet — ice freshly cut, seats empty, the kind of anticipatory hum that vibrated through Harbor Ice Center before the season officially started. The team had been back for ten days. New guys in the room, new energy, the usual optimism that preceded the reality of an eighty-two-game grind.

Also new: the framed Sports Illustrated cover hanging in the hallway outside the front office. Roman’s hands on my jersey, our mouths fused together at center ice, the Cup gleaming behind us. DeLuca had tried to take it down twice. Jenna had threatened to leak his browser history. The photo stayed.

Everything was different now.

And the medical room was exactly the same.

I hadn’t planned this. That was important context, because Roman would absolutely think I’d planned it — he’d give me that look, the one that said I know what you’re doing with those dark eyes that had been making me stupid since the first day he walked into this building and made the air leave the room.

But I genuinely hadn’t planned it. I’d been heading to the equipment room to grab extra tape for tomorrow’s practice when I’d passed the door. The door that didn’t lock properly from the inside — push-button mechanism, decorative, not functional. The door that had been closed the night Roman Gallagher put his hand over my mouth and took me apart on an exam table and then walked out and said this didn’t happen.

Nine months ago. A lifetime ago.

I stopped walking.

Stared at the door.

And something that lived at the intersection of nostalgia and pure, undiluted want unfurled in my chest like a fist unclenching.

Roman was in the weight room. I’d watched him go in twenty minutes ago — gray compression shirt, black shorts, the expression of focused intensity that meant he was about to deadlift something obscene and come out smelling like iron and sweat. He’d kissed the top of my head on his way past my stall, casual, proprietary, the way he did now that we didn’t have to pretend. Bex had made a gagging sound. Mitty had nodded approvingly. Sanderson had thrown a roll of tape at us and yelled get a room.

Get a room.

I looked at the medical room door.

I pulled out my phone.

Kyler: Come to the medical room.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Roman: Why?

Kyler: Just come.

Roman: Are you hurt?

Kyler: Roman.

Roman: I’m mid-set.

Kyler: The medical room. Now.

A pause. I could picture him — standing in the weight room, phone in one hand, the other wrapped around the barbell, jaw tight, trying to decide whether this was an emergency or exactly what it sounded like.

Roman: …

Kyler: Bring the tape.

Roman: What tape?

Kyler: You know what tape.

No response. But I heard the weight room door open and close from down the hall, and the sound of footsteps — measured, unhurried, because Roman Gallagher did not rush for anyone, even when he absolutely wanted to — growing louder against the concrete floor.

I slipped inside the medical room. Hoisted myself onto the exam table. The paper crinkled.

Same sound. Same room. Same fluorescent buzz.

Different everything.

* * *

He filled the doorway the way he always did. Six-three, two-twenty-five, shoulders that blocked light, dark eyes that found mine immediately and didn’t let go. His hair was damp at the temples. The compression shirt clung to his chest. He had a roll of white athletic tape in his left hand.

He’d brought the tape.

Something hot and liquid pooled low in my stomach.

“Close the door,” I said.

Roman looked at me. Looked at the exam table. Looked at the position I was in — sitting on the edge, legs dangling, leaning back on my hands. The exact position I’d been in nine months ago when he’d crossed this room in two strides and put his hand on my chest and shoved me flat.

Understanding moved across his face like weather. Recognition. Memory. And underneath both, the slow, dangerous ignition of something that turned his dark eyes black.

He closed the door.

The lock didn’t catch. Same as before. He didn’t bother trying.

“Kyler.”

“Roman.”

“What are you doing?”

“Sitting on an exam table in a room that changed my life.” I cocked my head. Clicked my tongue piercing against my teeth. Watched his jaw tighten at the sound. “Feeling nostalgic.”

He set the tape on the supply cabinet. Crossed his arms. Leaned against the closed door. The posture was controlled, measured — the Wall in its resting state, all that power held in check by sheer discipline.

I wanted to demolish it. Same as always. Same as the first time. Except now I had every tool in the world to do it, and he’d given me every single one of them willingly.

“You pulled me out of a deadlift set,” he said.

“I did.”

“For nostalgia.”

“Among other things.”

His eyes tracked down my body. Slow. Deliberate. Taking inventory the way he always did — cataloging every detail, filing it somewhere behind that impenetrable expression. I was in joggers and a tank top, nothing special, but the way Roman looked at me had never required special. He looked at me like I was the only variable in every equation he’d ever tried to solve.

“Last time we were in this room,” he said, voice low, “I told you this didn’t happen.”

“You did.”

“I was wrong.”

“You were a lot of things. Wrong was definitely one of them.” I spread my knees wider on the exam table. Subtle. Not subtle at all. “Repressed. Terrified. Stupidly hot. Wrong.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. That almost-smile that I’d spent months excavating from beneath the rubble of his self-control. The one that meant he was trying not to laugh and also trying not to cross the room and put his hands on me.

