Hands On

An MM Sports Medicine Romance — by Jace Wilder

Available everywhere books are sold

Book Details

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno (5/5)
Word Count: ~140,000
Length: 24 chapters + epilogue
POV: Dual (Marcus & Julian)
Distribution: Wide — All Major Retailers
HEA: Yes — absolutely

Tropes

Patient/Therapist · Forced Proximity · Closeted Athlete · Size Difference · Praise Kink · Hurt/Comfort · Touch Starved · Forbidden Romance · Coming Out · First Time Bottoming · Slow Burn Heat · Bisexual Awakening

He was supposed to put my body back together. He took my whole life apart instead.

Marcus Reed has spent fifteen years being the largest, quietest, most thoroughly closeted man in the NFL. He’s thirty-four years old, he has a knee that won’t hold him through another season, a back that goes out when he sneezes, an ex-wife who deserved better, and exactly one person on the planet who knows what he is. He hasn’t said the word out loud since he was fifteen.

The team sends him to Halford-Reyes Sports Recovery Institute — ninety days residential, in a glass-walled lodge tucked into the side of a mountain in Colorado, with the best clinical staff money can buy. Marcus is not, in any way, planning to spend any of those ninety days thinking about himself. He is going to put his head down and rebuild a body. He is going to be, for fifteen more years, the man he has, in fact, always been.

Julian Park is five-foot-ten, Korean-American, an ex-Olympic-track gymnast with a surgical shoulder and an ankle that quit on him three years from a probable spot in Tokyo. He is, on the morning Marcus walks into Studio One, the lead clinical tech assigned to Marcus’s case. He is the calmest, most measured, most deliberately careful pair of hands Marcus has ever had on his body. He is also, on the inside of three weeks of sessions, the only person in fifteen years who has, in fact, looked at Marcus and seen what is, in fact, there.

What starts as the small clean fact of clinical work — the squaring of a hip, the firing of a glute, the slow careful unhurried mobility of a back that has not, in nine months, been right — becomes, on the inside of a cabin in the woods at the end of a Wednesday, the small clean fact of Marcus Reed, at thirty-four, finally, in fact, letting himself.

An MM contemporary slow-burn closeted-athlete romance about residential rehab, hands-on healing, the long careful work of putting a body back together, and the much longer careful work of putting a closed-off life back together with it. Dual POV. Heat 5/5. Sundays. Full HEA, two matching bands, a small careful three-bedroom craftsman in Boulder, and a studio on Pearl Street with a long mirrored wall.

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

Slow, devastating patient/therapist work that earns every inch of the line crossing
Praise kink written as actual emotional repair, not just dirty talk
Size-difference dynamics where the smaller man runs the bedroom
Forbidden workplace romance with real professional consequences and a real path through them
Closeted-athlete coming-out written with patience, sisters who knew, and mothers who put the kettle on
Hurt/comfort with a hero who has been hurting for nineteen years and a hero who refuses to look away
Long, slow, on-page sex written with full graphic detail and zero hedging
Dual POV where both men know they’re it — and both eventually say so, in daylight, standing up
An ending that lands at the front door of a small careful three-bedroom craftsman in Boulder

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🔥 Read the Bonus Chapter

Content Warnings

Explicit on-page MM sex (graphic, detailed, frequent, written with zero hedging). Patient/clinical-tech professional boundary crossing that the book takes seriously and resolves on the right side of professional consequences. Praise kink, power exchange, size difference, first-time bottoming. Closeted athlete and his nineteen-year coming-out arc, written with full emotional weight (sister phone call, mother phone call, agent reveal, small dark-night-of-the-soul scene with packed bag and a phone call from a sister). Brief on-page references to past homophobia, a teammate slur in a locker room (off-page), and a single anonymous email. Two characters work past mental-health spirals (the closet voice; a clinical-tech professional crisis) with care and full HEA on the other side. Brief mention of a past on-field injury (Hill, deceased, off-page). Career retirement on the protagonist’s own terms. All sex is between consenting adults, on the page, with full enthusiastic consent at every step. HEA guaranteed.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One

Marcus

My agent is talking. He’s been talking since Denver.

I tune most of it out. Trevor talks the way other people breathe — constantly, mechanically, without much thought to whether anyone is listening. The SUV is climbing some switchback through a forest of pine that all looks the same, and my knee is throbbing, and the back of my neck is wet with sweat that has nothing to do with the temperature.

