🔥 The 5 AM Drive

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Bench This Town Forgets
by Chase Power

What Liam was thinking at 5 AM when he left Jamie’s apartment. The drive home. The shower he couldn’t survive. The text he almost didn’t send.

⚠️ This scene is TOO HOT for Amazon. Reader discretion advised. 18+ only.

The 5 AM Drive

Liam

I leave at five because I’m afraid of what I’ll say if I stay.

The apartment is dark. Jamie is asleep — on his back, one arm above his head, the other across his stomach, and even unconscious his body holds tension. His jaw is set. His shoulders are slightly hunched. He sleeps like a man guarding a perimeter, which is the saddest thing I’ve ever observed about another person and I’ve been observing it for the last two hours because I haven’t slept at all.

I can’t sleep. Not because the bed is uncomfortable — the bed is fine, it’s a queen, it’s adequate — but because Jamie Cole is lying next to me and four hours ago he came in my hand and said my name like it was the last word in a language he was losing, and then he put his mouth on me and I discovered that there is a version of pleasure that exists beyond anything I’ve experienced and it lives in the careful, earnest, slightly unpolished mouth of a man who has never done this with someone who mattered and was doing it with the focused intensity of someone taking an exam that would determine the trajectory of his life.

He was so serious about it. That’s the part I keep replaying. Not the technique — the seriousness. The furrowed brow. The concentration. The way he held my hip like he was anchoring himself, like the act of giving pleasure was a form of survival, like if he did this well enough, I’d stay.

I would have stayed if he’d done nothing. If he’d rolled over and gone to sleep. If he’d said actually, I changed my mind and handed me my jacket and pointed at the door. I would have stayed anyway — found an excuse, made a joke, sat on his couch and waited for morning because the prospect of leaving this apartment and driving back to my condo and lying in my king-size bed alone was, after the last three hours, physically impossible.

But I’m leaving. Not because I want to — because I have a seven-thirty conditioning session with the training staff and an eight-forty-five brand call and a ten AM practice, and the infrastructure of Being Liam Hart doesn’t pause for the most important night of my life.

I slide out of bed. Carefully. The mattress shifts and Jamie stirs — his hand reaches across the sheet, finds the warm space where my body was, and his fingers close on nothing. I watch his face. In sleep, the frown deepens for a second, the absence registering in whatever subconscious monitoring system governs his awareness of other people in his space. Then it smooths. He settles. His hand stays on my side of the bed, fingers loosely curled, holding the ghost of me.

I dress in the dark. Jeans, sweater, the mechanical assembly of a man who’s put these clothes on a thousand times and is doing it now by feel because turning on the light would wake him and waking him would mean looking at his face and his face would mean staying and staying would mean missing the conditioning session and missing the conditioning session would generate questions I can’t answer.

I find my shoes by the door. My jacket is on the floor where he dropped it when we came in — when his hands were pulling at fabric with an urgency that made me feel like a wrapped present on a man’s first Christmas. I pick it up. Put it on.

I stand at the door and look back at his bedroom.

The streetlight outside the window throws a pale stripe across the bed. Jamie is a shape in the dark — angular, lean, the topography of a body I now know in ways I didn’t twelve hours ago. I know the sound he makes when you touch the inside of his wrist. I know the exact pressure that makes his hips stutter. I know he comes with his eyes closed and his mouth open and a sound that isn’t a word but contains more honesty than any sentence I’ve ever heard.

I know he tried to leave his own bed after. Tried to put his shirt on and go stand in the kitchen and become the man he was before — the self-contained, carefully organized man who doesn’t need things and doesn’t ask for things and doesn’t lie naked in a bed with another person’s fingerprints still drying on his skin.

I didn’t let him. I caught his wrist and said stay and he looked at me like I’d asked him to do something impossible and then he did it, because Jamie Cole does impossible things. He blocks slapshots with his body and fights men who outweigh him by forty pounds and lies in a bed with the most visible man on his team and lets himself be held, and each of those acts requires the same thing: the decision to absorb the impact instead of avoiding it.

I have to go.

I open the door. Step into the hallway. Close it behind me — quietly, the way you close a door when you don’t want the person inside to hear you leave.

And then I stop.

Because I’m doing the thing. The thing his father did. Leaving in the dark. Closing the door quietly. Disappearing before the sun comes up because the daylight version of this situation is too complicated to face.

I stand in the hallway of his apartment building — beige carpet, numbered doors, the faint smell of other people’s lives — and I feel the weight of what I’m doing. Jamie Cole, who told me about his father leaving at two AM without turning on the headlights. Jamie Cole, who has built his entire emotional architecture around the premise that people leave quietly when you’re not worth waking up for.

And I’m leaving. At five AM. Without waking him.

I pull out my phone. Open our text thread. The last message is from yesterday — come over — his invitation, two words that changed the direction of my life. I stare at the screen. My thumbs hover.

I need him to know this isn’t the car in the driveway. I need him to know I left because I have a conditioning session, not because the daylight version of him isn’t worth staying for.