“I was thinking,” I said, “that we have some unfinished business in this room.”

“We finished pretty thoroughly, if I remember correctly.”

“You finished me. I didn’t get to return the favor.” I leaned forward on the table. The paper crinkled. “And you walked out. Just — walked out. Into the hallway. Like you hadn’t just dismantled me on a medical exam table with one hand.”

“Kyler — “

“You put your hand over my mouth and told me not to make a sound.” I held his gaze. “You held my wrists above my head. You made me come so hard I saw colors that don’t exist in nature. And then you said this didn’t happen and left me lying on that table like a crime scene.”

His breathing had changed. Deeper. Slower. The kind of controlled breathing he used on the ice when the game was close and every second mattered. His arms were still crossed, but I could see the tension in his forearms, the veins standing out, the white-knuckle grip of his own biceps.

“I owe you,” I said. “For nine months of interest.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“Then consider it a gift.” I slid off the table. The paper tore. I didn’t care. I stood in front of him — my Roman, my beautiful, controlled, emotionally devastated wall of a man — and I put both palms flat against his chest and felt his heart slamming against my hands.

“The door doesn’t lock,” he said.

“I know.”

“Anyone could walk in.”

“I know.” I smiled up at him. “Except this time, I don’t care. And neither do you. Because everyone already knows, Roman. The whole world knows. Three hundred and forty million people watched you kiss me at center ice. There’s a Sports Illustrated cover hanging twenty feet from this room. Mitty sent us a blender for the apartment.” I fisted the front of his compression shirt. “So when I get on my knees for you in this room — and I am going to get on my knees for you in this room — you don’t have to pretend it didn’t happen. You don’t have to walk out. You don’t have to feel guilty, or scared, or any of the things you felt last time.”

His hands came up. Slowly, like something being released from restraint. They found my hips and the contact sent electricity arcing through me the way it always did — the way it had the very first time, in the training room, when he’d brushed against my skin and then looked at my mouth and everything between us had caught fire.

“You planned this,” he said.

“I absolutely did not plan this. I was going to get tape.”

“You told me to bring tape.”

“That was improvisation. I’m gifted.”

His hands tightened on my hips. Pulled me into him. The length of his body pressed against mine — hard muscle, radiating heat, the faint smell of iron and clean sweat from the weight room. I tilted my head back to look up at him and he was looking down at me with an expression that still, after all these months, made it hard to breathe.

Not the Wall. Not the enforcer. Just Roman. Open. Present. Wanting.

“Tell me what you want,” he said.

“I want to redo this room. Properly.” I ran my hands up his chest, over his shoulders, into his hair. “I want to take my time. I want you to make those sounds you make when you stop controlling everything — the ones you only make when it’s just us and you let the Wall come down. I want to hear them echo off these ugly tile walls.”

His breath caught.

“And I want to be the one on my knees this time.” I tugged his hair, just enough. “Because nine months ago you wrecked me in this room and didn’t let me touch you, and I have been thinking about returning the favor approximately every forty-five minutes since.”

“Every forty-five minutes?”

“Sometimes thirty. During road trips, closer to twenty.”

He kissed me.

Not the gentle, proprietary kiss he’d dropped on my head in the locker room. Not the center-ice kiss that lived on magazine covers. This was the medical room kiss — the one that tasted like adrenaline and need and the reckless, consuming thing that had been eating us alive since the day we met. His hands came up to frame my face, thumbs along my jaw, tilting my head back to change the angle, and he kissed me deep and slow and thorough, like he was trying to memorize the shape of my mouth, like we had all the time in the world and he intended to use every second.

I kissed him back with everything I had. Bit his lower lip. Felt him growl against my mouth — that low, vibrating sound that lived in his chest and made my knees go liquid. His hands slid from my face to my throat, and the ghost of that first night flickered between us like a struck match.

His hand on my throat. My pulse hammering against his palm. The exam table creaking. The fluorescents buzzing.

But this time, when his fingers wrapped around my neck, I leaned into it. No defiance. No fury. Just trust so absolute it made his hand tremble.

“Ky — ” His voice cracked. His thumb traced my pulse point. “What you do to me — “

“Tell me.”

“Everything.” He pressed his forehead against mine. “You do everything to me.”

I dropped to my knees.

The floor was cold. Hard. The concrete they didn’t bother covering in the medical room because who cared about comfort in a room designed for stitches and ice packs and the systematic repair of broken hockey players.

I didn’t care about the cold. I cared about Roman’s sharp intake of breath above me. I cared about the way his hand found the back of my head — gentle, shaking, his fingers threading through my hair with a tenderness that contradicted every brutal thing those hands had done on the ice. I cared about the way his back hit the door and his head fell back and his eyes closed and then opened again because he’d promised me, months ago, that he’d keep his eyes open. That he’d stay present. That he’d stop hiding behind the Wall.

