🔥 Game Day 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from POWER PLAY BOYFRIENDS

Thank You for Reading! 💙

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived the rules card, the equipment room, the four-day silence, and a jumbotron declaration seen by eight thousand people. You’ve watched a man who sharpens skates at 5 a.m. learn that being seen isn’t a threat — it’s a gift. Thank you for giving Jace and Ben your time. This exclusive chapter is our gift to dedicated readers like you.

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Game Day

Set between Chapter Seventeen and the Epilogue. Jace and Ben have been living together for two months. Jace is midway through his first professional season.

Five days was nothing.

Five days was a road trip — three games, four flights, five hotel rooms that all smelled like the same industrial air freshener. Five days was the standard rhythm of professional hockey, the expected absence, the cost of doing the thing Jace had spent his entire life training to do.

Five days was nothing.

Ben repeated this to himself at 10:47 p.m. on a Friday while sitting on their couch in Jace’s college hoodie, staring at page thirty-six of an equipment supply catalog he’d been “reading” for an hour without absorbing a single word about composite stick blade construction.

The hoodie was not a statement. It was practical. The apartment was cold — or it could have been cold, theoretically, if the thermostat hadn’t been set to seventy-two degrees and the June heat hadn’t been pressing against the windows like a warm hand. The hoodie was just comfortable. The fact that it smelled like Jace — pine soap and that unnamed sweetness that Ben’s brain had filed under essential, non-negotiable, permanent — was incidental. Coincidental. Irrelevant.

He’d been wearing it for four days.

The door opened at 10:58 p.m.

Ben heard the key. The lock turning. The door swinging. The thump of a bag hitting the hallway floor — because Jace Monroe would drop his bag in the hallway until the heat death of the universe — and then footsteps, and then Jace was standing in the living room doorway in his travel suit with his tie loosened and his hair wrecked from sleeping against an airplane window and his eyes finding Ben on the couch with the accuracy of a guided missile.

He stared at Ben. At the hoodie.

“You’re wearing my hoodie,” he said.

“It was cold.”

“It’s June, Ben.”

“I missed you,” Ben said. “Specifically, I missed your hands. And your mouth. And the sound you make when I—”

Jace kissed him before he could finish.

The catalog fell to the floor. Ben’s hands found Jace’s face, his jaw, the stubble that had grown in during five days of road-trip grooming neglect. Jace’s mouth was warm and tasted like airplane coffee and spearmint gum and home.

“Hallway,” Jace breathed against his mouth.

“The bedroom is thirty feet away.”

“Thirty feet too far.”

He pulled Ben into the hallway and pressed him against the wall. Ben’s shoulders hit the drywall. The coat hooks dug into his back and he didn’t care because Jace’s body was against his and the five-day deprivation was converting to urgency at a rate that bypassed every rational process he possessed.

Jace dropped to his knees.

The hallway floor was hardwood. Cold, unforgiving. But Jace’s knees hit it without hesitation — the same commitment he brought to every surface he’d ever knelt on for Ben. His hands found Ben’s waistband. Pulled them down. Ben was hard — had been since the door opened.

Jace didn’t tease. He wrapped his hand around the base and took him in one long, devastating stroke.

“Fuck—” Ben’s hand shot to the coat hook above him. His other hand found Jace’s hair. The wet heat of Jace’s mouth was staggering after five days of nothing.

Jace pulled back. Looked up with dark, blown eyes. “Five days. Five days without tasting you. Do you know what that’s like?”

“I have some idea.”

“I replayed the last time in my head every night. In the hotel. Your hands in my hair. The sounds you make — the ones you only make for me.”

He took Ben deep again. No warning. All the way, his throat working, and the praise poured out of him between strokes — how long he’d waited, how good Ben tasted, how the sounds Ben made were the only thing his brain would play on repeat in empty hotel rooms.

“Jace, I’m close—” Ben’s hips moved, small thrusts he couldn’t stop.

“Come for me, Ben. I’ve been waiting five days to feel you.”

Ben came with Jace’s name on his lips, his body shuddering through it while Jace’s mouth and hand worked him past the edge and through the fall.

They made it to the kitchen. Water. Breathing. Ben on the counter — their spot — Jace standing between his legs.

“Road trip update,” Jace said. “Griff and Voss got into a screaming match at practice on Wednesday. Then Griff texted the group chat at 2 a.m. saying ‘I think I have a problem.’ No further context.”

“He’s going to sleep with him,” Ben said.

“Within six weeks.”

“I give it four.”

“Mads update: they sent Sam their goaltending theory paper. With margin notes. Sam said yes to coffee.”

“That’s a date disguised as peer review.”

“That’s Mads. They flirt in footnotes.”

Then Ben told Jace about the voice memos. The 114 recordings he’d found behind the beanbag in Jace’s office while cope-organizing at 2 a.m. Two years of Ben’s voice telling Jace he was good. Labeled by date.

“I listened to three of them,” Ben said. “I sat in your beanbag and cried. Because I didn’t know I sounded like that when I talk to you. My voice drops. It slows down. I sound like someone who means it.”