“—and I want you to remember this is opportunity, Marcus. Three months. Three months of nothing but recovery and you walk out of here ready to crush camp.”

I look at him.

“The thing about your situation,” he says, “is the narrative. Right? The narrative is comeback. The narrative is grit. The narrative is—”

“Trevor.”

“—the prodigal returns, baby—”

“Trevor.”

He stops. Adjusts his cuffs. Trevor wears French cuffs to drive a man to rehab. Trevor wears French cuffs in his fucking sleep.

“Yeah.”

“If you say narrative to me one more time before we get to this place,” I say, “I’m going to open this door and step out of this car at sixty miles an hour.”

He laughs. He doesn’t believe me. He should. My right knee is the size of a softball under my joggers and I’d take a tuck and roll over another two hours of this.

I press my forehead to the cold glass and watch the trees go by.

The brochure called it a campus. The brochure was generous.

What it actually is, when we round the last bend, is a long low building of dark wood and glass tucked into the side of a mountain like it grew there. A guesthouse-style lodge with a green metal roof. A gravel drive lined with stones the size of bowling balls. Beyond the main building, scattered up the slope through the trees, I can see the roofs of what must be the cabins. Eight, maybe ten of them. All facing east, all with their own decks, all carefully arranged so you can’t see your neighbor through the pines.

It’s the kind of place that costs three hundred thousand dollars for ninety days and prints you a leather binder with your name embossed on it for the trouble.

Trevor parks at the front. Gravel pops under the tires.

“Look at this,” he says, and he means look at this place I got you into. “Look at this fucking view.”

I look at the view. The view is mountains. I have seen mountains. I get out of the car.

The first step on my right leg makes me hiss through my teeth. Eight hours of sitting and the knee has locked up like a rusted hinge.

A bellhop — or whatever you call a bellhop at a rehab clinic — appears with a luggage cart. He’s maybe twenty-two, blond, smiling so hard it looks like a workplace requirement.

“Mr. Reed,” he says. “Welcome. I’ll take care of your bags.”

I take the duffel out of his hands. “I got it.” Some things you don’t let other men carry for you. Doesn’t matter how much they cost an hour.

Trevor is already inside. I follow him in.

The hallway turns. There’s a glass wall on my right that runs the length of about thirty feet, and beyond it the main gym opens up — high ceilings, polished concrete, the back wall mirrored from floor to twenty feet up. Equipment in zones. Free weights, plyo boxes, the long row of treatment tables I’ve spent the last nine months of my life on.

The gym isn’t empty. There are three patients working with techs, scattered through the space.

The one nearest the glass is doing single-leg box jumps with what looks like a foam pad balanced on top of the box. The patient is a woman, maybe forty, fit. Her tech is standing in front of the box with both hands raised at chest height — not touching her, just there, ready to catch her if she needs catching.

He’s small. That’s the first thing.

He’s small in a way that doesn’t track with what I know about people who do this job. The techs I’ve worked with are mostly built like me, big through the shoulders and the chest, the kind of guys you hire because if a 280-pound athlete falls on you, you can take it. This guy is — what, five-ten? Wiry. Black hair, a little long, tucked behind his ears. Black t-shirt, fitted. Black athletic pants. The musculature in his arms is the kind that looks drawn on, every line clean. No bulk anywhere.

Then she goes for the jump and her foot catches the pad wrong, and her ankle rolls, and her body pitches forward — and he steps in.

He doesn’t lunge. He doesn’t grab. He steps in with his whole body, one arm going around her waist and the other under her elbow, and he turns her weight off the bad ankle and onto his hip in a single, smooth shift, like he was born inside the moment, and she lands on her good leg, leaning into him, and laughs. Embarrassed. He says something I can’t hear. She nods. He sets her upright. Doesn’t make a thing of it. Steps back.

Wiry, my ass. He just absorbed a hundred forty pounds of falling woman like she was a coat.

I am still standing at the glass.

Halford is talking — something about the schedule, something about the dining hall again, something — and I am not hearing him because the man in the gym has turned, half a beat after he sets his patient back on her feet, and he has looked through the glass.

He has looked at me.

For maybe a second and a half.

Brown eyes, dark, level. The kind of looking that doesn’t pretend to be anything else. I am a six-foot-three man in joggers and a hoodie and I am being clocked — head to foot, like a movement screen, like a triage. And then his mouth twitches, very slightly, at one corner. Not a smile. An acknowledgment. I see you. New patient. Right.

He turns back to his client.

