The Other Side of the Door
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Virgin Bodyguard
by Chase Power
This bonus chapter contains explicit MM sexual content and takes place three months after the epilogue. Spoilers ahead. 18+ only.
The house smells like basil and steam when Marcel comes home.
I hear the front door — one lock, engaged and released — and then his keys on the hook and his shoes on the mat and his voice, carrying through the narrow hallway with the particular energy of a man who has spent eight hours in a recording studio and has opinions.
“Torin Ash, I have had the longest day of my life, and if you are not in that greenhouse talking to a plant, I will be emotionally devastated.”
“Kitchen,” I call back.
He appears in the doorway. Studio clothes — fitted black jeans, an oversized sweater that used to be mine before it became his through the same territorial acquisition process that claimed seven of my shirts and a hoodie I genuinely liked. His hair is pushed back. His eyes are bright with the specific, post-creative energy that means either the session went brilliantly or catastrophically, and either way he needs to be touched.
“You cooked,” he says, looking at the counter.
“Pasta.”
“The good pasta? The one with the—”
“The one with the thing. Yes.”
He crosses the kitchen in three steps and wraps his arms around me from behind while I am draining the colander. His face presses between my shoulder blades. His hands flatten against my stomach. The contact is immediate, full-body, and entirely without preamble — Marcel Lux does not build to physical affection. He arrives at it.
“Good day or bad day?” I ask.
“Great day. I finished the bridge on the new track and Lyric cried, which means it is either beautiful or terrible, and Lyric only cries at beautiful things and season finales of cooking competitions.” He presses closer. His mouth finds the back of my neck. “I missed you.”
“You have been gone nine hours.”
“I missed you at hour two. By hour six I was writing lyrics about your forearms. The bridge may actually be about your forearms.”
I set down the colander. I turn in his arms. His face tilts up — that six-inch height difference that used to make me feel like a weapon and now makes me feel like a shelter.
“I want to try something tonight,” Marcel says. His voice has shifted. Lower. The register he uses in bedrooms and greenhouses and the narrow shower where we negotiate for space every morning.
“Something culinary or something else?”
“Something else.” His fingers trace my waistband. His eyes darken. “I want to be inside you.”
The kitchen goes very still.
We have not done this. In three months of established, domestic, increasingly adventurous intimacy, we have not reversed the penetrative dynamic. Not because either of us has objected — because I have not asked, and Marcel has not pushed, and the pattern we established in the safe house has been comfortable enough that changing it felt like a project rather than a desire.
But I have been thinking about it. In therapy, Dr. Obi would call it expanding the vulnerability framework. In practice, it means I want to know what it feels like to let someone in. Literally. Completely. The way Marcel has let me in since the first time, every time, with the devastating trust of a man who opens his body as an act of faith.
I want to give that back.
“Yes,” I say.
Marcel’s eyebrows rise. “That was fast.”
“I have been thinking about it.”
“For how long?”
“Six weeks.”
“Six weeks. You have been thinking about this for six weeks and did not mention it?”
“I was processing.”
“Torin.” He cups my face. His thumbs trace my jaw. “Did you make a risk matrix?”
I do not answer.
“You made a risk matrix.” He laughs — the full, helpless, delighted laugh that vibrates through his whole body and into mine. “You made a risk matrix for me fucking you.”
“It was a comfort assessment. Not a risk matrix. The categories were different.”
“What were the categories?”
“I am not telling you the categories.”
“I will find that document, Torin Ash. I will find it and I will frame it and I will hang it next to the bumblebee photograph.”
I kiss him to shut him up. It works, but only because kissing Marcel Lux is the one tactic guaranteed to redirect his attention. His mouth opens under mine and his hands slide under my shirt and the pasta gets cold on the counter and neither of us cares.
His tongue slides against mine and I taste coffee and spearmint and the specific sweetness that means he has been singing for eight hours and his throat is warm and open. His hands pull my shirt up and over my head and then his mouth is on my chest — my collarbone, my sternum, the flat expanse of muscle that his fingers have mapped a hundred times but his lips treat like new territory every time.
“Bedroom,” he murmurs against my skin. “Unless you want to do this on the kitchen counter, which I am not opposed to but which may compromise the pasta.”
“Bedroom.”
