Pining in Plain Sight

MM Contemporary Romance
by Chase Power

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Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Bisexual Awakening, Forced Proximity, Only One Bed, Praise Kink, Touch Starved, Friends with Benefits, Body Worship

He’s been in love with his straight best friend for seven years. Then they had to share a bed.

Cal Rourke has been half in love with his best friend since the night they met. He’s built an entire life around not saying it — early mornings, a gym he runs with his hands, relationships with men who are never quite right because the right one sleeps on his couch and calls him bro.

When Nate Price’s five-year relationship implodes and leaves him on a curb with two suitcases, Cal does what he always does: opens the door, makes up the spare room, doesn’t ask for anything back.

But the spare room’s ceiling leaks. One bed becomes the only bed. Late-night conversations in the dark become confessions. Workout spotting becomes hands that linger. And the thing Cal swore he’d take to his grave starts clawing its way out — because Nate is touching him back. Reaching for him. Asking questions no straight man asks his best friend at 2 a.m.

Nate calls it stress relief. Cal calls it survival. Neither of them calls it what it is until the silence almost costs them everything.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Best friends to lovers with seven years of pining
✅ Bisexual awakening done right (the word matters)
✅ Forced proximity + only one bed
✅ A gym owner who praises like it’s a love language
✅ “Just stress relief” that is obviously not just stress relief
✅ Explicit, frequent, emotionally devastating heat (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️)
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including penetration), strong language, post-breakup emotional distress, bi-erasure anxiety, and on-page panic about coming out. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter 1: Cal

The best part of my day happens before anyone else gets to ruin it.

Five twenty-eight in the morning. Anchor Fitness is mine — just me and the overhead lights buzzing to life and the particular silence of a room built to absorb noise. I unlock the front door, flip the breaker, and the gym exhales into existence: fluorescent rows snapping on above the free-weight floor, the rubber mat smell rising like it does every morning, warm and clean and faintly chemical. Like effort stored in the walls.

I leave the door propped while I set up. December air cuts through the entryway, sharp enough to feel good against the back of my neck. The playlist loads on the Bluetooth speaker — low tempo for now, something with bass and no lyrics, the kind of thing that sounds like a heartbeat if you’re not paying attention. I drag the plyometric boxes into position, chalk the pull-up bar grips, and run a rag over the bench press stations even though I wiped them down last night. Ritual. I like ritual. Ritual means I don’t have to think about anything except the next step.

I was an athlete once. Midfielder, D1, the kind of player coaches described as “disciplined” when what they meant was “not quite talented enough to be undisciplined.” I blew my ACL junior year on a wet field against Maryland, watched my pro pipeline drain through the hole in my knee, and spent six months learning that the body I’d built my entire identity around could betray me in a quarter-second.

But I kept the discipline. Kept the mornings. And four years ago, I scraped together enough savings and a small-business loan to open this place — a gym that isn’t trying to be anything other than a gym. No branded water bottles. No influencer wall. Just iron, rubber, chalk, and the kind of community that happens when the same people show up at the same time five days a week and learn each other’s names.

It’s mine. The one thing in my life I built exactly the way I wanted it.

Jess pushes through the door at five forty-five, travel mug in hand, ponytail already tight enough to give me a sympathy headache. She’s wearing a hoodie that says TIRED OF BEING EVERYONE’S HYPE GIRL in cracked iron-on letters, which is ironic, because Jess Tran has never once been tired of being everyone’s hype girl. She lives for it. She just likes to pretend she doesn’t.

“You already chalked the bars,” she says, not a question.

“You’re welcome.”

“I was going to do it.”

“And yet.”

She narrows her eyes at me over the rim of her mug. “You know you don’t have to be here at five-thirty. I can open.”

“I like opening.”

“You like being alone in a room that smells like rubber at an hour when normal humans are still horizontal. That’s not a personality trait, Cal. That’s a cry for help.”

I toss the rag at her. She catches it without spilling her coffee, which is why I hired her.

The 6 a.m. group trickles in. Marcus comes first — always first, because Marcus treats punctuality like a competitive sport. He’s forty-two, built like a fire hydrant, and has never once entered a room at normal volume.

“Morning, Cal.” He claps my shoulder hard enough to recalibrate my spine. “Ready to make me cry?”

“Always.”

I’m scanning the room, counting heads, when the front door opens one more time and my entire nervous system recalibrates without my permission.

Nate Price walks in eleven minutes late.

Here’s what I know about being in love with your best friend for seven years: it doesn’t get easier. People say it does. People say you adjust, acclimate, build a tolerance. Those people are wrong, or they weren’t actually in love, or their best friend doesn’t look like Nate Price in a faded gray hoodie with his hair going in three directions and his eyes the color of a January sky.

He catches me looking and fires off a grin that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Morning, Coach. Sorry I’m late. Traffic was a bitch.”

“You live twelve minutes away.”

“Twelve very congested minutes.”

Something is wrong. I can see it from across the room. Nate moves through the gym like he’s underwater — heavy, delayed, performing normalcy a half-beat too late.

After the session, he’s already packing his bag.

“Hey. You good?”

“Yeah, man. Just tired.” He zips his bag. “Long week.”

“It’s Tuesday.”

“Exactly.”

He claps my arm the way he always does — two quick slaps, half hug, the universal male gesture for I care about you but only in a way that’s safe. His fingers stay a beat longer than usual.

“See you Thursday,” he says, and walks out.

Jess materializes at my shoulder. “You’re doing your face.”

“I don’t have a face.”

“You absolutely have a face, and it’s the Nate face.”

Seven years. I lean against the front desk and let myself have thirty seconds of it — the full, uncut weight of wanting someone who will never want me back. Not in a dramatic way. Just the quiet, constant ache of standing next to the warmest person I’ve ever met and knowing I’ll never be the one he reaches for in the dark.

My phone buzzes. Nate.

Hey can I ask you something later? Not a big deal. Just need to talk.

I keep my response measured. Breezy. The way a man who isn’t in love with his best friend would respond.

Yeah of course. Anytime. Everything ok?

Three dots. They appear, disappear, appear again. Then:

Yeah all good. Talk later.

It’s not all good. I know it’s not all good. And I know that when he’s ready to tell me, I’ll sit down and listen and give him whatever he needs, because that is what I do. Cal, the steady one. Cal, the one you call.

I put my phone in my pocket and go set up for the 7 a.m. class.

The gym needs me. That’s enough.

It has to be enough.

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After Hours at Anchor — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Four months in. The gym is closed. The lights are off. Cal has a key and a plan and Nate brought lube in his jacket pocket. What starts as a private training session becomes body worship on every piece of equipment in the room — squat rack, bench press, and a mat that will never be the same.

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