Straight in the Sheets by Chase Power - MM MMA Sports Romance book cover

Straight in the Sheets — Bonus Chapter

Two Corners — Fight Night
by Chase Power

This bonus chapter takes place after the events of Straight in the Sheets. For the full story, grab the book first.

Two Corners

Cade

The hotel room door barely closed before his mouth was on mine.

Not gently. Not the careful, post-fight tenderness of two men who had just spent twelve rounds of combined cage time getting hit in front of fifteen thousand people. This was the other thing — the thing that lived underneath the discipline, underneath the game plans, underneath the controlled personas we wore for cameras and coaches and a world that knew us as fighters and nothing else.

His hands were still wrapped. Mine too. The tape was loosened but not removed — we’d barely made it through the post-fight interviews, the medical checks, the corridor to the elevator.

Now the distance was zero and his mouth tasted like blood and mouthguard and the adrenaline that was still metabolizing through both of us, and my back hit the door and his body pressed into mine and we were home.

“You won,” he said. Against my mouth. His voice was wrecked. “You fucking won.”

“You won too.” Second-round TKO. Nico Reyes, number one contender, the most dangerous middleweight no one saw coming.

“Champion,” he said. The word was a kiss placed on the bruise under my left eye. “Champion.” Another kiss, on my swollen lip. “My champion.” On my jaw, where the bone ached from clenching through five rounds of the hardest fight of my life.

“Shut up. I’m kissing your injuries. It’s a medical procedure.”

I laughed. The laugh hurt — bruised ribs, round four — and the hurt was worth it because his face when I laughed was the face I’d fallen in love with on a mountain.

I grabbed his wraps. Both fists. Pulled him with me as I walked backward through the suite. His feet tangled with mine. We nearly went down twice. Didn’t care. Didn’t stop kissing.

The bed hit the backs of my knees. I sat. He stood between my legs — looking down at me, his chest heaving, the bruise on his cheekbone already purpling beneath golden-brown skin. Two men in expensive clothes with blood on their knuckles and championship dreams realized.

“Take this off,” I said. My hands on his jacket. Pushing it off his shoulders.

He stripped me with the efficiency of a corner man removing gear between rounds. When he reached my briefs, he paused. The bruises on my torso were a map of violence he hadn’t been close enough to prevent.

He knelt. Kissed each bruise. His mouth on my ribs. On the scar — the old one, from Tucson, the one he’d kissed on a massage table a lifetime ago.

“Does this hurt?” His lips on the bruise over my hip.

“Nothing hurts right now.”

“Liar.” He kissed lower. His fingers hooked the elastic. “Everything hurts. You just don’t care.”

He pulled my briefs down. I was already hard — had been since the moment the announcer said and still and the arena roared and I’d looked across the cage and found his eyes in the crowd.

He took me in his mouth. Not slow. Not patient. The night was too big for patience. He took me deep and fast, the aggression he brought to everything — the cage, the argument, the relentless forward pressure that was his signature in fighting and in fucking.

My hand found his hair. I gripped. He groaned around me — the vibration traveling through my cock and into my spine.

“Nico — wait —”

He pulled off. Looked up. Dark eyes, swollen lips, the scar through his eyebrow catching the light. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I’d just seen my name on a championship belt.

“I want you inside me,” I said. “Tonight. Fight night. I want to feel everything.”

He stood. Stripped — fast, graceless. His body in the lamplight — the tattoo, the bruise on his ribs from his own fight, the lean, explosive architecture of a man who had been built for violence and had learned tenderness as a second language.

He pushed me onto my back. Kissed me — deep, filthy, the taste of both our blood mixing in the space between our mouths.

“Lube?” Against my ear.

“Bag. Front pocket.” Because I planned for contingencies. Still. Always.

He opened me slowly. Two fingers, then three. I breathed through it — the familiar stretch, the burn that became pressure that became pleasure that became need. My body opened for his hands the way a lock opens for the right key: completely, automatically.

“Ready?”

“Since the mountain.”

He entered me in one slow push. The full length. My back arched off the hotel bed. But we didn’t use the space. We pressed together — chest to chest, forehead to forehead — because the closeness was the point. The closeness had always been the point.

“Look at me,” he said. Our words.

I looked.

He moved. Deep. Each stroke a declaration.

“Champion,” he said. Thrust. “Mine.” Thrust. “I love you.” Thrust. “I’m going to take your belt.” Thrust. “And then I’m going to take you home.”

I laughed and groaned at the same time — the absurd, joyful, filthy combination of competition and devotion that was the foundation of everything we’d built. He was inside me, telling me he loved me, promising to dethrone me. The duality was impossible and perfect and exactly, precisely, fundamentally us.

“Faster,” I said.

“My pace.”

“That’s my line.”

“I stole it. Like I’m going to steal your belt.”

He sped up. His hips driving forward with the explosive power of a man whose body was an instrument of force and who was now applying that force with the devastating precision that I’d taught him on a training mat and that he was now using against me in the best possible way.

I wrapped my legs around him. Pulled him deeper. My hands on his back — the muscles working under my palms, the geography I’d learned by touch and taste and a hundred nights spent mapping each other in the dark.

He shifted the angle. Found the spot. I arched — hard, involuntary. He locked onto it. The relentless repetition that was our shared language.

He reached between us. Wrapped his hand around my cock and stroked in rhythm with his thrusts. The dual sensation pushed me to the edge in seconds.

“Now,” I said.

We came together. The overlap — his orgasm and mine, interleaved, the waves breaking against each other — was the physical proof that two bodies could learn each other so completely that even the involuntary became coordinated.

He collapsed onto my chest. Both of us breathing hard. Both of us bruised. Both of us champions. Both of us holding on.

Later. The hotel room dark. We were in bed — his back against my chest, my arm over his waist, the configuration we’d optimized on a narrow bed on a mountain and had transferred to every bed since.

The championship belt was on the desk. Beside it, his fight gloves. Two artifacts of the same night — placed side by side because that was how we existed now. Side by side. In everything.

“When they match us,” he said. Half-asleep. “I’m not going easy.”

“If you go easy, I’ll break up with you.”

“You just said ‘break up.’ That implies we’re together.”

“We’ve been together since the kitchen. Keep up, old man.”

I smiled into the dark. “Old man.”

His hand found mine on his stomach. Interlaced. The grip that had started as linked pinkies on a kitchen floor and had grown into this — full, certain, the hand-hold of two people who had fought for this in every sense of the word.

“Two fighters,” he said.

“One corner.”

He fell asleep in my arms. The champion’s belt caught the light — gold, gleaming, the physical proof of everything I’d worked for since I was twenty-two.

The man in my arms was the proof of everything I’d needed and hadn’t known.

I held them both. The belt and the man. The career and the love. The cage and the corner.

Both mine. Both earned. Both permanent.

I closed my eyes. Slept deeply. Dreamed of mountains.

Want the full story? Straight in the Sheets is available now.

Get Straight in the Sheets