Radio Check — Bonus Chapter
A Pole Position, Bottom Line Bonus by Chase Power
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after the events of Pole Position, Bottom Line. Read the full novel first for maximum impact.
Adrian’s POV — Off-season, Monaco
The box arrived on a Tuesday in December, wrapped in brown paper with no card.
Luca was in the shower. I could hear him through the bathroom door — the water, the off-key humming of something Italian that he refused to identify and I refused to ask about because the mystery of it had become one of the small domestic pleasures I was learning to collect rather than analyse.
The box was heavy. Dense in a way that suggested metal rather than paper. I opened it at the kitchen counter with the precision I applied to everything and found, nested in black velvet, a vintage pit-lane headset.
1970s manufacture. Leather ear cups, cracked and beautiful. A gooseneck microphone with a foam windscreen that had yellowed with age. A coiled cable terminating in a jack connector that hadn’t been used in professional motorsport since before I was born. The headband was adjustable, the padding intact, and the whole unit carried the specific weight of an object that had been built for function and survived into beauty.
No card. But I knew who it was from, because only one person in the world understood what a headset meant to me.
The shower stopped. The bathroom door opened. Luca appeared in joggers and nothing else, towelling his hair, water still tracking down his chest and catching in the grooves of his abdomen. The gold chain sat against his collarbone. The scar through his eyebrow caught the afternoon light.
He stopped when he saw me holding the headset.
“Found it at a vintage motorsport auction in Milan,” he said, crossing the kitchen with the unhurried stride of a man who knew exactly what he’d done and was enjoying the reveal. “1974. Used at Monza for three seasons. Original leather. The mic still works.”
“You bought me a headset.”
“I bought you a headset and had the electronics restored. Bluetooth module in the left ear cup. Pairs with any phone. Range of about thirty metres.” The grin arrived — the private one, the one that belonged to hotel rooms and shared bathrooms and this kitchen. “So theoretically, if someone were wearing it and someone else were, say, in the bedroom with a phone connected to it…”
“You’re suggesting I wear this.”
“I’m suggesting you sit in the living room wearing a vintage headset and let me run the strategy for once.” His hand found my hip. Warm, still damp from the shower, his thumb tracing the ridge of bone above my waistband with a pressure that was technically innocent and functionally devastating. “You’ve spent six months telling me what to do. Telling me where to put my hands. Telling me when I’m allowed to come. I want a turn.”
I looked at the headset. Then at him — shirtless, damp, his joggers slung low enough that the trail of dark hair below his navel was a directional indicator I was trying not to follow. Then at the headset again.
“Radio check?” I said.
His eyes darkened. The pupils expanding, the green-brown irises narrowing to rings. “Loud and clear.”
He put me in the armchair. The leather one by the window, the one where I read strategy documents and pretended I wasn’t watching him move around the apartment with the unconscious grace of a man who treated every surface as an opportunity for display.
The headset fit. The leather ear cups pressed against my temples with a snugness that muted the ambient sound — the harbour traffic, the air conditioning, the distant hum of Monaco performing its eternal act of excess — and replaced it with the warm, close-miked intimacy of a private channel. The analogue circuitry softened the frequencies. Made everything warmer. Closer. Like being inside a voice rather than listening to one.
Luca disappeared into the bedroom. The door closed.
The Bluetooth connected with a soft chime. Then his voice.
“Can you hear me?”
Through the restored headset, his voice was different from the modern intercom — rounder, more textured, carrying the particular warmth of analogue compression that made him sound like he was speaking from inside my skull.
“I hear you,” I said.
“Good. Here are the rules.” A pause. I could hear him breathing through the mic — the deliberate, controlled rhythm of a man who was enjoying the architecture of power from the other side. “Hands on the armrests. Eyes closed. You don’t move until I tell you. You don’t touch yourself until I tell you. And when I tell you… you do exactly what I say. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
The echo of my own vocabulary in his mouth — the short imperatives, the confident delivery, the absence of qualifiers — produced a physical response so immediate that my fingers gripped the leather before I consciously decided to comply. My cock was already thickening against my thigh, responding to the voice and the dynamic and the knowledge that whatever Luca had planned, he’d been thinking about it long enough to buy a headset and have its electronics professionally restored.
