Good For Me

A High-Heat MM Praise Kink Romance • by Milo Hart

📖 Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Therapist/Patient, Forbidden Romance, Praise Kink, Age Gap, Slow Burn, Coming Out, Hurt/Comfort

He spent thirty years trying to be enough. Six sessions taught him he already was.

Marc Rivera is a thirty-year-old finance VP with a forty-seventh-floor view, a four-thousand-dollar suit, and three panic attacks in a month. HR called it burnout. They didn’t call it what it was.

Dr. David Chen is the kink-aware therapist HR hands him an appointment with — a thirty-six-year-old psychologist who wrote the book on praise as a clinical tool. Four sessions in, Dave knows what Marc needs. Marc knows what he wants. And the only ethical answer is to terminate the therapeutic relationship and wait one hundred and twenty days.

The cooling-off becomes its own discipline. The discipline becomes a vow. By the time Marc walks back through the door of Dave’s loft on a Sunday in February, the man who thought he was broken has discovered something stranger and far more dangerous than desire: he’s allowed to be wanted in return.

What follows is the slow, patient, scorchingly explicit unmaking of a man who spent three decades bracing — and the ethical, devoted, exquisitely controlled hands that put him back together.

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

✓ Forbidden therapist/patient with full ethical handling
✓ Praise kink as a love language, not a gimmick
✓ Age gap with a 36-year-old who knows exactly what he’s doing
✓ A 120-day cooling-off discipline that becomes the relationship
✓ Slow burn that pays off in scorching, character-driven scenes
✓ Found family, Dominican grandmother memory, and a long table
✓ Guaranteed HEA with onpage marriage and a daughter named Ana

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⚠️ Content Notes

This is an explicit MM contemporary romance for adult readers (18+). Includes: anxiety/panic disorder on page (handled with care, never as kink), brief discussion of death of a grandparent in the past, parental heart attack (recovers), a coming-out arc, ethical handling of a therapist/patient dynamic with full termination and 120-day cooling-off, age gap, praise kink, light verbal D/s with no pain, hand-on-throat as presence (never pressure), explicit on-page sex throughout. Heat: 5/5 Inferno. Guaranteed happy ending.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One

The panic attack started at 10:47 AM.

I knew it was 10:47 because I’d just glanced at the clock on my monitor to confirm I had thirteen minutes before the Tokyo call, and in the span of a single blink the room had gone sideways — the clock smearing, my vision narrowing to a gray pinhole at the center of the screen, my hands going numb in a way my hands did not do. My hands were instruments. My hands made me money. My hands were not, generally, available for this kind of behavior.

I stood up from my desk.

Something I would later be vaguely impressed by, sitting with Dr. Okonkwo months later and cataloguing the event for her clinical records, was how quickly my body moved on autopilot even while my lungs were fighting me for air. I walked, or something like walking, to my office door. Turned the lock. I turned back toward the chair and didn’t make it — the floor was closer. I sat down against the door, back to the wood, a forty-seven-hundred-dollar suit be damned, because the alternative was falling down in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, and Marcus Rivera had made a lot of questionable choices in his thirty years on this earth but he had never once fallen down where someone could see him do it.

On the laptop, the Zoom login chime went off.

Then again.

Then a third time.

I closed my eyes and tried to run through the breathing exercise the company’s wellness app had sent us during Mental Health Awareness Month. Four in. Seven hold. Eight out. I made it to three in, gagged, started over. My tie felt like it was tightening on its own. I loosened it without opening my eyes. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

And then, because the brain is a sadist, the memory came.

I was eleven years old. It was a Tuesday in October. Mr. Donnelly had handed back the geometry unit test at 2:15 in the afternoon, and I had run — actually run, the whole six blocks from the bus stop to our front door — because I had been so certain, so certain, that this was the one that would finally do it.

A ninety-eight.