I type.

Left at 5. You sleep like you’re guarding something. Coffee later?

The textual equivalent of turning on the headlights — a signal that says I’m going, but I’m going somewhere, and the somewhere includes you.

I hit send. Stand in the hallway. Walk to the stairs. Down three flights. Through the lobby. Into the parking lot. I get in the Audi. Start the engine. The dashboard clock reads 5:11 AM.

His hands on my belt. The way he pulled it free — fast, purposeful. His fingers on my cock — tentative for one second, then certain, the learning curve so steep and so immediate that by the third stroke he’d figured out what I needed and was delivering it with the precision of a scouting report.

I’m hard. In my car, in a parking lot, at five-eleven in the morning, I’m hard because I’m thinking about Jamie Cole’s hand on my cock and the way he looked at me when I came — not away, not at the wall, not at the ceiling. At me. Into me. With an expression that was half wonder and half terror, like he’d discovered something powerful and beautiful and was already calculating the cost.

I drive. Past the arena, dark and dormant. I think about the ice. About six forty-five. About the mornings that started this — the silence, the blades, the shared ritual of two men who didn’t know they were building something.

He came so fast. That’s the thing I keep returning to — the fact that Jamie Cole, who controls everything, who rations every gesture and budgets every emotion and keeps his bed made with military corners, came in my hand in under two minutes and was mortified by it. He started to apologize. I refused to let him.

That’s the hottest thing that’s ever happened to me.

I said that. I meant it. Because watching Jamie Cole lose control is watching a fortress dissolve. The man behind the walls — raw, desperate, shaking, saying my name like a prayer he didn’t know he’d memorized — is the most erotic thing I’ve ever experienced. The anti-performance. The real thing, messy and fast and over too soon and more devastating than any slow burn because it was the first time he’d let himself want something without immediately calculating the cost.

And then his mouth — his mouth, Jesus, his mouth — hesitant and unpracticed and so earnest that I nearly came from the sight of him before the sensation even registered. He wasn’t polished. His rhythm was uneven. I didn’t care. The metric that mattered was the fact that Jamie Cole was on his knees in his own bedroom choosing to do this with someone he’d see at practice tomorrow and the choosing was the thing that undid me. Not the suction. Not the heat. The trust.

I pull into my building’s garage. Park. Sit. It’s 5:24. I check my phone. No response from Jamie. He’s still asleep. Still in the bed I made the decision to leave, in the dark, like a man who’s afraid of what the morning looks like.

But I texted. I turned on the headlights. I left a signal in the dark that says I was here, and I saw you, and I’m coming back.

I shower. Stand under the water and think about his mouth and his hands and the sound he made when he came — Li-am, split across two syllables, two breaths, my name broken open and reassembled as an act of surrender — and I press my forehead against the tile and my hand finds my cock and I stroke myself in the shower thinking about Jamie Cole because the need didn’t leave with the leaving, the need followed me home, the need is permanent now.

I think about his lips around me. The concentration in his brow. The way his throat worked when he took me deeper than he planned. The way his hand gripped my hip — hard, bruising, desperate — and the red marks his fingers left that I can still see on my skin under the shower spray. Evidence. Proof that Jamie Cole wanted me badly enough to leave marks.

I stroke harder. Close my eyes and I’m not in the shower anymore — I’m in his bed, his mouth on my cock, his eyes looking up at me with that dark, earnest, terrified focus, and his hand on my hip, and his throat opening, and the sound — the wet, urgent, consuming sound of Jamie Cole taking me like his life depended on getting this right.

I come with his name in my throat and my hand braced against the wall and the memory of his fingers in my hair and the memory of his eyes — open, watching, seeing me come undone and looking proud. Faintly proud. Like making Liam Hart lose control was an achievement he was filing away for future reference.

I stand under the water until it runs cold. Then I get out. Dry off. Dress. Eat the meal-prepped chicken standing at the island.

My phone buzzes. 6:47 AM.

Jamie: Practice at 10. See you there.

He responded. He’s not panicking. He said see you there, which means the door isn’t closed, which means the morning-after is happening and he’s choosing to let it happen.

I type: Six forty-five tomorrow?

Our code. Our shorthand. The ritual that means I’ll be there, and I hope you’ll be there, and the being-there is the whole thing.

Jamie: I’ll be there.

He’ll be there. Tomorrow, at six forty-five, I’ll walk into an empty arena and he’ll already be on the ice. He’ll be skating his drills, lean and scarred and quiet, and I’ll set a coffee on the boards — black, because that’s how he takes it — and we won’t talk, and the silence will contain everything.

It’s a thing. It’s the thing. It’s the only thing that’s ever been real, and I left at five and I turned on the headlights, and tomorrow at six forty-five I’ll bring coffee and I won’t say any of this and he’ll know it anyway, because Jamie Cole sees everything, and the thing he sees when he looks at me is the man I actually am.

That man is just a guy in love, standing in his kitchen, eating cold chicken, waiting for tomorrow.

Six forty-five.

I’ll be there.

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