🔥 Road Game 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Return to Contact by Tessa Valehart

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place in October, three months after the epilogue of Return to Contact. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Grant’s side of the first road trip on his new contract: a hotel room two time zones from home, a knock at twenty to midnight, a fourteen-minute no-touching rule that replays a phone call from February, and the thing Elise couldn’t wait until breakfast to tell him. Explicit content — 18+.

Road Game

The phone lights up on the nightstand at twenty to midnight.

I’m two time zones west of home, on the edge of a hotel bed with a towel around my waist and an ice wrap strapped to my left shoulder. It’s October. It’s the first road trip of a one-year contract. We won three–two tonight. I played eleven-forty and took nine draws, and I won six of them, including the last one in our end.

The screen says Doc. I never changed it.

“Elise.”

“Where are you?”

“The hotel.” I check the clock. It’s nearly two in the morning where she is. “Is everything all right?”

“Everything’s fine. Which room?”

“Fourteen-twelve. Why are you awake?”

“I can’t sleep.” There’s something in her voice I can’t place. It’s the one she uses just before she’s funny. “I keep ending up on a terrace.”

I know that sentence. She said it to me from her own bed last February, on the ninth day of fourteen, and it cost me a night’s sleep and most of my self-respect.

“What have you got on?” she asks.

“A towel. And an ice pack. Elise, what—”

“You said something to me once. In my bed, the first time. You said that if I ever called you like that again, you’d get on the plane.”

“I meant it.”

“I know you did. But you had a game.” A beat. “I had a free Saturday.”

Somebody knocks on my door.

I look at it. I look at the phone.

“That’ll be room service,” she says in my ear, and from the far side of four inches of hotel door.

I get it open.

She’s standing in the corridor with her phone at her ear and a carry-on at her heel. She’s wearing a long camel coat I’ve never seen, buttoned to the chin, and her hair’s down. Her glasses are on top of her head. She’s flown four hours. She looks like a woman who’s just robbed a bank and can’t believe how well it went.

“I’ve never got on a plane for a reason that wasn’t a conference,” she says. “I’d like that noted.”

I can’t find a word. I stand there in a towel with my mouth open.

“You’re letting the cold out, Captain.”

I get her inside. I get the door shut and my hands in her hair, and I kiss her. She tastes like airline coffee and the mint she ate in the elevator. She’s laughing into my mouth.

“Nina drove me to the airport,” she says, when I let her breathe. “She said if I looked at my email at the gate she’d have me sedated. I didn’t. I bought a magazine. I read about a celebrity’s kitchen.”

“You flew across the country.”

“Half of it. And I operate on Monday, so I fly back tomorrow night. You’ve got me for nineteen hours.” She puts her palm on my sternum. Her place. “How was the game?”

“Shoulder’s a one. Stomach was a three before the anthem and nothing since.”

“Thank you.” She takes the ice wrap off me herself, the Velcro tearing in the quiet, and drops it on the desk. She doesn’t look at what’s under it. She looks at my face. “Now. I want to try something.”

“Anything.”

“Don’t agree until you’ve heard it.”

She walks me backward to the bed with that one hand and sits me down on the edge. Then she crosses the room to the armchair by the window, and she sits down in it. She’s still in the coat. She crosses her legs.

“In February you talked me through it from a room like this one,” she says. “I’ve thought about that call roughly once a day since. I only got to hear it. I’d like to see it.”

My pulse kicks.

“You told me that if you’d been in the room, you’d have lain there with your hands behind your head and watched me do every bit of it, because you’d given your word.” She nods at the clock on the nightstand. “So. Fourteen minutes. Nobody touches anybody. You’re good with a clock.”

“Fourteen.”

“It’s a number we’ve done before.”

“We did fourteen days.”

“And you complained the entire time. This is the short form.” Her eyes go down my chest to the towel, which isn’t hiding anything by now. “Take that off. Lie back. Show me what I was listening to.”

It’s 11:52. I take the towel off.

I lie back against the headboard with one knee up, and I wrap my right hand around my cock. I’m already most of the way hard. I’ve been that way since the corridor.

“Tell me,” she says. “Exactly. You made me say all of mine.”

“I’m hard enough that it aches.” My voice has dropped without my asking it to. “I’ve got my fist around it. Slow. Thumb over the head on the way up.”

“Is that what you were doing in February?”

“In February I’d been at it since you said ‘left of center.’ There wasn’t anything slow about it.”

She laughs, low. Then she starts on her buttons.

She does it one at a time, from the throat down, and she doesn’t hurry. The coat falls open.

There’s a Breakers sweater under it. Mine. Nineteen, with the C on the chest. She’s got the sleeves rolled four times. From where I’m lying I can see there’s nothing else at all.

“Christ, Elise.”

“I went through security in this.”

“With the coat on.”

“With the coat on. I’m adventurous. I’m not a lunatic.”

She puts her heels up on the edge of the chair and lets her knees fall open. The hem of the sweater slides up her thighs. She’s bare underneath it. She’s pink and already wet, and the lamp’s right there beside her.

My hand stops moving.

“I didn’t say stop,” she says.

I start again. It’s the hardest job I’ve had all night, and I killed two penalties.

She slides her hand down her own stomach and between her legs. Middle finger. Small circles. I know where without being told. I wrote it down.

“Now you tell me,” I say.

“I’m wet. I’ve been wet since the gate.” Her breath catches. “I sat through four hours next to a man doing a spreadsheet, and I thought about this chair. I didn’t know it’d be this chair. I knew there’d be one.”

“What were you thinking?”

“That I’d make you wait. That you’d hate it, and you’d do it anyway, because I asked. You’d lie there with your cock in your hand and look at me exactly the way you’re looking at me now.”

“How am I looking at you?”

“Like you’re counting.”

