Deep End, No Labels
MM Sports Romance
by Chase Power
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bisexual Awakening, Age Gap, Athlete Romance, Praise Kink, Forced Proximity, Size Difference, Secret Relationship, Touch Starved, Slow Burn, Control/Surrender
He held his breath for everyone. Then a filmmaker taught him to exhale.
Ren Ishida knows how to hold his breath. He has done it beneath Olympic water, beneath sponsor expectations, and beneath the weight of a public image built around being disciplined, dependable, and completely uncomplicated.
Then documentary filmmaker Malcolm Voss points a camera at him and asks one dangerous question: Who are you when no one is watching?
Malcolm is thirteen years older, maddeningly observant, and openly gay. He is also the first man Ren has ever wanted badly enough to risk everything. Once Malcolm removes himself from control of the documentary, there is nothing unethical standing between them. Nothing except Ren’s fear.
Their first night is supposed to answer a question. Instead, it creates dozens more. Ren wants Malcolm’s hands, his voice, his praise, and the terrifying relief of finally surrendering control. Malcolm wants Ren too — but he refuses to become another secret someone is ashamed to keep.
Ren does not need a label to know what he feels. He may need one to survive the cameras waiting outside.
DEEP END, NO LABELS — a high-heat MM sports romance about an Olympic swimmer who has been drowning on dry land, and the filmmaker who taught him to breathe.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Bisexual awakening with zero shame spiral
✅ Praise kink that rewires the hero’s nervous system
✅ Athlete × filmmaker with a 13-year age gap
✅ “Good” as the most devastating word in the English language (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ A man who gives up his career so consent stays free
✅ Secret relationship that demands to become public
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content, strong language, panic attacks and performance anxiety, public speculation about sexuality, threat of involuntary outing, corporate manipulation, age-gap relationship, and past divorce. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Ren
The starting block hasn’t changed.
Same matte white surface. Same anti-slip texture under the balls of my feet. Same slight forward rake that’s supposed to launch me into the water like a weapon. I’ve stood on this exact block maybe four thousand times since I was fourteen, and my body has memorized every millimeter of it.
Six months ago, I stood here and my lungs stopped working.
Not in the water. On the block. Before the race even started. Sixty million people watched me grip the edges so hard my fingerprints bruised, and every single one of them saw what happened next — the stuttering breath, the locked ribcage, the way I entered the water a full half-second late and swam the worst two hundred meters of my career. Last place. Definitively, spectacularly, historically last.
Now it’s Tuesday morning, five-forty-five a.m., and the San Diego Aquatic Center is empty except for me and Anika. No cameras. No media credentials. Just chlorine, fluorescent light, and the hollow sound of water moving against tile.
I pull my goggles down and dive.
The cold hits my chest first, then my shoulders, then my legs. I surface into my stroke and the water accepts me the way it always has — completely, without opinion. This is what I love about swimming. The pool doesn’t know my name. It just holds me, and the only thing that matters is whether I can move through it fast enough.
My body works.
It’s everything above the neck that’s the problem.
I know how to hold my breath. I’ve been doing it my whole life. In the pool. At press conferences. In hotel rooms where I kissed women I liked well enough and performed a version of desire I understood on paper but never felt in the base of my spine.
Holding your breath is a survival skill. It is also, eventually, a way of drowning on dry land.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
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The Bigger Bed — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Ren and Malcolm christen the California king. Praise kink at maximum volume, athletic creativity, and the filthiest christening in literary history.
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