🔥 The Table 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Playing Hurt

Thank You for Reading! 💙

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the treatment room, the late sessions, the parking structure footage, and a man who stood in a GM’s office and said your son is the best thing that’s ever happened to me to a father who spent twenty-three years saying otherwise. You’ve watched Julian’s steady hands finally shake — not from fear, but from being held by someone who refused to let go. Thank you for giving Julian and Roman 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, anal sex, praise kink, size difference, body worship, possessive dirty talk, orgasm delay, emotional intensity, and sex on a treatment table. Set one year after the epilogue — Julian and Roman return to the room where it all started. Intended for readers 18+ only.

The Table

Set one year after the epilogue.
Julian POV.

The treatment room smelled exactly the same.

Antiseptic, eucalyptus muscle rub, and the faint metallic undertone of a space that lived inside a hockey arena and had stopped pretending otherwise. I stood in the doorway at seven twenty-nine — the same time, to the minute, that I’d stood here one year ago waiting for a man I’d been told to fix and instead let ruin my entire life in the best possible way.

The fluorescents were off. I’d switched them off then, too — traded the clinical blue-white for the adjustable desk lamp that cast the room in warm amber. The padded treatment table sat in the center like an altar. Same fresh sheet. Same rolling cart, though I’d restocked it this afternoon with supplies I didn’t strictly need for what I had planned tonight.

What I had planned tonight didn’t require kinesiology tape or a goniometer.

What I had planned tonight required Roman Vane, this table, and approximately zero professional boundaries.

I checked my watch. Seven-thirty in twelve seconds. The building was quiet the way it always was at this hour — the evening staff filtered out, the cleaning crew not yet started on this wing, the ice freshly resurfaced and gleaming under the arena lights that nobody was watching. The hallway outside was deserted. I’d checked three times.

My phone buzzed.

Roman: I’m in the parking structure. Why am I in the parking structure?

Julian: Because I told you to be.

Roman: You told me to meet you at the facility at 7:30. You didn’t say why. You were smiling when you said it. I don’t trust your smile.

Julian: Treatment room. Now.

A pause. I could picture him in the car — engine off, phone in one hand, the other draped over the steering wheel, his jaw doing the thing it did when he was calculating variables. Silver at his temples catching the parking structure lights. Leather jacket. The cologne I’d bought him for his birthday that smelled like cedar and dark intentions.

Roman: Julian.

Julian: It’s been exactly one year.

No response. But thirty seconds later I heard the stairwell door open at the end of the corridor, and then footsteps — measured, unhurried, each one landing with the deliberate weight of a man who never rushed because the world rearranged itself around his schedule.

The door didn’t open at seven-thirty.

It opened at seven twenty-nine.

Same as the first time.

* * *

He filled the doorframe the way he’d filled it three hundred and sixty-five days ago. Six-three. Shoulders that made the architecture look insufficient. Dark eyes that found mine before the door was fully open, because Roman Vane had been calibrated to my location since the first night he sat on this table and let me put my hands on his shoulder and we both pretended the electricity between us was static.

He was in jeans and the leather jacket and a black henley that stretched across his chest in a way that should have been regulated by some governing body. His hair was damp at the temples — shower, recently. The cedar cologne. The short-trimmed beard I’d spent the last twelve months learning the exact topography of with my mouth.

He looked at me. He looked at the room. He looked at the treatment table with its fresh sheet and the amber lamp and the deliberate recreation of the scene that had preceded the systematic dismantling of both our lives.

“Julian.” His voice was low. The voice he used in hallways when other people might hear, except there were no other people and the hallway was empty and we’d stopped hiding eleven months ago when he’d held my hand in a locker room full of hockey players and told them this is the person I love, and you can deal with it or you can request a trade.

“Close the door,” I said.

He closed the door.

“One year,” he said.

“One year.” I was leaning against the treatment table, arms crossed, wearing the same navy scrubs I’d been wearing that first night. Not a coincidence. I’d dug them out of the back of my closet this morning and ironed them with the focused precision of a man who was planning a seduction and believed in attention to detail. “You walked into this room at seven twenty-nine on a Tuesday night and sat on this table and took your shirt off, and I spent the next forty-five minutes touching your shoulder while pretending I couldn’t feel your pulse accelerating under my fingers.”