I closed my eyes.
“Good.” The word — my word, the one I’d used to begin his unravelling six months ago in an English practice session — landed in my chest like a controlled detonation. One syllable, borrowed and returned, and the impact was exponentially greater than anything I’d anticipated because I understood, for the first time, what it felt like to be on the receiving end. Of the scarcity. Of the specificity. Of the particular devastation of being praised by someone who means it and who makes you earn every syllable.
“Unbutton your shirt,” he said. “Slowly. Top to bottom. I want to hear each one.”
I unbuttoned. The sound of each button releasing through the fabric was audible in the headset’s noise-cancelled silence — small, precise, intimate. Five buttons. He counted them with me, his voice dropping half a register on each number, and by the third my breathing had changed and by the fifth my hands were unsteady.
“Now open it. Don’t take it off. Just open.”
The air hit my chest. Cool, faintly salt-tinged from the open terrace door. My nipples hardened immediately. The shirt hung from my shoulders, framing rather than covering, and the vulnerability of the position — clothed but exposed, instructed but untouched, hard and unable to address it — was making my pulse visible in my throat.
“Touch your chest,” he said. “Flat hand. Over your heart. Tell me what you feel.”
I pressed my palm against my sternum. “My heart rate is elevated. Significantly.”
“Because of my voice?”
“Because of you. All of this. The headset. The instructions. The fact that you —” I stopped. The analytical language I usually deployed to maintain distance was failing. Luca’s frequency was too warm, the ear cups too intimate, and the truth was sitting on my tongue refusing to be converted into something more manageable. “The fact that you’re in the other room and I can hear you breathe and it’s making me harder than I’ve been in months.”
A sound through the headset. Low. Pleased. The sound of Luca Moretti hearing something he liked and storing it. “Now lower. Stomach. Slowly. And tell me what you want to be doing right now.”
My hand traveled down. The muscles of my abdomen contracted under my own touch. “I want to be touching my cock.”
“I know you do. I can hear it in your breathing. It’s gone shallow — the same pattern you get when I’m on my knees in front of you and you’re trying to last. But you’re not going to touch it yet. You’re going to wait. Because I’m asking you to, and because anticipation is strategy.”
My own words, returned. I exhaled a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t been so wrecked.
“Belt,” he said. “Open it. Unbutton the trousers. Unzip. Leave everything else exactly where it is.”
I opened my belt. The buckle sound was loud in the headset’s intimate acoustics. Unbuttoned. Unzipped. My cock was straining against my boxer briefs, the head already wet, and the relief of the reduced pressure was immediately replaced by the torment of being one layer of cotton away from what I wanted and unable to close the distance.
“Now tell me what you want.”
“I want you to touch me.”
“Where?”
“My cock. My chest. My mouth. Everywhere. I want your hands on me, and I want your mouth, and I want you to stop being in the other room and come here and take what you want because I am sitting in this chair harder than I have ever been in my life and the sound of your voice through this headset is —” I breathed through my nose, steadying myself. “It’s the most erotic thing anyone has ever done to me, and that includes every encounter we’ve had, and I need you to know that.”
Silence. Three seconds. I heard him swallow.
The bedroom door opened.
His footsteps approached — bare feet on marble, unhurried, deliberate. The sound stopped directly in front of the armchair.
“Open your eyes,” his voice said through the headset, even though he was standing close enough that I could feel the heat of his body radiating against my bare chest.
I opened them.
He was naked. Completely, unashamedly naked, his cock fully hard against his stomach, thick and dark and leaking, his whole body still carrying the warmth from the shower. The gold chain. The scar. The muscle definition that came from a career spent fighting g-forces. And his expression — power and tenderness and joy and the specific, focused hunger of a man who had been listening to me come apart for ten minutes through a phone and was now ready to finish the job in person.
“Hi,” he said. Into the phone. Through the headset. Into my ear and into the room simultaneously, and the duality — his voice arriving twice, in stereo, the live version and the transmitted version overlapping — made my cock twitch visibly against the cotton.
“Hello,” I said.