I am still at the glass.

Halford is saying, “—primary tech for the elite-athlete program. He’s the best hands on the campus. You’ll be working with him.”

“Who?”

“Julian,” he says, and he’s looking at me like he’s been waiting for me to come back to the conversation for a few seconds. “Julian Park. Through the glass. You’ll meet him tomorrow.”

“Right.”

“He used to compete at gymnastics. Olympic track before an injury took him out.”

“Right.”

“He’ll go easy on you. He won’t go easy on you.” Halford smiles, pleased with his own joke. “He knows what you’re walking through.”

I clear my throat.

Filed. Filed. Walking now. Moving on.

“Great,” I say, and I peel my eyes off the glass, and we keep walking, and I do not let myself look back.

I do not let myself look back.

I do not.

The cabin is, of course, perfect. Mostly one big room. Vaulted ceiling, exposed beams, a bed made up tight enough to bounce a quarter on it. Dark wood floor, one wall of glass facing east, a low couch in front of a stone fireplace already laid with kindling. The bellhop kid drops my duffel on the bed and tells me where the thermostat is and where the binder with the schedule is and what number to call if I need anything from the main building.

He leaves. The door closes behind him with a soft, expensive click.

I stand in the middle of the cabin for a long time.

The mountain is right there, through the glass, taking up the whole horizon. The light coming off it is the kind of late-afternoon gold that costs money to look at. I should sit down. My knee is screaming. My back is locking. I do not sit down.

I drop the hoodie on the bench at the foot of the bed. I peel the t-shirt over my head. I push the joggers down to my ankles and step out of them, careful with the knee, and I am standing in the middle of a cabin in the Colorado mountains in nothing but a pair of black compression shorts, and I am finally, finally alone, and that means there is a problem coming and I cannot stop it.

There is a mirror on the back of the bathroom door, a full-length one, framed in the same dark wood as everything else in this cabin, and the door is angled just enough that I am facing it without meaning to be.

I look up. I don’t recognize the man in the mirror.

That’s the thing that gets me, every time, and I haven’t been alone with it in weeks because there is always someone — Trevor, the trainer, the surgeon, the kid sister checking in on the phone, somebody — and now there is no one and there is just me and the mirror and my own body and I do not recognize him.

I am still big. I am six-foot-three. I am still, on paper, two-hundred-and-forty-five pounds of man, which is bigger than ninety-eight percent of the men in this country. But there is a softness across my middle that wasn’t there a year ago. The cut of my obliques is gone. The line down the center of my abdomen is smoothed over. I have the body of a man who used to be carved and is now upholstered, and the difference is small, and it is everything.

My right thigh is visibly smaller than my left. That’s the surgical leg.

I stand there. I look. I am thirty-four years old. I made my first Pro Bowl at twenty-six. There is a poster of me on the wall of every sports bar in three states. I have spent fifteen years being the body I’m looking at right now, and I do not know who this is.

I cannot stop looking at him.

I make myself turn around. I make myself walk into the bathroom. Make myself reach into the shower. Make myself turn the water on, hot, hot enough that the glass fogs up immediately, hot enough to drown out anything you can hear when you stop moving.

I close my eyes.

I see, against the back of my eyelids, a man through a glass wall. Black t-shirt. Dark eyes. The way his mouth twitched at one corner when he saw me — I see you. New patient. Right — and the way his arm went around the waist of a falling woman like a hand catching a thrown ball.

I open my eyes. I scrub my face hard with both hands.

Stop. Stop.

I am here to fix my knee. I am here to fix my back. I am here to fix the soft places. I am here for my career. I am here for the contract that hasn’t been pulled yet. I am here for the only thing I have ever been.

I am not here for whatever the fuck just happened to me at a glass wall.

The water is too hot. I turn it down.

I stand there with my forehead against the tile until the steam stops feeling like something I can drown in, and I tell myself, in the calm unbothered voice I use to tell myself things I do not believe, that tomorrow morning I am going to walk into that gym and I am going to meet Julian Park and I am going to be very polite, and very professional, and very, very straight.

The knee throbs in time with my pulse.

The man in the mirror waits for me to come back out. He has all the time in the world.

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🔥 An Exclusive Bonus Chapter

A 5,500-word extended scene set three months after the epilogue. A Sunday morning. The new bedroom. All the time in the world. Established couple, full power exchange, full praise, multiple orgasms. Available free on this site only.

🔥 Read the Bonus Chapter