“I wasn’t pretending anything,” Roman said. He hadn’t moved from the door. His eyes were doing the thing they did — the slow, thorough inventory, cataloging every detail: the scrubs, the lamp, the table, the way I’d positioned myself against it. “I was trying not to get hard on your treatment table while you pressed your thumbs into my trapezius.”

“You failed.”

“I failed spectacularly. Within the first fifteen minutes.”

“I know. I noticed.” I tilted my head. “I noticed everything about you, Roman. The pulse. The breathing changes. The way your muscles tensed when my hands got close to your neck. The way you looked at the ceiling like it had personally wronged you because looking at me was too dangerous.” I uncrossed my arms and placed my palms flat on the table behind me. “I went home that night and took the longest shower of my life, and I didn’t think about your shoulder.”

His jaw tightened. The muscle flexing along the hinge — not his father’s tell, not the seismic warning of a man containing anger. Roman’s version. The tell of a man containing want.

“What did you think about?” he asked.

“Your hands.” I said it simply, because it was true, and because the truth had always been the most devastating weapon in my arsenal when it came to Roman Vane. “You have enormous hands. I measured them that first session — span, grip strength, finger length. Professional metrics. Entirely clinical. And then I went home and thought about those hands in contexts that had nothing to do with rehabilitation.”

Roman moved. Not toward me — sideways, along the wall, shrugging off the leather jacket and hanging it on the hook by the door. The same hook where he’d hung his coat a year ago. The henley pulled across his shoulders as he moved, and I tracked the shift of muscle underneath the fabric with the same clinical attention I’d applied to his rotator cuff, except there was nothing clinical about what I was feeling.

“You set this up,” he said.

“I set this up.”

“The scrubs. The lamp. The table.” He was looking at the table now, his expression caught between something tender and something predatory. “The exact time.”

“I even set the thermostat two degrees warmer. Like the first night. Muscle tissue responds better to heat.” I smiled. The smile he didn’t trust. “I’m very thorough.”

“You’re very dangerous.”

“I learned from the best.” I pushed off the table and stood in front of him. The height difference — eleven inches of it — meant I had to tilt my head back, the same angle I’d spent a year memorizing, the angle at which Roman’s face went from imposing to devastating, his dark eyes above me like a sky I’d chosen to live under. “Sit on the table.”

“Julian —”

“Sit on the table, Roman.”

He sat on the table.

The paper crinkled. Same sound. Same room. The table creaked under his weight — two-twenty, distributed across the padded surface with the casual efficiency of a man who’d been sitting on these things for seventeen years. His legs hung off the edge, knees apart, hands braced on the cushion beside his thighs. The posture of a patient waiting for treatment.

I stepped between his knees.

His thighs bracketed my hips. The heat of him bled through the denim, through my scrubs, into my skin. I placed my hands on his shoulders — both of them, the healed right and the undamaged left — and felt the muscle beneath my palms tense and release, the involuntary response of a body that had been trained by twelve months of my touch to associate my hands with things that had nothing to do with physical therapy.

“How’s the shoulder?” I asked. Professional voice. The voice I’d used a year ago, steady and clinical, the mask I’d worn to hide the seismic activity underneath.

Roman’s eyes darkened. He recognized the game. “Sore.”

“Sore.” I pressed my thumb into the muscle over his right rotator cuff and felt him inhale. Not pain — he was long past pain. Memory. The cellular recall of a year of sessions where my professional hands had mapped every fiber of his shoulder while my unprofessional mind had mapped every way I wanted to take him apart. “Range of motion?”

“Full.” His voice was getting lower. Rougher. The gravel underneath the composure. “You know it’s full. You cleared me eight months ago.”

“I like to be thorough.” I slid my hands from his shoulders to his neck. His pulse jumped under my fingertips — elevated, accelerating, the same physiological response I’d pretended not to notice a year ago. “Heart rate’s up.”

“I wonder why.”