A ninety-eight out of a hundred on a test a third of my class had failed. I had circled it in red pen on the ride home. I had looked at it every few blocks just to confirm it was real. Mrs. Donnelly had written Excellent work, Marcus across the top in her small, neat handwriting, the one time a teacher had ever bothered to add anything beyond the number, and I had held that little red Excellent in my chest like a coal.

My father had been at the dining room table when I got home, three files open, a cup of espresso going cold beside him. I had put the test in front of him without saying anything, because that was the rule — you did not announce; you presented. He’d picked it up. He had read the score.

He had handed it back. Without looking up. Without smiling. Without even pausing the motion of his pen in the other hand.

He said, the way you might ask a cashier for a receipt:

“Where did the two points go, Marcus?”

That was the whole conversation.

I had stood at his elbow for another thirty seconds, waiting for the rest of it. The rest of it did not come. I had taken the test, said I’ll do better next time, and gone upstairs and shut my door and held that little red Excellent under my pillow like a stolen thing.

I had been, at the time, eleven years old.

On the floor of my office eighteen years later, I put my forehead to my knees and thought, with the unsettling clarity that only panic brings, a sentence that should have scared me and did not:

I don’t want to be here anymore.

Not here as in alive. I want to be clear about that, because I know how it sounds. Here as in this. This chair. This floor. This body. This whole towering architecture I had built, floor by floor, brick by brick, since I was eleven years old — to be enough. For whom, now, I couldn’t entirely remember. My grandmother was dead. My father didn’t read my emails. My mother responded to my texts with single-word replies that felt like receipts. My last serious relationship had ended two years ago, on a Tuesday, at a restaurant I had picked for the reviews.

The Zoom chimed a fourth time.

I wiped my face with the back of my wrist. Loosened my tie the rest of the way. Stood up in one motion, the way I’d been trained to do since undergrad crew — get vertical in one breath, the body doesn’t know yet that you can’t — and walked to my desk.

I sat down. I clicked Join. I smiled.

“Apologies,” I said. “Tech issues. Gentlemen. Where are we.”

And I closed the fucking deal.

That was the thing about being me. That had always been the thing about being me. Whatever was happening inside me was not, and had never been, permitted to show up on my face. My body had a separate job. My body made the money. My body showed up, performed the trick, and got out of the way. Whatever was rotting in the basement was the basement’s problem.

The call ran seventy-two minutes. I shook hands — virtually, for the benefit of the Tokyo office — with three men whose names I had been saying all morning without ever hearing myself say them. I walked them through a forty-slide deck I could have recited from a dead sleep. I made a joke in the fourth-to-last slide that got an actual laugh from the partner who never laughed. When I closed the Zoom, I sat in my chair and stared at the dark monitor for a very long time.

My assistant, Lila, knocked once and let herself in.

“You look like shit,” she said, setting a wrapped sandwich and a bottle of water on my desk. “You have ninety minutes until the next call. I am going to stand in this doorway until you eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I don’t care.”

She stayed. I unwrapped the sandwich. I took two bites I could not taste. She accepted this as compliance and left, pulling the door almost-shut behind her in the specific way she did when she wanted me to know she was not going to let anyone else knock.

I looked at the sandwich.

I did not eat it.

I left the office at 8:40 PM. I took the car home. I rode up forty-one floors in an elevator that spent two of them talking to me about a hotel I would not be booking, and when I unlocked the front door of my apartment I thought, as I thought almost every night, about how much the echo of that door hitting the wall reminded me of a hotel.

I poured a whiskey I would not finish.

I stood at the window.

The skyline was going through its full lit-up nightly performance for me — the spires, the office towers with their long verticals of lit windows marking other people still working, the bridges making their long glowing arcs over the black of the river. Two years ago I had closed on this apartment specifically for this view. The realtor had cried a little when she handed me the keys. I remembered thinking, This is going to fix something.

