The PowerPoint
A Pitch, Please Bonus Chapter by Jace Wilder
⚠️ This bonus chapter contains spoilers for Pitch, Please and is set eighteen months after the final chapter. It is explicit, graphic, and significantly hotter than the main novel. Reader discretion and enthusiasm both advised.
Dylan had been planning this for six weeks, and the PowerPoint had fourteen slides, and he was going to throw up.
Not literally. Probably not literally. His stomach was doing something that felt like a seventh-inning stretch performed by his internal organs, and his hands were steady because he was a professional athlete who’d hit in front of fifty thousand people, but his heart rate was somewhere around a hundred and forty, which was his sprint speed, and he was sitting on their couch in their apartment in Carroll Gardens at nine o’clock on a Thursday night with a laptop on the coffee table and the ring in his pocket.
The ring was titanium. Simple. A brushed-finish band with a thin inlay of reclaimed stadium wood—ash, from a bat manufacturer in Louisville that sourced their timber from the same forests that had supplied major-league lumber for a century. Dylan had commissioned it through a jeweler Tessa found, and the inside was engraved with coordinates.
Not the Yonkers coordinates. Different ones.
40.8296° N, 73.9262° W.
The armchair. Rafe’s apartment. The first time Dylan’s body had understood what his brain was still pretending not to know.
Rafe was in the kitchen making tea, because Rafe had become a tea person in the offseason and Dylan had opinions about this that he was saving for a less emotionally significant evening.
“You’re being weird,” Rafe called from the kitchen.
“I’m not being weird.”
“You’ve been sitting on the couch staring at your laptop for twenty minutes without opening it. That’s weird by any standard, and deeply weird by yours, because you don’t own a laptop. That’s mine.”
“I borrowed it.”
“For what?”
“A presentation.”
Rafe appeared in the kitchen doorway with two mugs. He was wearing sweatpants and one of Dylan’s old T-shirts—a Comets practice tee that was too tight across Rafe’s chest and too long in the sleeves and that Dylan found unreasonably attractive for reasons he’d stopped trying to analyze. His hair was damp from a shower. The silver at his temples caught the lamp light.
Eighteen months, and the sight of him still hit Dylan in the sternum.
“A presentation,” Rafe repeated, with the particular inflection of a man who’d spent a career giving presentations and recognized when someone was about to give a bad one.
“Sit down.”
“Dylan—”
“Sit down. Please. I practiced this.”
Something shifted in Rafe’s expression. The amusement dimmed into something more attentive—the reading gaze, the one that missed nothing.
He set the mugs on the coffee table. Sat on the couch. Close, because they sat close now.
Dylan opened the laptop.
Slide one. The Williamsburg bar photos. Below the photo, two words: NOT HIM.
Slide two. Dylan’s home run highlight. THE NIGHT EVERYTHING CHANGED.
Slide three. Rafe’s panel video freeze-frame. I WATCHED THIS CLIP THREE TIMES. I TOLD MYSELF IT WAS RESEARCH.
Slide four. No image. Just text. IT WASN’T RESEARCH.
Rafe made a sound. Small, involuntary.
Slide five. A stock image of an armchair. YOU PUT YOUR HAND ON MY SHOULDER AND I FORGOT HOW TO BREATHE. THE COORDINATES ON THE RING ARE FROM THAT CHAIR.
Rafe’s head turned sharply. “The ring?”
“Keep watching.”
Slide six. Mara’s restaurant exterior. OUR FIRST DATE. YOU CALLED IT A PRACTICE RUN. I CALLED IT THE BEST NIGHT OF MY LIFE. WE WERE BOTH RIGHT.
Slide seven. A hotel hallway. ROOM 1412. I TEXTED YOU THREE WORDS. YOU SHOWED UP IN FOUR MINUTES.
Slide eight. A baseball diamond. YOU STOOD ON MY FIELD AND LET ME TELL YOU EVERYTHING. YOU DIDN’T DEFEND YOURSELF. YOU JUST LISTENED. THAT WAS THE BRAVEST THING ANYONE HAS EVER DONE FOR ME.
Rafe’s eyes were wet.
Slide nine. The Cruz family kitchen. MY FATHER SHOOK YOUR HAND AND TOLD YOU TO DRIVE SAFE. FROM MATEO CRUZ, THAT’S A DECLARATION OF LOVE.
Slide ten. The charity softball game. “GO EASY ON ME.” “YOU’VE NEVER ONCE ASKED ME TO DO THAT.”
Slide eleven. The tunnel photo. THE BEST PHOTO ANYONE’S EVER TAKEN OF ME.
Slide twelve. The brownstone. HOME.
Slide thirteen. Black screen. White text. I KNOW WHAT I WANT MY LIFE TO LOOK LIKE WHEN NO ONE IS WATCHING. IT LOOKS LIKE YOU.
Dylan closed the laptop. Reached into his pocket. Pulled out the ring.
“There’s a fourteenth slide,” he said. “But I thought the fourteenth slide should be in person.”
He held up the ring.
“Rafael Sosa. Will you marry me?”
Then Rafe said, “Yes,” and his voice broke on the word, and the break was the most beautiful sound Dylan had ever heard.