We make it to the hallway. Barely. He pushes me against the wall and his hips press into mine and I feel him hard through his jeans — the insistent, demanding pressure of a man who has been thinking about this all day and has run out of patience. His hand slides between us and palms me through my sweatpants and the sound I make echoes off the narrow hallway walls.
“You are already hard,” he says. His voice is rough. Wondering. “You have been thinking about this too.”
“Since you walked through the door.”
“Since I walked through the door? I said three sentences about pasta.”
“You said them while wearing my sweater and smelling like the studio and looking at me the way you look at me when you want something you are about to take. That is enough.”
“God, Torin.” He grips me through the fabric and I thrust into his hand and my back arches against the wall and his mouth is on my throat, sucking hard enough to leave a mark I will see tomorrow and touch with my fingers and remember this exact moment.
We stumble into the bedroom. He pushes me onto the bed. I land on my back and he stands over me, stripping off the sweater — my sweater, reclaimed — and then his shirt, and then his jeans, efficient and unperforming, the practical undressing of a man who has a destination and does not intend to waste time on the route.
He kneels on the bed between my legs. His hands on my thighs. His expression focused and warm and carrying zero judgment.
“How do you want this?” he asks.
“I want to see you. Face to face. I want to watch your face while you are inside me.”
“Okay.” He leans down and presses his mouth to my stomach. Then lower — a line of kisses along my hip bone, his teeth grazing the ridge of muscle that makes my abs contract. He hooks his fingers in my waistband and pulls my sweatpants and briefs down in one motion and my cock springs free, hard, flushed, already leaking against my stomach.
He wraps his hand around me and strokes — slow, firm, the practiced grip of a man who knows exactly what pressure makes me lose words. My hips buck. My hand grips the sheet.
“Not yet,” he says. “I want you wound up. I want you so far gone that when I finally push inside you, you feel every inch.”
“Marcel—”
He drops his head and takes me into his mouth. No preamble. No teasing. The full, hot, devastating reality of Marcel’s mouth wrapped around my cock, his tongue working the underside, his hand twisting on the base. My spine arches off the mattress and the sound I make is not language — it is a wrecked, animal groan that comes from somewhere below conscious thought.
He works me with his mouth until I am shaking, until my hand in his hair is gripping hard enough to hurt, until the pressure building at the base of my spine threatens to crest. Then he pulls off. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Looks up at me with swollen lips and dark eyes.
“Turn over,” he says.
“You said face to face.”
“I will get there. Right now I want to open you up, and the angle is better if you are on your stomach.” He runs his hand down my side, over my hip, along the swell of my ass. “Trust me.”
I trust him. I turn over.
He starts with his mouth. Not where I expect — on my lower back, the sensitive divots above my glutes that he discovered three weeks ago during a lazy Sunday morning and has been weaponizing ever since. His lips trace the line of my spine, moving downward, and his hands spread me open with the steady confidence of a man who has been on the receiving end of this enough times to know exactly what it feels like and exactly how to make it feel better.
His tongue finds me. The first contact is a shock — hot, wet, deliberate. I bury my face in the pillow and my whole body locks because the sensation is so far outside my frame of reference that my nervous system has no protocol for processing it.
“Breathe,” Marcel says against my skin, and the vibration of his voice adds another layer to the overload. “Torin. Breathe.”
I breathe. He continues. His tongue circles and presses and flattens and I discover that this — this specific, intimate, filthy act — rewires something fundamental in my body. Every defense I have ever built deactivates. Every muscle that exists to keep the world at bay goes soft. I am face-down on our bed with Marcel’s mouth on me, inside me, and I am making sounds I have never heard from my own throat — high, broken, desperate sounds that would embarrass me if I had the capacity for embarrassment, which has been dissolved by his tongue.
He adds a finger alongside his mouth. Slick — he reached for the lube at some point and I did not notice because I was too busy losing my mind. One finger, slow, crooking upward while his tongue continues its devastating work, and the combination makes my cock throb against the sheets and my hips grind into the mattress in search of friction.
“Marcel — god — I cannot — you need to—” The words fragment. I am trying to tell him that if he continues this I will come before he gets inside me, and six weeks of anticipation and a comfort assessment with detailed projections will have been for nothing.
He pulls back. Two fingers now, his mouth replaced by the focused, patient pressure of a man who has learned my body from the outside and is now learning it from in. He works me open with the same thorough, meticulous attention I bring to security sweeps, and the irony — the specific, devastating irony of being dismantled by my own methodology — makes me laugh against the pillow.