“Could be cardiovascular. Could be stress.” I traced my thumbs along the tendons of his neck, the same diagnostic palpation I’d performed dozens of times in this room, except I let my fingers drift higher — along his jaw, into the short hair behind his ears, threading through the silver at his temples that I’d spent a year telling him was the most attractive thing I’d ever seen on a human being. “Could be your physical therapist is standing between your legs in a locked treatment room.”

“The door doesn’t lock.”

“I had it fixed.” I smiled at his expression — the surprise, the flare of heat, the recalculation happening behind his eyes. “Last week. Told maintenance the latch was a liability issue. It locks now.”

“You planned this a week ago.”

“I’ve been planning this since the night you walked out of this room and I stood here for twenty minutes trying to remember how to breathe.” My hands were in his hair now, my fingers curling against his scalp, and his eyes had gone half-lidded, his mouth slightly open, the composure dissolving in real time the way it always did when I touched this specific spot at this specific pressure. “Take off your shirt.”

He reached behind his head with one hand and pulled the henley over in a single motion. The fabric cleared his body and revealed the geography I’d memorized with my palms and my mouth and my clinical expertise — the broad planes of his chest, the ridged abdomen, the scar on his left oblique from a skate blade in 2020, the dark hair that narrowed below his navel. The shoulders that had started everything. The body that had been an MRI on my screen before it was the landscape I came home to every night.

I placed my hands on his bare chest. Flat. Palms against warm skin. His heartbeat slammed against my left hand, rapid and strong, the cardiac output of a professional athlete whose blood pressure was spiking because his boyfriend was touching him in the room where they’d first touched and both of them were remembering everything.

“One year ago,” I said, “I put my hands right here. I told myself it was palpation. Assessment. I told myself the heat I was feeling was body temperature, not want. I told myself the reason I couldn’t breathe wasn’t because you smelled like cedar and looked at me like I was the only person in the building.”

“You were the only person in the building,” Roman said. His hands came up and settled on my hips — the hold. The first hold. The one that had started as professional — stabilizing the patient during mobilization — and had become the gesture that preceded everything. His thumbs found the gap between my scrub top and the waistband beneath, pressing against bare skin, and the contact sent voltage through me that had not diminished in twelve months and showed no signs of diminishing ever.

“You were always the only person in the building,” he said.

I kissed him.

Not the way I’d wanted to kiss him a year ago — frantic, desperate, the starving collision of two people who’d been denying themselves. This was different. This was the kiss of a man who had three hundred and sixty-five days of evidence that he was loved, who had stood in a GM’s office and heard Roman say your son is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, who had walked through the front entrance of a fundraiser with Roman’s hand on the small of his back and the entire city watching.

This was a slow kiss. Deliberate. The kind of kiss that said we have all night and I intend to use every minute of it.

Roman’s hands tightened on my hips. Pulled me closer until I was pressed against the edge of the table, against him, the heat of his bare chest bleeding through my scrubs. His mouth opened under mine and I deepened the kiss — tasting him, relearning him, the particular combination of mint and coffee that lived on Roman’s tongue at the end of every day. His beard scraped my chin. His hands slid under my scrub top, palms flat against my lower back, and the sound I made was not clinical.

“Take these off,” he said against my mouth, tugging at my scrubs.

“Not yet.” I pulled back. Put my palms on his chest and pushed him gently until he was leaning back on his hands, looking up at me with an expression that was equal parts adoration and barely restrained violence. “I’m conducting an assessment.”

“Julian —”

“Patient presents with elevated heart rate, dilated pupils, and involuntary physiological arousal.” I ran my hands down his chest. Over his ribs, his obliques, the hard planes of his stomach that contracted under my palms. I hooked my fingers into the waistband of his jeans and felt his entire body tense. “Assessment: the patient requires immediate intervention.”

“You’re insane.”

“I’m thorough.” I undid the button of his jeans. Eased the zipper down. Felt the heat of him through the fabric and watched his jaw clench, his hands white-knuckling the edge of the table, the composure fracturing along fault lines I’d mapped months ago. “Lie back.”

He lay back.

Two hundred and twenty pounds of Roman Vane, stretched out on the treatment table where I’d rehabbed his shoulder and fallen in love with him in the same motion. The table creaked. The paper crinkled. The amber light from the desk lamp painted his body in gold — the chest, the shoulders, the silver at his temples, the dark trail of hair disappearing beneath denim I’d half-opened. His arms were at his sides. His breathing was controlled in the way that meant the control was costing him.