He set the phone on the side table. Dropped to his knees between my legs with the fluid grace of a man who had been kneeling for me for months and was now choosing to kneel from the other side of the equation. His hands found my thighs. Pushed them apart. Hooked his fingers into my waistband and pulled my trousers and boxer briefs down in a single efficient motion that left me exposed and straining and making a sound I didn’t recognise as my own.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, looking at my cock with the same focused attention I usually directed at him. “I don’t tell you that enough. I get distracted by the glasses and the strategy voice and the way you fold your shirts, and I forget to say: you are beautiful, Adrian. Right here. Like this. Hard and desperate and mine.”
He took me into his mouth without preamble.
Not teasing. Not gradual. He took me deep on the first stroke — lips stretched around the shaft, tongue flat against the underside, his throat opening to accommodate the length with a practised ease that told me he’d been thinking about this specifically, preparing for this specifically, wanting this specifically. His hands gripped my hips to hold me in the chair because my body’s immediate response was to surge upward, to fuck into the wet heat of his mouth, and he wanted control of the pace.
His pace. Not mine. The reversal was complete.
The sound I made was captured by the headset and played back through the ear cups. Raw. Loud. Unedited. I could hear myself the way he heard me — the groan that started in my chest, the sharp inhale when he swallowed around the head, the broken “fuck” that escaped when his tongue did something devastating to the frenulum. Every sound, amplified and returned, so that the experience was doubled: his mouth on me and my own voice confirming how completely it was destroying me.
“Don’t hold back,” he said, pulling off just enough to speak, his lips against the head, his breath hot and his eyes looking up at me through dark lashes with the same expression he wore when he was driving perfectly — focused, alive, in the exact centre of where he was supposed to be. “I want to hear everything. That’s the point of the headset, Adrian. You hear yourself. You hear what I hear when you let go. And you sound fucking incredible.”
He took me back in. Deeper this time. I felt the back of his throat, felt his jaw relax to take more, felt his hand slide between my legs and cup my balls with a gentle pressure that made my thighs shake. His other hand was on himself — I could see his arm moving, stroking his own cock in counterpoint to the rhythm of his mouth, and the visual of Luca on his knees getting himself off while he sucked me was so far beyond anything my composure could process that I stopped trying to process it.
I let go.
The sounds filled the headset. My breathing, ragged and accelerating. The wet, obscene sounds of his mouth working me with a dedication that made analysis impossible. The moans I couldn’t contain — low, continuous, building in volume as his pace increased and his tongue flattened and curled and his fingers pressed behind my balls with a pressure that made white light pulse at the edges of my vision.
“Luca.” His name, the only word left. “Luca, I’m going to —”
He pulled off. The denial was so sudden that my hips chased his mouth involuntarily, and the sound I made — frustrated, desperate, a man who had been expertly edged by his own techniques — played back through the ear cups with mortifying clarity.
“Not yet,” he said. Grinning. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “We both know anticipation is strategy.”
“I am going to dismantle you for this.”
“You’re going to sit in that chair and take whatever I give you. Those are the rules tonight.” He climbed into my lap. Straddled me, his thighs bracketing mine, his cock pressed against my stomach, slick and hot. He gripped my jaw — firm, specific, the same gesture I used on him — and tilted my face up. “And the rules say I decide when you come. Not you. Not your body. Me.”
The sound I made was not a word. It was below language, in the register where consent and surrender and want existed without requiring translation.
He reached behind himself. Slick already — he’d prepared in the shower, I realised, the forward planning making my chest constrict with a combination of arousal and tenderness that should have been contradictory but wasn’t. He positioned me at his entrance and sank down in one continuous, devastating motion.
The sound he made — a guttural, full-throated groan that started in his chest and vibrated through the phone and into the headset and into my skull — was the most explicit thing I had ever heard. Not because of its volume, but because of its honesty. No performance. No bravado. Just a man taking what he wanted and letting the sound of the pleasure exist without editing.
“Fuck,” he breathed. “God, Adrian, you feel —”
He didn’t finish the sentence. His hips answered instead — rolling forward, lifting, descending, establishing a rhythm that was pure Luca: instinctive, aggressive, impatiently perfect. He rode me with his hands braced on my chest and his head thrown back and his cock bouncing between us with every downstroke, flushed and leaking, demanding attention he hadn’t given himself permission to receive.
I reached for him. He caught my wrist.
“No,” he said. Breathless, commanding, his grip tight. “Hands on the armrests. I told you.”