Dylan put the ring on his finger. It fit.
“You practiced this,” Rafe said. Tears on his cheeks, in his beard, unwiped.
“Lucia helped with the fonts. Eli vetted the emotional pacing.”
“Eli vetted the—”
“He has opinions about dramatic structure. They’re mostly wrong but occasionally useful.”
Rafe laughed. Wet and cracked and gorgeous. Dylan leaned forward and kissed the laugh off his mouth, tasting salt from the tears.
“I love you,” Rafe said against his lips. “I love you and your stupid PowerPoint and the fact that you engraved the coordinates of my armchair on a ring.”
“Our armchair. I bought it when you renovated the office. It’s in storage. I’m saving it for the wedding venue.”
“We’re not putting a leather armchair at our wedding.”
“We’re absolutely putting a leather armchair at our wedding.”
“I have notes,” Rafe said. “On the PowerPoint.”
“You’re critiquing my proposal?”
“I’m giving you production notes. It’s what I do.” He held up his hand. Looked at the ring. The titanium caught the light.
“The coordinates,” he said quietly. “The armchair.”
“The first time I knew. You put your hand on my shoulder and everything rewired.”
“Take me to bed,” Rafe said. “And make me feel like I just said yes to the rest of my life.”
They didn’t rush.
Dylan undressed Rafe slowly. The T-shirt first—his T-shirt, the too-tight Comets practice tee—pulled over Rafe’s head with reverence. The sweatpants next, thumbs hooked in the waistband, sliding them down over hips he’d memorized.
Rafe stood in their bedroom, naked, in the low light. Forty-one years old. The body that had played twelve seasons and survived being outed and broken and rebuilt. The ring on his left hand.
“You’re staring,” Rafe said.
“I’m going to stare at you for the rest of my life. Get used to it.”
Dylan kissed him. Backed him toward the bed. Laid him out on the sheets. Took his time.
Mouth on his throat. The hollow of his collarbone. The dark hair on his chest that had gone silver in places, traced with Dylan’s tongue because the silver was evidence of a life lived and a body earned.
“Tell me what you want,” Dylan said against Rafe’s stomach.
“Everything. Your mouth. Your hands. You inside me. I want to feel you and I want to hear you and I want to look at this ring while you make me come.”
The directness sent a current through Dylan’s body that was hot and immediate. He gave him everything.
His mouth first. Down the center line of Rafe’s body—sternum, navel, the trail of dark hair, the cut of his hips where Dylan’s teeth drew a sound that was half gasp and half reverence. He took his time, and Rafe’s responses—the hitched breathing, the hand gripping Dylan’s hair, the desperate murmur of his name—were a language Dylan had spent eighteen months becoming fluent in.
When he took Rafe in his mouth, the ring hand tightened in his hair and Rafe said, “God, Dylan,” in a voice that was shattered and present and the most honest sound in the room.
Dylan pulled back before Rafe was close. Kissed his way back up. Found Rafe’s mouth. Kissed him long enough that the kiss became its own conversation—tender, filthy, the taste of both of them mixed together.
“Look at me,” Dylan said, when he was above Rafe, when they were aligned, when the only distance left was the distance between intention and action. “I want you to see me.”
Rafe’s eyes opened. Dark, wet, wide. “I see you. I always see you.”
Dylan moved inside him with a patience that was its own kind of intensity—slow, deliberate, the long sustained note of two bodies that knew each other well enough to build pleasure in layers. Rafe’s legs wrapped around him. The ring hand pressed flat against Dylan’s chest, over his heart, and the metal was warm from Rafe’s body and the sensation of that small, permanent circle over his heartbeat was so intimate that his vision blurred.
They moved together. The deep, steady, knowing rhythm of two men who’d mapped each other completely and were still finding new territory.
“You’re so good,” Dylan said, and the praise hit Rafe the way it always did. Full-body shudder. The catch of breath. The arch of his back.
“I can’t—” Rafe’s ring hand pressed harder against Dylan’s chest.
“You can. Let go. I’ve got you. I’ve always got you.”
Rafe let go. The orgasm hit him like something seismic—his back arching, his hand pressed against Dylan’s heart, his mouth open on a sound that was Dylan’s name spoken like a vow. Dylan followed—couldn’t have stopped, the sight and sound and feeling of Rafe coming undone with a titanium ring on his finger and Dylan’s name on his lips was more than any nervous system could withstand.
Afterward. The bedroom was dark except for Brooklyn’s amber glow through the curtains. Rafe’s head on Dylan’s chest. The ring hand over Dylan’s heart.
“Slide fourteen,” Rafe said. “What was it going to say?”
“It was a photo of this bed. And the text said: The rest is ours.”
Rafe was quiet. His thumb traced a slow circle over Dylan’s heart.
“The rest is ours,” he repeated.
“The rest is ours.”
The ring caught the streetlight. Titanium and reclaimed wood. The coordinates of an armchair where a retired outfielder had put his hand on a rookie’s shoulder and the world had rearranged itself.
The rest was theirs. All of it.
Never Miss a Release
Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways from Jace Wilder.