I pulled his jeans down. He lifted his hips to help — the practiced coordination of a man whose body did what was asked of it — and I dragged the denim off his legs and dropped it on the floor. Then the boxer briefs. Then there was nothing between Roman and the treatment table except the sheet I’d laid out that morning, and nothing between Roman and me except air that felt like it was burning.

He was hard. Already, fully, the rigid evidence of twelve months of Pavlovian conditioning — my hands plus this room plus the smell of eucalyptus equaled Roman’s body responding before his brain had finished processing the situation.

I stood at the side of the table and looked at him. All of him. The length and breadth and devastating detail of the man who had walked into this room a year ago as my patient and now lay on this table as the center of my entire existence.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

His eyes closed. Opened. The vulnerability flashing across his face — the same flash I’d seen the first time I’d said it, the disbelief of a man who’d spent thirty-four years being told he was strong, useful, valuable, and had never once been told he was beautiful until a twenty-three-year-old physical therapist had whispered it against his collarbone in a dark bedroom and meant it like a prayer.

“Julian.” His voice was rough. Stripped. “Come here.”

“I’m working.” I placed my hands on his right shoulder. The healed one. Pressed my fingers into the supraspinatus with professional pressure and watched his eyes go dark as the clinical touch registered against the context of everything else — naked, aroused, laid out on the table like an offering. “Muscle tone is excellent. Scar tissue has remodeled well. Full ROM confirmed.”

“Julian.”

“The rehabilitation has been —” I slid my hands from his shoulder down his chest, tracing the midline, feeling every rib and every breath and every accelerating heartbeat under my fingertips. “— extremely successful.”

“If you don’t stop narrating my medical chart and kiss me, I’m going to pull you onto this table.”

“Promise?”

He moved. Fast — the speed that had made him the most feared defenseman in the league for a decade, the explosive force that turned his body from stillness to weapon in a fraction of a second. His hands caught my waist and hauled me onto the table, onto him, and the table groaned under our combined weight as I straddled his hips and felt the hard length of him press against me through my scrubs and the sound that left my mouth was not voluntary.

“There it is,” Roman said, looking up at me with the expression I’d spent a year trying to describe and failing — hungry, tender, devastated, wanting, like I was simultaneously the answer to a question he’d been asking his whole life and the question itself. “There’s my favorite sound.”

His hands went to the hem of my scrub top and pulled it over my head. I let him — raised my arms, let the fabric clear, let him see what he’d seen a thousand times and still looked at like the first. His palms spread across my chest, thumbs tracing my collarbones, fingers following the lines of my body with the thorough attention of a man who had turned knowing me into a discipline.

“The compass rose,” he said, touching the tattoo behind my left ear. The small black ink pointing north. “I asked you about this tattoo on our third session.”

“You asked. I deflected.”

“You said it pointed toward something your father never bothered to ask about.” His thumb traced the design. “I wanted to ask. I wanted to know everything about you, and I was so goddamn scared of wanting that I went home and sat in the dark and drank bourbon and told myself you were just good at your job.”

“I am good at my job.” I rolled my hips against him and his breath caught — the sharp intake, the clench of his fingers on my waist, the controlled man losing control one degree at a time. “But that wasn’t why your heart rate spiked every time I touched your neck.”

“No.” His hands slid to my ass, pulled me tighter against him, and the friction through my scrub pants was devastating — not enough, exactly enough, the specific amount of stimulation that lived on the knife-edge between pleasure and torment. “That was because I was falling in love with you and couldn’t stop.”

I kissed him. Deep, open-mouthed, the kind of kiss that contained a year’s worth of gratitude and want and the ongoing, undiminished miracle of being loved by someone who had chosen to stand beside me when standing alone would have been safer. His hands found the drawstring of my scrub pants and pulled. I lifted my hips. The scrubs came off — pants, boxers, everything — and the skin-to-skin contact when I settled back against him was a full-system detonation, his hardness against mine, his heat against mine, nothing between us but the twelve inches of air we breathed into each other’s mouths.

“Fuck,” Roman said, eloquently.