I put my hands back on the armrests. The leather was warm under my grip. My fingernails dug into the padding, because the effort of not touching him — not grabbing his hips, not wrapping my hand around his cock, not pulling him down harder onto me — was consuming every available resource.
“Good,” he said. The word, from above me, while he fucked himself on my cock with a thoroughness that was rewriting my understanding of who held power in this relationship. “You’re doing so well. Taking what I give you. Staying where I put you. I understand now why you like this — the obedience, the waiting, the way it feels when you can’t do anything except receive.”
He leaned forward. Pressed his forehead against mine. Changed the angle — deeper, more grinding, his cock trapped between our stomachs, the friction of his abs against the sensitive head making him shudder on each downstroke.
“I’m going to come on your cock,” he said against my mouth. “And you’re going to watch. And you’re not going to come until I tell you. Because I have spent six months learning patience from you, and now you’re going to find out exactly how devastating patience feels from this side.”
He straightened. Planted both hands on my shoulders. And he rode me with a focused, relentless intensity that turned the living room of our Monaco apartment into the most private and explicit space I had ever occupied.
I watched. As instructed. His body moving above me, the muscles in his thighs working, the sweat breaking across his chest, his cock dark and swollen and streaking precome across his stomach with every thrust. His face was the best part — no composure, no mask, no media smile. Just pleasure and concentration and the raw, beautiful transparency of a man who had learned to hide nothing from the person he loved.
“Adrian,” he said. “Adrian, I’m —”
He came without touching himself. The orgasm hit him mid-downstroke — his body clenching around me, his cock pulsing in thick, visible ropes across my chest and stomach, his mouth open on a sound that the headset captured and returned to me in stereo: live and transmitted, doubled, the most intimate recording that would ever exist of Luca Moretti losing control.
The sensation of him coming around me — the rhythmic tightening, the heat, the absolute physiological evidence of his pleasure — was beyond anything my discipline could contain.
“Now,” he gasped. Still shaking, still clenching. “Come. I want to feel it.”
I let go of the armrests. Grabbed his hips. Drove upward into him with three hard, deep, desperate thrusts that lifted him off the chair, and the orgasm that tore through me was not measured, was not managed, was not the controlled release of a man who had spent forty-two years calibrating every output. It was a detonation. A full structural failure of every wall I’d ever built, the pleasure so intense that my vision went white and my hands left bruises on his hips and the sound I made through the headset was something I would, under any other circumstances, have been mortified to hear.
Through the ear cups, my own voice played back to me. Broken open. Unstrategic. The sound of a man who had finally heard himself from the other side and discovered that losing control was not a failure but a gift.
He collapsed against my chest. Both of us breathing in wreckage, both of us slick with his come and my sweat, the headset askew on my head, his face pressed into the curve of my neck where his breath came in hot, ragged bursts against my pulse.
“Radio check?” he murmured into my skin.
I removed the headset. Carefully — the vintage leather, the restored electronics, the gift that had just facilitated the most thorough unravelling of my composure in forty-two years of careful maintenance. I set it on the side table beside the phone. Put both hands on his face. Kissed him with the slowness and the certainty of a man who had been given something he didn’t know he needed.
“Loud and clear,” I said.
He found my wrist. Held it. The pulse point. The fixed point. The anchor that had survived every storm the season had thrown at us and emerged not unscathed but intact.
“I love you,” he said. Casual. Certain. The way you say a thing that has been true for so long it no longer requires formal delivery.
“I love you. And I’m not afraid to say it.”
“I know.” He kissed the corner of my mouth. “That’s the whole point.”
Outside, Monaco did what Monaco always did — glittered, performed, existed with the mechanical beauty of a place that ran on money and sunlight and the assumption that everyone inside its borders was living their best life. Inside, a vintage headset sat on a side table next to a phone with a Bluetooth connection that would be used again — next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that, and the Tuesdays that followed — because Luca Moretti had found a way to reverse the dynamic without dismantling it, and Adrian Shaw had discovered that being told you’re allowed was its own kind of pole position.
His heartbeat pulsed against my fingertips. Steady. Warm. Alive.
The bottom line had never been clearer.
Want to read the full novel? Pole Position, Bottom Line is available now.
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