He watched me.

I held his gaze and took my time with his shorts, easing them down with deliberate slowness, because if there was one thing Roman had taught me — on this table, in this room, all those months ago — it was the devastating power of making someone wait.

“Kyler.” His voice was wrecked already. Low and rough and shaking at the edges. “You don’t have to — “

“I know I don’t have to.” I pressed my mouth to his hip bone. Felt his abs contract under my lips. “I want to. I’ve wanted to since you walked into this room the first time and looked at me like I was simultaneously the worst and best thing that had ever happened to you.”

“You were. You are.”

“Romantic.” I traced the line of his hip with my tongue. His fingers tightened in my hair. “Hold on.”

I took him into my mouth.

The sound he made — God, the sound he made. Not the controlled, measured breathing of a man who’d spent thirty-two years building walls. Not the enforcer, not the captain, not the version of Roman Gallagher the world got to see. This was the sound beneath all of that. Raw. Desperate. A groan that started in his chest and tore itself out of his throat and hit the tile walls and bounced back and filled the room with exactly the kind of noise that Roman Gallagher had spent his entire life not making.

I wanted to drown in that sound.

His hand cradled the back of my skull — not pushing, not directing, just holding. Anchoring himself. The other hand pressed flat against the door behind him like he needed something solid to keep him upright. His thighs were trembling. Roman, whose legs didn’t shake after back-to-back overtime periods, was trembling because of my mouth.

I took him deeper. Set a rhythm that was slow and devastating and deliberately designed to dismantle every remaining shred of his composure. I used my tongue, my hands, the flat of my palms against his hips holding him against the door when he tried to thrust forward. I used every trick I knew and a few I invented on the spot, and I watched his face the entire time — watched the Wall crumble brick by brick as his jaw clenched and his eyes went glassy and his chest heaved with breaths that sounded like they were being ripped out of him.

“Ky — fuck — ” His head dropped forward. Eyes locked on mine. Pupils obliterating the dark brown to a thin ring. “You — I can’t — “

I pulled back just enough to speak, my lips still brushing him. “You can. Let go.”

“The door — “

“Let someone walk in. Let the whole team walk in. Let them see you like this.” I pressed an open-mouthed kiss to him that made his whole body jerk. “You’re mine, Roman. This is what mine looks like.”

His hand tightened in my hair. Not gentle anymore. His hips snapped forward — the control slipping, the discipline fracturing — and I opened for him and took everything he gave me because this was what I’d wanted for nine months. Not the controlled version. Not the careful version. The real Roman, desperate and shaking and making sounds that would ruin the sanctity of this medical room for every future patient.

I could feel it building in him. The tension coiling in his thighs, the tremor in his hands, the way his breathing went ragged and uneven. His eyes were still open — barely, the lids heavy, but open, watching me with an expression so unguarded it made my chest ache.

“I love you,” he said. Not a whisper. Out loud. In this room where he’d once told me this didn’t happen. “Kyler — I love you — I — “

His voice broke.

His body followed.

I held him through it the way he’d held me nine months ago. Every tremor, every sound, every breath. I kept my hands on his hips and my knees on the cold concrete floor and I didn’t look away because he didn’t look away. We stayed locked together through the entire shattering, devastating, world-ending aftermath of Roman Gallagher letting go of control completely.

When his body finally went slack against the door, his hand loosened in my hair. Stroked instead of gripped. Gentle again. Trembling.

I stood up. My knees ached. I didn’t care.

Roman pulled me into him immediately. Arms wrapping around me — tight, almost crushing, his face buried in my neck. I could feel his heart slamming against my chest. Feel the unsteady rise and fall of his breathing. Feel the wetness on my throat that might have been sweat and might have been something else entirely.

“Hey,” I said softly. My hands found the back of his neck, his shoulders, his hair. “Hey. I’ve got you.”

“I know.” His voice was muffled against my skin. Wrecked. Raw. Beautiful. “You always do.”

We stood like that for a while. In the medical room. Under the fluorescent lights. Holding each other like the building might collapse if either of us let go.

Eventually, Roman lifted his head. His eyes were red-rimmed. His expression was —

Open. Completely, devastatingly open. No Wall. No armor. Just a man who had spent thirty-two years learning how to take hits and was still, every single day, learning how to take love.

“This happened,” he said.

I smiled. “This happened.”

He kissed me. Gentle. Almost chaste, except for the way his tongue swept across my lower lip and the way his hands slid down to my ass and hauled me against him in a move that was decidedly not chaste.

“Your turn,” he said.

“I’m fine — “

He reversed our positions in one fluid motion. My back hit the door. His body caged mine. One hand pinned my wrists above my head — just like the first time, except now his grip was tender where it used to be punishing, and his eyes were soft where they used to be furious, and the exam table was behind him and I was against the door and everything was different and everything was the same.