“That’s the plan.” I reached for the rolling cart — the one I’d restocked this afternoon with supplies that had nothing to do with rehabilitation. My fingers found the small bottle of lube I’d placed behind the resistance bands where no one would think to look. “I’m very well prepared.”

“You hid lube on the medical cart.”

“Between the kinesiology tape and the palpation gel. Practically medical supplies.”

Roman’s laugh vibrated through his chest and into mine — low, warm, the laugh I’d excavated from beneath years of composure and still treated as the rare and extraordinary thing it was. His hands came up to cup my face, thumbs on my cheekbones — the first gesture, the original gesture, the touch that preceded every significant moment between us.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know.” I turned my head and pressed a kiss to his palm. “I love you. Now let me show you how much.”

I slicked my hand and reached behind me, and Roman’s eyes went black.

Not dark — black. The pupils swallowing the brown, the controlled man watching me prepare myself while sitting astride him on the table where I’d first put my hands on his body and pretended it was medicine. His hands gripped my thighs, the pressure bruising-gentle, the possessive hold of a man who was watching something he wanted more than oxygen and was exercising every ounce of his discipline not to flip me onto my back and take over.

“Julian.” His voice was wrecked. Gravel and need and something breaking behind the composure. “Let me —”

“No.” I worked myself open with clinical efficiency and unprofessional impatience, my breath hitching, my thighs tightening around his hips. “This is my assessment. You’re the patient. Lie still.”

“I’m going to die on this table.”

“You’re going to survive this table. I’m a medical professional.” I added a second finger and my back arched, and Roman’s hands slid up my thighs to my hips and his thumbs pressed into the hollows beside my hip bones and the sound I made echoed off the concrete walls of the treatment room.

“That sound,” Roman said. “Every time. That exact sound.” His grip tightened. “I heard it in my sleep for weeks before I touched you. Do you know what it’s like to lie in bed at three AM thinking about the noises your physical therapist makes and knowing you’re going to see him in sixteen hours and have to pretend you didn’t spend the night with your hand wrapped around yourself thinking about —”

“Shut up and let me have you.”

I positioned myself. Slicked him. Sank down.

Slowly. Devastatingly slowly. The stretch and the fullness and the overwhelming, obliterating sensation of Roman inside me — the size of him, the heat of him, the way my body opened for him like it had been designed for this specific purpose and had spent twenty-three years waiting. My hands braced against his chest. My fingers curled against muscle. My head dropped forward and my hair fell across my face and I breathed through the pressure until there was no space left between us, until I was seated fully against him and we were connected at every possible point and the room was completely silent except for two people trying to remember how to respirate.

“Oh,” I said. Quietly. Not a moan — something simpler. The involuntary vocalization of a person whose body has been overwhelmed by sensation and whose vocabulary has been temporarily reduced to single syllables.

Roman’s hands found my face. Cupped my jaw. Turned my head so I was looking at him — directly, inescapably, his eyes wide and wet and completely unguarded.

“Stay with me,” he said. The same words he’d said the first time we’d done this, in his penthouse, in the dark, when I’d cried and told him I loved him and he’d said it back on every stroke. “Right here. Don’t leave.”

“Never,” I said.

I moved.

Slow at first. Finding the rhythm, the angle, the precise alignment that activated every nerve ending I had and a few I was discovering for the first time. My hands on his chest, my thighs working, my body rising and falling with the controlled, deliberate movements of someone who’d spent his professional life understanding biomechanics and was now applying that knowledge to the most unprofessional act imaginable.

Roman’s hands slid to my hips. Not controlling — supporting. Matching my rhythm, not dictating it. His thumb found the jut of my hip bone and traced circles while I rode him, and the tenderness of that small gesture inside the larger act broke something open in my chest every time.

“Good,” Roman said. Low. The praise voice. The one that lived somewhere between his chest and his throat and vibrated against my sternum when he spoke it into my skin. “You’re so good, Julian. Look at you.”

My rhythm faltered. It always faltered when he used that voice. The praise went straight past my brain and into my spine, into the place where Julian Miller, who had spent twenty-three years being told he wasn’t enough by a father who used silence as a weapon and criticism as a love language, heard you’re so good from the man who had seen every fractured part of him and called each one beautiful.