“You are laughing,” Marcel says. “That is either very good or very concerning.”
“I am laughing because you are using my own technique against me.”
“Methodical. Thorough. Devastatingly attentive.” He crooks his fingers and hits the spot that makes my vision white out. “I learned from the best.”
“You are doing so well,” he murmurs, and the praise — my praise, the words I have used on him in the gym and the bedroom and the greenhouse — lands differently when I am the one receiving it. My cock pulses against the sheets. My hands fist in the pillow. The praise kink does not care which direction it flows. It only cares that the person saying the words means them.
Marcel means them.
Three fingers. The stretch burns and I breathe through it — not a four-count, just breathing, the way Dr. Obi taught me. Present. Not managing. Not controlling. Feeling.
“Turn back over,” Marcel says. “I want to see your face.”
I turn. He is kneeling between my legs, flushed, hard, his cock straining against his briefs — the last piece of clothing between us. He strips them off and I look at him — lean, golden-brown, the constellation tattoo behind his ear, his body a composition of dancer muscle and the casual beauty of a man who has never had to try to be wanted.
He sheathes himself. Positions between my legs, my thighs draped over his, the angle tilted to give him depth. His cock nudges against me and the anticipation is so intense my abs contract involuntarily.
“Ready?” he asks.
“I love you,” I say. Because that is the answer to every question he has ever asked me.
He pushes in.
Slowly. So slowly. The head breaches and the stretch is different from fingers — fuller, warmer, alive. I feel every inch of him as he slides in, and the sensation is pressure and heat and the acute vulnerability of a body that has been a weapon for thirty-five years finally being used for something else entirely.
My eyes burn. Not pain — the surplus. The same surplus that has been filling me since the first time he touched me in a gym during a thunderstorm.
“Torin.” Marcel’s voice is barely a whisper. His arms are shaking — not from the effort of holding himself up but from the effort of holding himself still. “You feel — god. You feel incredible. You are so tight and so hot and I need you to tell me when I can move because if I move right now I am going to last approximately eleven seconds and I have a reputation to maintain.”
I wrap my hand around the back of his neck. I pull his forehead to mine. We breathe together — the shared rhythm we learned in a safe house, in a hotel bed, in every moment when our bodies needed to sync before they could surrender.
“Move,” I say. “Please.”
He moves.
And I discover something I should have known from the beginning: Marcel Lux fucks the way he performs. With his whole body. With total commitment. With the specific, generous, devastating attention of a man who is not trying to take something from the person underneath him but to give something — pleasure, presence, the proof that being entered is not the same as being invaded.
His hips roll. Deep, measured strokes that find the angle his fingers mapped and hit it with a precision that makes my cock leak against my stomach and my spine bow off the mattress. My legs wrap around his waist. My hands grip his shoulders — the lean, muscled shoulders that carry choreography and stage costumes and the weight of twenty million people’s expectations — and I hold on.
“Harder,” I say. The word surprises me. I did not plan to say it. My body said it — the body that is learning, in real time, what it likes when it stops calculating and starts wanting.
“Yeah?” Marcel’s eyes darken. His rhythm shifts — deeper, faster, the control he has been maintaining starting to crack at the edges. “You want it harder?”
“Yes. I want to feel you. I want — god, Marcel, right there — I want to feel you tomorrow.”
He groans — a raw, guttural sound that vibrates through both our bodies — and gives me what I asked for. His hips snap forward and the impact drives the breath out of me and the pleasure is blinding, white-hot, the kind of sensation that erases thought and replaces it with pure, uncomplicated want.
I wrap my hand around my cock. I stroke in time with his thrusts and the dual stimulation — his cock inside me, my hand on myself, his mouth finding my neck and biting down on the muscle where it meets my shoulder — builds toward something seismic. Something that has been gathering for six weeks and a comfort assessment and thirty-five years of not being touched.
“You are so good,” he breathes against my neck. “The way you look right now — Torin, do you know how you look? Like a man who stopped being afraid. Like a man who decided he deserves this. God, you deserve this. You deserve everything.”
“I am close,” I tell him. My voice is shattered. My body is shaking — not from fear, not from adrenaline, from the specific overwhelm of being fucked by someone I love while he tells me I deserve it. “Marcel, I am so close—”
“Come for me.” He drives deep and holds, his cock pressed against the spot that makes my vision fragment, his hand replacing mine on my shaft, stroking fast and firm and certain. “Let me feel it. Let me feel you let go.”