“That’s why I recorded them,” Jace whispered. “Because your voice is the only thing in my life that’s ever sounded like someone actually means it. And I needed proof.”

Ben pulled him in. Kissed him. “Bedroom. Now.”

They went to the bedroom. Not running. Walking. Ben leading, Jace following.

“Take off your clothes,” Ben said.

Jace stripped. When he stood naked, Ben’s eyes found it immediately — the bruise on his left hip. Purple-black. The signature of a check.

“You didn’t tell me about this,” Ben said.

“It’s nothing.”

“Nothing doesn’t bruise.” Ben knelt. Pressed his lips to the bruise. Gently. The kiss of a man whose entire professional life was built on maintaining and repairing bodies.

“I should have been there,” Ben murmured against his skin.

He kissed his way back up. Stripped himself. Pushed Jace onto the bed. Covered him — skin to skin, chest to chest — and what followed was slow, thorough, the I-haven’t-touched-you-in-five-days-and-I’m-going-to-touch-every-inch-of-you version.

Ben mapped Jace’s body like a post-trip equipment inspection. “Checking for damage,” he deadpanned while kissing down Jace’s ribs. He found a scrape on the left side — road rash from a board battle — and kissed that too.

“Your inspection is going to kill me,” Jace said.

“Death by thorough examination. I’ll note it in the incident report.”

He bypassed Jace’s cock entirely. Kissed the inside of his thigh. Then the other. Found a bruise on his shin and kissed that too.

“Ben, if you don’t—”

“Patience. I said every inch.”

“Some inches are more urgent than others.”

He worked his way back up. By the time he reached Jace’s mouth again, Jace was trembling — the same shiver he produced during the pre-game ritual but amplified by naked skin and five days of distance.

“Assessment complete,” Ben murmured. “One bruise, left hip. One scrape, left ribs. Recommendation: immediate and thorough treatment.”

“Please,” Jace breathed. “Please, Ben.”

Ben prepped him slowly. One finger. Jace’s breath catching. Two. His hips lifting. The curl, the angle, the pressure that made Jace’s eyes fly open.

“There?” Ben asked. Knowing.

“There. Fuck. Right there. Don’t stop.”

“I never stop.”

Three fingers. Jace open and trembling and ready. Ben rolled the condom on. Lined up. Forehead to forehead. Eyes open.

“Say my name,” Ben whispered.

“Ben.”

He pressed in.

The sound Jace made was the sound of five days ending. The sound of absence filling. Ben seated himself fully. Held still. Pressed his forehead harder against Jace’s.

“I missed you,” Ben said. “I don’t know how to be in this apartment without you and that terrifies me because I built my entire life on not needing anyone and now I need you and it’s—”

“Everything,” Jace finished. His legs wrapped around Ben’s waist. “It’s everything. And it’s not weakness. It’s home.”

Ben moved. Not fast. The slow, thorough rhythm of a man who understood that this was more than sex. Each stroke deliberate. The praise flowing — both directions now, the fluent language of two people who knew exactly what the other needed to hear.

“Your voice,” Jace gasped. “Tell me — say the things—”

“You’re good. You’re brave. You play hockey like a man who was born on the ice. And you come home to me. Every road trip, every game — you come home.”

“Always come home to you.”

“Good boy,” Jace whispered back. And the reversal — the two words Ben had given Jace in the workshop and the reunion and a hundred rituals, now returned — shattered Ben’s remaining control.

They came within seconds of each other — Jace first, untouched except by the friction of their bodies and Ben’s voice in his ear, his body clenching around Ben. Then Ben — deep inside him, forehead against his chest, the heartbeat thundering against his temple.

“I talked to Doug,” Ben said in the aftermath. Tangled together. Jace’s head on his chest.

“About what?”

“About the next road trip. I asked if I could travel with the team. As equipment staff. He said yes.”

“You’re coming on the road trip?”

“I’m coming on every road trip. Doug approved it last week. I was going to tell you in the morning.”

“Why the morning?”

“Because letting you stew for eight hours is its own kind of foreplay.”

Jace laughed. The full laugh, the real laugh. “You’re evil.”

“I’m strategic.”

“Tell me I did good. Coming home to you.”

“You always do good coming home to me.”

“Even when I leave my bag in the hallway?”

“I moved it to the hook while you were going down on me.”

Jace lifted his head. Stared. “You multitasked during a blowjob?”

“I kicked it toward the hook with my foot. It’s a spatial awareness skill.”

“You’re insane.”

“You love it.”

“Permanently.”

They slept. And in the morning — as in every morning, as in all the mornings of the road trips to come — they would wake together, and make coffee together, and drive to the arena in the same car. And Ben would kneel and lace and speak in the voice that sounded like home. And Jace would shiver and smile and step onto the ice knowing that when he came back to the tunnel, the man who kept everything running would be there.

Not because it was his job.

Because it was his life.

And it was everything.

Loved Jace and Ben? The Power Play series continues.

Penalty Box Hearts (Book Two) — Griff and Eli’s story. Coming soon.
Save Percentage (Book Three) — Mads and Sam’s story. Coming soon.

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