It had fixed nothing. I stood at the window. I held a whiskey I did not want. I was a thirty-year-old VP at one of the top three firms in the city, I had a view that cost me nine figures of accumulated lifetime stress, and I was — I understood, for the first time, as if someone had dropped the word into my ear from behind — tired.

Not the tired of a long day. The tired of a long life.

The sentence I had thought on the floor of my office that morning came back to me, and this time I did not try to argue with it.

I don’t want to be here anymore.

I put the whiskey down. I picked up my phone. I scrolled to HR. I stared at the entry for a long time. My thumb hovered. I thought about a dozen different versions of the sentence and threw them all out.

I did not call that night. I did not have the words yet.

I called the next morning, at 6:42 AM, from the back of a car on the way to a breakfast meeting I would end up being nineteen minutes late for. I got the after-hours voicemail.

“This is Marc Rivera,” I said. “I think — I don’t — I think I might need some help.”

I hung up.

I looked out the window of the car at a city that had not, in any meaningful way, ever been mine.

HR called me back at 11:02 AM. Leigh from HR, who I had known since onboarding. Her voice was gentle in a way that told me my boss had already been in her office.

“Marc,” she said. “I’m going to read you the list of approved practitioners under the new wellness plan. Take your time choosing. And Marc — off the record, and I will deny I said this — I’m glad you called.”

I listened while she read the names.

Most of them slid past me. A few of them I half-recognized from the corporate email blasts none of us read. I had already mentally resigned myself to the blandest available option — someone in a beige medical plaza near the office, someone who would sign off on six sessions of cognitive-behavioral homework and send me back to work — when Leigh said a name and something in my chest did a small quiet thing it had never done before.

“Dr. David Chen,” Leigh said. “He’s — his practice is new on the list, actually. He published a book a couple of years ago. A lot of people have been requesting him.”

“What kind of book,” I said.

She paused. I heard her scroll. “Something about affirmation-based intimacy? Or — hold on — The Language of Affirmation. I’ve got the subtitle here. A Kink-Aware Approach to Repair.“

The airport came back to me in a snap of memory. A layover in Denver two summers ago, a four-hour delay, the little Hudson News with its wall of self-help paperbacks. I had stood in front of that wall for a long time, looking for something, I didn’t know what. There had been a navy blue cover with a single line of gold lettering across the center of it. I had picked it up. I had turned it over. I had put it back on the shelf, because the word on the front had been Affirmation and I had thought, without any particular emotion, that isn’t for me.

I hadn’t thought about that book since.

“Marc?” Leigh said. “There are nine more names on the list, I can keep going —”

“No,” I said. “Book me with Chen.”

“You sure? His earliest opening might be —”

“I’ll take whatever he has.”

There was a pause. I heard her typing. Then she said, a little surprised, “He actually just had a cancel for Thursday at 11 AM. Do you want it? Otherwise it’s three weeks out.”

“I’ll take Thursday.”

“I’ll send the intake forms.”

“Thank you, Leigh.”

“Take care of yourself, Marc.”

I hung up. I looked at the calendar entry populating on my phone. Dr. David Chen — Intake — Thursday 11:00 AM. I dragged it into my work calendar. I gave it a generic block title I gave to all medical appointments: Offsite.

I thought, the way I always thought about anything new I was about to do, I’ll just do it right and get it over with.

I thought therapy would be the same as everything else had ever been.

Something to get right.

Something to perform.

I got out of the car, walked into the breakfast meeting nineteen minutes late, apologized without looking anyone in the eye, and ordered a black coffee I would not drink.

Thursday was three days away.

I had, at the time, no way of knowing Thursday was going to be the last day of my life as I had built it.

I only knew I had to get through Wednesday.

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🔥 Bonus Chapter — Free

A scene too explicit for Amazon. Marc and Dave’s first wedding anniversary, a cabin upstate, no plot, no complication — the longest, slowest, most explicit scene in the entire Good For Me project. Free for readers, never on KDP.

Read Bonus Chapter: One Year →