“Don’t stop,” I said. “Say it again.”

“Beautiful.” Roman sat up. The table groaned. His arms wrapped around me — one across my lower back, one hand between my shoulder blades — and the change in angle drove him deeper and I gasped against his mouth and felt tears prick my eyes because this, this, this combination of physical and emotional obliteration was the thing I’d been chasing my whole life without knowing what to call it. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. On this table, in my bed, standing in a ballroom in a suit that costs more than your first apartment. Every version of you. Every single one.”

“Roman —”

“I didn’t know.” His forehead pressed against mine. His hips had taken over the rhythm — slow, deep, devastating thrusts that hit exactly where I needed them and drew sounds from me that I couldn’t contain and didn’t try to. “I didn’t know it could be like this. Thirty-four years, Julian. Thirty-four years of being alive and I didn’t know that being inside someone you love felt like this.”

I wrapped my arms around his neck and gave myself over to it. The rhythm. The depth. The way Roman’s body moved with mine in the synchronized, intuitive harmony of two people who had spent a year learning each other’s frequencies and had achieved the kind of attunement that transcended technique and became something approaching the sacred. His mouth found my neck — the spot below my ear, the spot behind the compass rose tattoo, the spot that made me dissolve — and he kissed and sucked and murmured against my skin while his hips drove into me with increasing urgency.

The table was protesting. Audibly. The metal frame producing a rhythmic creak that kept time with our movements, and the paper that I’d laid out with such meticulous care was bunched and torn and irrelevant. The cart with its lube-hidden-behind-resistance-bands was rolling slowly toward the wall with every thrust, the wheels turning in tiny increments, the physical comedy of medical equipment being displaced by sex.

“Harder,” I said. Not a request. An instruction. The physical therapist in me translating desire into directive with the same precision I applied to treatment protocols. “I need more.”

Roman gave me more.

He shifted me — one hand under my ass, the other braced on the table — and adjusted the angle by two degrees that shouldn’t have been perceptible and were cataclysmic. The next thrust hit the spot that turned my vision to static, and the sound I made — his name, broken, desperate, the sound of a person whose higher brain functions had been systematically dismantled by a man with a rehabilitated shoulder and a devastating talent for precision — bounced off the concrete walls and filled the small room.

“There,” Roman said. Satisfaction and tenderness and the razor focus of a man who had found exactly what he was looking for and intended to exploit it until I shattered. “Right there. I’ve got you.”

He hit it again. And again. And again. Each thrust measured, each one landing with the accuracy of a person who had spent a year studying my body with the same obsessive attention he brought to reading opposing offenses, who knew the angle and the depth and the speed that would take me from coherent to incoherent to the deep, wordless place where my body spoke for me and everything it said was his name.

I was close. The pressure building from somewhere cellular, somewhere that existed below physiology in the territory where pleasure and emotion merged into a single, overwhelming signal. My hands clawed at his back. My nails drew lines along his shoulders — the shoulders I’d healed, the shoulders that had started everything, the shoulders that were now flexing and working as he held me and moved inside me and whispered praise against my throat.

“I want to feel you come,” he said. Low, rough, the voice that existed only in this context — raw and unfiltered and honest in a way that Roman Vane, the man who had built composure into an art form, only ever allowed himself to be when he was inside me. “I want to feel it. I want to watch your face. Give it to me, Julian.”

His hand wrapped around me. Stroked. Once, twice, his grip perfect — because he knew, because he’d spent a year learning exactly how to touch me, the pressure and the speed and the twist at the apex that short-circuited every remaining neural pathway.

I came apart.

The orgasm detonated from my core outward — shattering, consuming, the kind of release that involved every muscle group and registered on a scale that my professional brain refused to classify because the data would be too embarrassing. I clenched around him, my back arching, my hands fisting in his hair, his name leaving my mouth in a broken shout that I would have been mortified by if I’d had the cognitive capacity for mortification, which I did not, because Roman was still moving, still hitting that spot, still whispering good, so good, that’s it, let go, I’ve got you against my skin.