I let go.
The orgasm is a demolition. It tears through me from the base of my spine to the back of my skull and my body clenches around Marcel’s cock and he gasps — a broken, beautiful sound — and I come in thick, hot pulses across my stomach and his hand, my back arching off the bed, his name in my mouth like a word I am inventing for the first time.
He follows. His rhythm fractures into three hard, desperate thrusts and then he buries himself deep and I feel him come inside me — the pulse and heat of it, the specific physical intimacy of holding another man’s release inside my body — and the vulnerability of it is the most overwhelming thing I have ever experienced.
More vulnerable than the blast. More vulnerable than the panic. More vulnerable than standing in a command center watching someone else protect the man I love.
This is the other side of the door.
And it is safe here.
Marcel collapses onto his elbows. His weight settles over me — heavy, warm, alive. His face in my neck. His breath coming in shuddering waves that slow gradually into something approaching human.
He eases out of me carefully. I wince — not pain, just the acute awareness of absence where fullness was. He notices. Of course he notices.
“Are you okay?” His hand on my face. Thumb tracing my jaw. The gesture I taught him in a safe-house greenroom and which he has perfected into an art form.
“I am significantly better than okay. I am in a category of okay that has not been invented yet.”
“How was your comfort assessment?”
“All categories exceeded projections. The risk matrix was insufficient. I will need to redesign it.”
He laughs into my neck. The sound vibrates through both our bodies and settles in my chest like a hum I want to carry for the rest of my life.
“Torin.”
“Marcel.”
“Can we do that again?”
“Give me twenty minutes and better hydration.”
“Twenty minutes. Very specific. Did you calculate a recovery window?”
“I calculated several recovery windows. The optimal range is fifteen to twenty-five minutes depending on caloric intake and ambient temperature.”
“You calculated recovery windows. For sex. Based on ambient temperature.”
“I am a thorough person.”
“You are insane and I am in love with you.”
He rolls off me and pulls me against his chest. My back to his front, his arm around my waist, his mouth pressed to the spot on my shoulder where he bit me and which is already darkening into a bruise I will touch tomorrow in the mirror and smile about.
The pasta is cold. The kitchen light is still on. Somewhere in the greenhouse, John McClane is growing a new leaf and Hans Gruber is silently judging our noise levels.
“Marcel.”
“Hmm.”
“Thank you for waiting until I was ready.”
“You processed for six weeks. I would have waited six years.” He presses closer. His lips against my ear. “Was it what you expected?”
“It was nothing like what I expected. It was better. Because it was you.”
“That is going in a song.”
“Please do not.”
“Too late. It is already a chorus.” He traces a line down my chest, over the ridges of my abs, through the mess on my stomach that neither of us has cleaned up yet. His fingers slide lower. “Torin.”
“It has been four minutes. The recovery window—”
“The recovery window can adjust. I am touching you.” His hand wraps around my cock, which is already stirring again because my body has apparently decided that Marcel’s hand is a sufficient override for any recovery protocol. “You spent thirty-five years not being touched. I intend to make up for lost time.”
He strokes me slowly — lazy, unhurried, the pace of a man who has all night and intends to use it. His mouth is on my neck, my ear, the sensitive spot behind my jaw that makes my hips jerk. I harden fully in his hand and he hums with satisfaction against my skin.
“Again?” he asks.
“Again.”
The second time is slower. He takes me on our sides, spooned against him, his cock sliding into me from behind with a depth that the new angle makes devastating. His hand stays on my cock, stroking in rhythm with his thrusts, and his mouth stays on my neck, and the combination — the fullness inside me, the pressure around me, his voice in my ear saying things that would make Dr. Obi proud and would make my mother cover her ears — builds to a second orgasm that unravels me so completely I forget my own name.
We lie in the wreckage. Sheets destroyed. Pillows on the floor. The bite mark on my shoulder throbbing gently. His come inside me and mine on the sheets and neither of us moving because movement would require motor function and motor function requires a nervous system that has not been comprehensively dismantled.
“The pasta,” Marcel says eventually.
“The pasta is a casualty.”
“Make it in the morning?”
“Make it in the morning.”
I check the bedroom lock from the bed. One glance. Sensor green. All clear.
Once is enough.