Major League Curious
An MM Baseball Bi-Awakening Romance by Chase Power
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bi Awakening, Age Gap, Praise Kink, Pitcher/Catcher, Secret Relationship, Teammates to Lovers, He Falls First, Hurt/Comfort, Coming Out
He can throw a hundred miles an hour. One quiet “good boy” leaves him helpless.
Some signals are meant to be followed off the field.
Rafael Castillo used to own the mound. Then came the shoulder surgery. The wild pitches. The humiliating trade to Brooklyn. Now one more bad month could cost him his rotation spot—and his career.
Veteran catcher Gabriel Mercer has spent eighteen seasons learning how to read pitchers. Rafael should be no different. But the younger man responds to Gabriel’s calm instructions in ways that have nothing to do with baseball—especially when a quiet word of praise leaves the towering ace visibly shaken.
Rafael has only ever dated women. He is not attracted to men.
Probably.
There is only one way to be sure.
Their rules are simple: absolute privacy, no feelings, and no promises after the season ends. But road hotels turn into private lessons. Praise becomes possession. And the more Rafael learns to trust Gabriel with his body, the less certain he is that this is only curiosity.
Because Gabriel can teach him how to surrender control. He can’t teach Rafael how to stop loving him.
You Will Love This If You Like:
✔️ Pitcher/catcher with off-field chemistry
✔️ Bisexual awakening done right (not “gay for you”)
✔️ 11-year age gap with silver-fox catcher
✔️ Praise kink that evolves from the bullpen to the bedroom
✔️ Secret hotel room arrangement that catches feelings
✔️ He falls first, he realizes first
✔️ One last season, one chance to choose
✔️ Explosive high heat with a guaranteed HEA
Content Warning: Major League Curious is a high-heat MM romance intended for adult readers (18+). It contains explicit, consensual sexual content between two adult men, bisexual awakening, praise kink, light restraint, an 11-year age gap, performance anxiety, prior shoulder surgery, chronic knee pain, media speculation, and a temporary third-act separation. All intimacy is enthusiastically consensual. Guaranteed HEA.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
A struggling star pitcher arrives in Brooklyn and meets the veteran catcher whose voice will change everything. Start reading now.
Chapter One: Designated for Assignment
RAFAEL
The last pitch I threw as a Stallion hit the backstop so hard the net buckled.
Not the backstop behind home plate. The one behind our dugout. Because I’d spun off the mound after walking my fourth consecutive batter—in the third goddamn inning—and fired the ball at the concrete wall like it had personally wronged me. The throw sailed three feet left of where I’d aimed it, which was fitting, since nothing I’d thrown all night had gone where I’d aimed it either.
He didn’t flinch. He just looked at me with the expression of a man who’d been waiting for an excuse, then pointed at the clubhouse tunnel.
I was out of the game. The stadium was quiet—not the respectful quiet of a close contest, but the embarrassed silence of nineteen thousand people watching a man come apart in public.
Eighteen million views by midnight. Twenty-six million by the time my agent called at 6 AM to tell me I’d been traded.
Breaker Field sat on the Brooklyn waterfront like something designed to look classic and expensive at the same time. I arrived at four in the afternoon carrying a duffel bag and the bone-deep certainty that every person inside already thought I was a head case.
I found the bullpen.
He was crouched behind the plate like he’d been waiting there since before I was born.
He was built like a man who’d spent two decades absorbing impacts—thick through the shoulders and chest, heavy in the thighs, compact and grounded in a way that made the dirt around home plate seem like his personal territory.
His catcher’s mask was pushed up on his forehead. Dark brown skin, close-cropped black hair with unmistakable silver at both temples, a short beard threaded with gray along the chin. His eyes were amber-brown and absolutely, unsettlingly calm.
“Castillo,” he said. Not a question. “Gabriel Mercer.”
I threw twelve pitches. None of them found the strike zone. Mercer caught every one without flinching. After twelve pitches, he pulled his mask up.
“Forget velocity,” he said. “One clean pitch. Wherever you want. Just put the ball where your body wants it to go.”
Four-seam fastball. Ninety-three miles per hour. Bottom of the zone. Clean.
“There you go,” he said quietly. “Good.”
One word. One syllable. The effect was immediate and physical. My chest tightened. Heat crawled up the back of my neck. My stomach dropped the way it does on the first hill of a roller coaster.
I threw the next pitch six feet over his head.
I was angry. Not at him—at myself. At whatever the hell my body had just done in response to a syllable. A single quiet word of approval from a man I’d known for less than twenty minutes, and my nervous system had responded like he’d put his hands on me.
My phone buzzed. Unknown number.
Tomorrow. Six a.m. You and me. — Mercer
I saved the contact as 38—his jersey number, because saving his name felt like admitting something—and set my alarm for five-thirty.
I didn’t type a response. I didn’t sleep either.
The bullpen. The praise. The man who sees too much. Keep reading — Major League Curious is available now.
🔥 Want More Rafael & Gabriel?
Read Spring Training: The Private Session — the free, exclusive bonus chapter that was too hot for retail. Set after the book. Spoilers (the good kind).
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Illegal Contact
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Straight in the Sheets
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"Tap out." — "Make me."
Victory Lap
We only do this when we win.
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