Roman followed within seconds. The rhythm breaking, his composure breaking, his arms crushing me against his chest as his hips drove deep one final time and stayed. The sound he made was my name — Julian — broken into three syllables by the force of it, and I felt him pulse inside me, felt the tremor in his arms, felt the man who had spent his life not shaking shake for me, because of me, in the room where it started.

* * *

We lay in the wreckage.

The treatment table — reinforced medical-grade steel, rated for three hundred pounds — had survived, though the paper was destroyed and the sheet had migrated to the floor and the rolling cart had traveled approximately four feet toward the wall, its lube-adjacent resistance bands undisturbed in their strategic camouflage.

I was on my side, pressed against Roman’s chest on a table that was not designed for two people to lie on but that we had, through twelve months of determination and creative use of available space, made our own. His arm was around me. His heartbeat was decelerating beneath my ear — the steady, slowing rhythm of a cardiovascular system returning to baseline. My legs were tangled with his. My face was in the hollow of his throat, the spot that smelled like cedar and tasted like salt and felt like the geographical center of my entire emotional universe.

“The table held,” Roman said.

“Medical grade. I checked the weight rating.”

“You checked the weight rating of the treatment table.”

“Three hundred pounds. We’re under by approximately fifty, depending on whether I’ve gained weight since the last time I —”

“You calculated our combined weight in the context of sexual activity on medical equipment.”

“I’m a thorough clinician.”

His chest vibrated with silent laughter. His arm tightened around me — the hold, the constant hold, the physical expression of a man who communicated love through pressure and proximity and the continuous, unbroken contact of his body against mine.

“One year,” he said.

“One year.” I traced a line down the center of his chest with one finger. Following the terrain. Mapping the man. “Three hundred and sixty-five days since you sat on this table and I put my hands on your shoulder and told myself the electricity was static.”

“It was never static.”

“No.” I pressed a kiss to his collarbone. “It was the beginning of everything.”

Roman shifted. Pulled me closer, which shouldn’t have been possible given the limitations of the table and the fact that we were already occupying approximately the same physical space. His hand found my jaw — the gesture, the first gesture, thumbs on cheekbones — and he tilted my face up so I was looking at him.

His eyes were soft. Open. The Roman who existed only in the private spaces we’d carved out of a world that had tried to keep us hidden — the treatment room, the penthouse, the passenger seat of his car where he held my hand on the drive home and the city lights painted us in colors that belonged to no one but us.

“Next year,” he said. “Same time. Same room.”

“Same table.”

“Same table.” He kissed my forehead. My nose. The corner of my mouth. “Every year. Until the table breaks or the building comes down.”

“Romantic.”

“Practical. Medical-grade equipment has a finite lifespan. I’ve read the spec sheet.”

I laughed. The sound filled the small room and came back warmer — refracted by the concrete walls, the amber light, the accumulated history of two people who had found each other in the most inconvenient possible way and decided, against every rational argument, to keep each other anyway.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you.” No pause. No hesitation. Not anymore, not ever again. Roman Vane, who had spent thirty-four years building walls around words like these, said them the way he said my name — immediately, completely, like a fact of physics. “Same time tomorrow?”

“Roman.”

“Seven twenty-nine. I’ll be early.”

“We don’t have sessions anymore. Your shoulder’s been cleared for eight months.”

“Then I’ll develop a new injury.” His mouth curved. The smile that I’d spent twelve months earning and would spend the rest of my life trying to keep. “Something that requires extensive treatment. Five nights a week. Late sessions.”

“You’re going to fake an injury to have sex with me on a treatment table.”

“I’m going to prioritize my rehabilitation. I’m very committed to the process.” He pulled me against his chest. Pressed his mouth against the compass rose tattoo behind my ear and spoke into it. “Same room. Same table. Same you. That’s all I need.”

I closed my eyes. Let the words settle into the place behind my sternum where I stored everything Roman gave me — the declarations, the praise, the steady, relentless certainty of a man who had decided I was worth the risk and had never once wavered.

The treatment room hummed around us. Antiseptic and eucalyptus and the amber light and the sound of two heartbeats synchronizing on a table that had held them both for a year and showed no signs of giving up.

Same room.

Same table.

Same everything, except better, because now the door locked, and we didn’t need it to.

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With love,
Jace Wilder