The Bullpen Experiment
MM Bi-Awakening Baseball Romance
by Chase Power
Available at all major retailers
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bi Awakening, Age Gap (28/42), Praise Kink, Coach/Player, Secret Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Forced Proximity, Control/Surrender, He Falls First
A volatile relief pitcher discovers the only man who can calm him on the mound is the first man he’s ever wanted off it.
Dante Flores throws 101 with the bases loaded. It’s the rest of him that’s out of control. One more televised meltdown and the San Antonio Outlaws will trade the most electric arm in baseball. Their last resort: Brooks Carter — retired catcher, new bullpen coach. Broad. Bearded. Silver at the temples. Openly gay, endlessly calm, and completely immune to Dante’s temper.
He’s also the first coach who’s ever told Dante exactly what he does right.
Two quiet words — good pitch — and something in Dante’s chest goes off like a flashbulb. He tells himself it’s adrenaline. He tells himself that a lot, right up until a disastrous road game ends with him at Brooks’s hotel door, taking instructions that have nothing to do with baseball.
It’s an experiment. That’s all. There are rules: Road trips only. Nobody knows. Nothing crosses the foul line. Either man can end it with one word.
Dante breaks every rule but one. Because Brooks’s voice is the only thing that quiets the ninth inning in his head — and Brooks already spent one career as somebody’s secret. He won’t do it twice. So when a reporter asks the question and Dante laughs it off on camera, he doesn’t just deny a relationship. He becomes every man Brooks swore he’d never love again.
Now the closer with the hundred-mile-an-hour arm has one save left that matters — and it starts with telling the truth while the whole world watches.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Volatile pitcher x calm silver-fox coach
✅ Bi-awakening with praise that goes straight to the bloodstream
✅ Age gap with an older openly gay hero
✅ Forbidden hotel rooms and road-trip secrecy
✅ Scorching heat (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ One devastating public denial and a hard-earned repair
✅ Found family baseball team
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including praise kink and power dynamics), strong language, sports-related pressure, depictions of anxiety and emotional dysregulation, parental emotional neglect, and internalized biphobia. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Blown
The bullpen phone rang at 7:42 in the bottom of the eighth, and my whole body changed.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about relief pitching. Starting pitchers get routines. They get warm-up mounds and national anthems and the slow theatrical walk from the dugout while forty thousand people clap. Relief pitchers get a phone that sounds like a dentist’s office and ninety seconds to become a different person.
I was already standing when Murph hung up the receiver. He didn’t need to say my name. I’d been watching the game fall apart from the bullpen bench for three innings — our starter leaking singles, the defense playing like they’d met each other in the parking lot — and when Rivera walked his second batter of the inning to load the bases with one out, I knew the call was mine.
“Flores. You’re in.”
I peeled off my jacket. Rolled my neck. Pulled the velcro strap on my glove loose, pressed it back, pulled it loose again. Three times. Always three.
The gate opened and the stadium noise hit me like a wall of heat.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Winter Ball — A scene TOO HOT for retailers
Brooks meets the Flores family in Corpus Christi and Puerto Rico. Dante’s nine-year-old cousins destroy him at wiffle ball. Luis attempts a full sentence of approval. And a beach-house night delivers the heat — Dante praising Brooks through every second, a deliberate reversal of the book’s signature dynamic. The filthiest, most joyful chapter in the series.
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