“Your turn,” he repeated, mouth against my ear, and his free hand slid beneath the waistband of my joggers with the kind of deliberate intent that made my vision tunnel.

“Roman — ah, fuck — “

“Last time, I told you not to make a sound.” His hand found me. Wrapped around me. Began to move with the same methodical, devastating patience he’d used nine months ago. “New rule.”

“What — ” I could barely form words. He was already taking me apart with the practiced efficiency of a man who had mapped every nerve ending in my body and weaponized the knowledge. “What rule?”

“I want to hear everything.” He tightened his grip. Stroked slow. “Every sound you held back last time. Give them to me.”

I gave them to him.

In the medical room at Harbor Ice Center, with the fluorescents buzzing and the exam table paper still torn from where I’d slid off it and the door that still didn’t lock pressing against my back, I stopped being quiet. I gave Roman Gallagher every moan, every gasp, every broken syllable of his name that I’d bitten back and swallowed and suffocated behind his palm nine months ago.

And he drank them in like water. Like air. Like a man who had spent his entire life in silence and was just now learning what sound was for.

His hand worked me with devastating precision. His mouth was on my neck — my throat, my jaw, the spot below my ear that made me incoherent. He whispered against my skin as he took me apart — praise, promises, the kind of low, rough endearments that Roman only ever said when the Wall was down and the lights were low and he’d forgotten to be afraid of his own voice.

“You’re so beautiful like this — “

“Look at you — “

“Mine. You’re mine — “

“Let go, baby. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you — “

I came with his name in my mouth and his hand in my hair and his body holding me up when my legs gave out. It hit like a wave — full-body, all-consuming, the kind of release that started in the base of my spine and detonated outward until my fingertips tingled and my vision went white and the only thing that existed in the entire world was Roman’s arms around me and his voice in my ear saying I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.

* * *

Afterward, we sat on the floor.

On the actual floor of the medical room. Roman leaned against the door, legs stretched out in front of him. I sat between his legs with my back against his chest, his arms wrapped around me, his chin resting on top of my head. The fluorescents hummed. The exam table paper hung in torn strips. The room smelled like us.

“We should clean up,” I said.

“Mmm.” He didn’t move.

“Someone’s going to need this room.”

“Mmm.” Still didn’t move.

“Peretti’s going to know.”

“Peretti knew nine months ago.”

I tilted my head back to look at him. “He did?”

“He left us alone in here on purpose, Ky. He saw the way we were looking at each other. He probably had a betting pool.”

I laughed. The sound bounced off the tile walls and came back warmer, lighter, like the room itself had shifted register. “So the team doctor orchestrated our first hookup.”

“He’s a very thorough medical professional.”

I twisted to face him. He was smiling. A real, full smile — the kind that crinkled the corners of his eyes and showed the gap between his front teeth that he hated and I loved. The kind he used to ration like a finite resource and now gave freely, recklessly, like he’d finally realized the supply was infinite.

“This room,” I said, tracing a finger along his jaw. “This stupid, ugly, fluorescent-lit box. This is where it started.”

“The training room, technically.”

“No. Here. The training room was — electricity. Chemistry. Whatever. But this room? This is where you touched me and I knew.” I pressed my palm flat against his chest. Over his heart. “I knew right here that I was fucked. That it wasn’t just physical. That you were going to be the most important person in my life, and you were already trying to pretend I didn’t exist.”

His hand covered mine. Pressed it harder against his chest.

“I wasn’t pretending you didn’t exist,” he said quietly. “I was terrified of how much I needed you to exist.”

I kissed him. Slow. Sweet. The kind of kiss we never could have had in this room the first time — unhurried, unafraid, tasting like honesty instead of desperation.

“We should come back here every year,” I said against his mouth. “Like an anniversary. Our medical room pilgrimage.”

“That’s bizarre.”

“It’s romantic.”

“It’s a medical facility, Kyler.”

“It’s our medical facility.” I grinned. “I’ll put it on the shared calendar. September. Medical Room. Bring tape.”

He shook his head. He was still smiling.

“You’re insane,” he said, with the particular inflection that meant I love you beyond the capacity of language to express.

“And you’re mine,” I said.

“I’m yours.” No hesitation. No Wall. Just truth, offered freely in a room that used to taste like secrets. “I was yours the minute you walked into this building.”

The fluorescents buzzed.

The exam table paper rustled in the draft from the ventilation system.

And in the medical room at Harbor Ice Center — the room where it didn’t happen, except it did, except it always had — Kyler Thorne kissed Roman Gallagher for the tenth time that hour and thought about how some rooms hold the exact shape of the moment your life changed.

This was ours.

This would always be ours.

And the door still didn’t lock, and we still didn’t care.

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With love,
Jace Wilder