I am. It’s 11:56. Ten minutes.

“Other hand,” I tell her. “Under the sweater.”

She pushes her left hand up under my number and closes it over her breast. I can see the shape of her fingers moving under the crest.

“Pinch it. You know how hard.”

She does. Her hips come up off the chair, and the sound she makes goes straight to the base of my spine. I tighten my grip and I have to slow right down.

“Two fingers inside,” I say. “Don’t lose the circles. Use your thumb.”

“That’s a difficult angle.”

“Best hands in the state. Figure it out.”

She figures it out. She slides two fingers into herself, deep, and I watch them go. Her head drops back against the chair. Her thighs are shaking. The sweater’s rucked up to her waist, and she’s fucking her own hand in a hotel armchair four feet from me. I’m not allowed to cross four feet.

“Grant.” Her eyes are half shut. “Talk. That’s what I came for.”

So I talk.

I tell her what she looks like. I tell her I can see how wet she is from here, and how it’s shining on her fingers and on the inside of her thigh. I tell her that when this clock runs out I’m going to get down on my knees in front of that chair and put my mouth where her hand is. I tell her I’ve been on the road for six days with nothing but my own fist and a picture of her in row eight. I say her name the way I said it the first time, on a phone, when I hadn’t yet been allowed to.

“Say that again.”

“Elise.”

“Again.”

“Elise. Don’t you dare come yet. It’s 11:59.”

“You’re not in charge of that.”

“You gave it to me once. On the fourteenth floor.”

“That was one night.” But she’s smiling, and she’s slowed her hand. “Fine. Seven minutes. You count them.”

They’re the longest seven minutes I’ve spent off the ice.

I stroke myself slowly enough that it’s an insult. I’m leaking over my knuckles. She watches every bit of it with her lip between her teeth. She takes her fingers out and circles, and puts them back, and takes them out again. Twice she gets close, and I see it coming in her stomach, and she stops herself and breathes. She swears at me both times. One of the words is Latin.

At 12:04 she says, “I gave notice on the condo.”

My hand stops.

“On Thursday. The lease is up at the end of the month, and I didn’t renew it.” Her voice isn’t quite level. Her fingers are still moving. “I’d planned to tell you over breakfast. I find I can’t wait for breakfast.”

“Elise.”

“I said I wanted to choose it at my own speed. This is the speed.” She looks at me across four feet of carpet, flushed to the throat, in my sweater. “I’d like to live in your house. I’d like it to be ours. I’m aware this is an unusual moment to raise it.”

It goes through my chest like a puck through traffic. I can’t get a breath around it.

“What time is it?” I ask.

She glances at the nightstand.

“12:05.”

“Close enough.”

I’m off the bed before she’s finished laughing.

I go down on my knees in front of the chair and pull her to the edge of it by the hips. I put my mouth on her, flat and slow, where her fingers were. She’s soaked. She tastes like every good thing that’s ever happened to me. Her hand fists in my hair and her heel lands on my left shoulder.

She found the left one without thinking. I notice it. I don’t say a word.

“Yes. There. Don’t change anything.”

I don’t change anything. I get two fingers into her, curled forward, and I keep my tongue exactly where she showed me in February. She’s been on the edge for a quarter of an hour, and it takes about forty seconds. She comes with her back arched off the chair and her thighs shut on my ears, loud enough that I think about the room next door for exactly as long as I’ve ever thought about it.

I don’t wait for her to come down. I stand up with her.

I pick her up out of that chair, both arms, and she wraps her legs around my waist and gasps. I carry her to the bed. It’s six feet. I’d carry her to the airport.

“Number,” she says against my neck. She’s allowed.

“One. And about a nine, in the chest. It’s the good kind.”

“What’s the good kind?”

“You gave notice.”

I lay her down, and I come down over her on both arms. I push into her, all the way, in one long stroke. She’s hot and slick and still fluttering from the first one, and she says my name like it’s the answer to something.

I’m not going to last. I say so.

“I don’t want you to last. I flew four hours.” She hooks her ankles behind my back. “I want you to lose your mind. I want to watch you do it.”

So I let go. I hold myself over her and fuck her hard, deep, with her hands fisted in the sweater she’s still wearing and the headboard hitting the wall. I’ve got my left hand under her hip, tilting her up to me. She’s meeting every stroke. She’s talking now, filthy and precise, telling me what she can feel and how deep and not to stop.

“Look at me,” she says.

I look at her.

“I love you. I’m moving in. Come inside me.”

It takes me apart. I drive into her and hold there and come with my forehead on hers, groaning, my whole body locked. I feel her go again around me, a second one, smaller, her mouth open against mine.

For a while there’s only the two of us breathing and the hum of somebody’s ice machine down the hall.

I don’t roll off. I stay where I am, on my arms. They’re both steady.

“Your house has one finished room,” she says eventually.

“Two. There’s an office now.”

“I’m bringing a couch for the office.”

“We’ve got a couch.”

“You’ve got nine feet of brown leather. I’m bringing a couch.”

I laugh into her hair. I kiss the sweater, right on the nine.

“When do you fly back?”

“Seven tomorrow night. You’ve got a morning skate and I’ve got a magazine about kitchens.” She traces the line beside my eye with her thumb. “After that I’d like to walk around a city I’ve never been to with a man who isn’t working, and eat something off a paper tray.”

“That’s it? That’s the whole plan?”

“That’s the whole plan. I didn’t make one. I got on the plane.”

I turn us over. I take the door side out of habit, and she puts her head on my left shoulder, and it holds her without a word.

Outside, a city I don’t know goes on being a city. I’ve spent twenty years in rooms like this one, on nights like this one, lying awake and counting the minutes I’d played.

I don’t count them.

She’s asleep before I’ve finished deciding not to.

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