Still Here, Still Yours

A Single Dad Second Chance MM Romance
by Jace Wilder

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Still Here, Still Yours book cover by Jace Wilder

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Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Second Chance, Single Dad, Bi Awakening, Hometown Return, Childhood Best Friends, Almost-Kiss Twenty-Three Years Ago, Over 40, Silver Foxes, Praise Kink, First Time with a Man, Blue Collar × Engineer, Small Town, Found Family, Coach Romance, He Falls First, Vers Couple

He promised to call. Twenty-three years later, he’s standing on my ball field.

Nolan Pierce was my best friend. My almost. The boy I nearly kissed on a tailgate the night before he left Briarwood, and never heard from again.

Now he’s forty-one, divorced, and back in town with an eight-year-old who’s scared of ground balls. He volunteers to help with her team. I’m the assistant coach.

He says he’s sorry. He says I didn’t imagine it. He looks at my mouth like a man doing math he’s avoided his whole life.

I’ve got a business I built with my own hands, a house I’m not ashamed of, and zero interest in being the soft place some man lands until he remembers where he was headed. If Nolan wants me, he can say so. Out loud. And he can still be here in the morning.

Then he kisses me on my own porch. And calls the next day.

It turns out the careful, buttoned-up engineer is a very fast learner. It turns out I’m not as guarded as I thought. And it turns out the hardest thing to teach a man who’s spent his life leaving isn’t how to touch me.

It’s how to stay.

Still Here, Still Yours is a high-heat MM romance with a single dad, a second chance twenty-three years in the making, a bi awakening at forty-one, praise that ruins him, a found family that feeds everybody, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA. Dual first-person POV. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A divorced dad who keeps his youth-league scorebook in two colors, and the man who taught him to throw a ball
✅ A second chance twenty-three years in the making: one tailgate, one almost-kiss, one phone call about a mini-fridge
✅ A bi awakening at forty-one that doesn’t erase his marriage: “I think it’s just true.”
✅ Praise that wrecks the man who has had to earn everything: “You like being told. Don’t you?”
✅ The guy who stayed and built something, and makes him say what he wants out loud, in plain words
✅ A baseball glove restitched in 2003 and kept in a closet for twenty years
✅ An eight-year-old out-caller with a ditch stone, a Little League season, and a grown man yelling “Four–three!” at a fence
✅ A big Pennsylvania family, a mother who asks “Are you eating?”, and a brother who won’t share the tongs
✅ A real third-act mistake, a real apology with no “but,” and terms written in a surveyor’s field book
✅ Silver foxes, he falls first (by twenty-three years), no cheating, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including praise, rimming, a vers couple, light restraint by consent, and sex without condoms after on-page testing), divorce and co-parenting, a one-year custody arrangement under review, a past rejection and twenty years of estrangement (recounted), a parent who equated leaving with success (recounted), a hidden job offer and a temporary breakup that is repaired on page, alcohol, and strong language. An eight-year-old child appears throughout and is never present in or near an intimate scene. No cheating, no dub-con, no sexual violence. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Nolan

“Do I have to be good on the first day?”

Sadie asked it from the back seat without looking up, in the voice she used for questions she’d already answered privately and was now auditing. She had the road atlas open across her knees, the Pennsylvania page gone soft at the fold, one finger parked on the dot marked Briarwood as if the town might slide off the paper if she let go.

I turned off the engine. “No.”

“Do I have to be good on the second day?”

“No.”

“Is there a day?”

“There isn’t a day, bug. You show up and you try the thing. That’s the entire assignment.”

She weighed that with her whole face. Maren’s face around the eyes, nobody’s around the mouth. Eight years old, and she examined a sentence like she expected to be billed for it later. I knew exactly where she’d picked that up, and it wasn’t from her mother.

“Okay,” she said. She closed the atlas. She did not get out of the car.

Neither did I.

Kemper Field lay at the bottom of a long grass slope below the lot, tucked in a bowl between Miller’s Creek and the old rail embankment, and on the first Saturday of April it looked the way it had when I was nine. Chain-link backstop the color of weak tea. Two dugouts with green shingle roofs. An infield somebody had dragged at dawn, so the dirt lay in combed arcs like a carpet nobody had walked on yet. The outfield was a brighter green than it had any right to be this early. I’d spent my first weeks at the borough office staring at this exact patch of ground on a stormwater map, where it showed up as the low point with every arrow in a quarter mile aimed straight at it. The grass was that green because it was wet. By May it would be a pond with bases. That was a problem I knew how to have.

The other one was in my lap.

I hadn’t meant to bring the glove. I’d meant to bring the new one, the stiff tan one I’d bought out on Route 9 the same day I bought Sadie’s, still in its plastic, still smelling like a shoe store. But I’d gone into the hall closet that morning for the water cooler and come out holding this instead, and I’d been holding it more or less ever since.

It was nearly black with age. The pocket had worn to the precise shape of a hand twenty-four years younger than mine, and the leather had gone soft as a wallet. Along the heel the lacing had been replaced once, in waxed thread a shade darker than the original—small, flat, even stitches, put there by someone with far better hands than I’d ever had.

I ran my thumb down them. I did that sometimes. I had never once looked at why.

“That one’s old,” Sadie observed.

“It is.”

“Older than me?”

“Older than your mom and me. Older than phones with cameras in them.”

That landed. She leaned between the seats to inspect it with new respect. “Why didn’t you get a new one?”

“I did. It’s in the trunk.”

“Then why are you—”

“Cleats, please. Both feet. Tied by you, not by me.”

She sighed like a woman of sixty and bent to her laces.

We’d been in Briarwood since August: one school year, on trial, with a review date I could have recited in my sleep. Maren had Sadie every other weekend in Pittsburgh and a standing opinion about consistency that I had earned the hard way. That was the arrangement. The reason for it was shorter. I’d been a very reliable man who was never anywhere, and I was trying to become something else before my daughter finished deciding what fathers were.

Baseball had been her idea. That was the part that kept getting me. She’d brought the flyer home from school folded in eighths and said, You did this, right? When you were little? and then, with the terrible offhand generosity of a kid who’s been managing adults for a year, We could do it. If you want.

So here we were, doing it. If I wanted.

“Tied,” she announced.

One was. The other was a knot of the kind that eventually has to be cut off. I let it stand.

We went down the slope together, her hand not quite in mine, her new glove clamped under her arm like a library book. Kids were already scattered across the infield in the loose, aimless orbits of children who haven’t been told where to stand. A boy was wearing his glove on his head. Two girls were holding a contest to see who could spit farther. Parents clustered along the first-base fence with travel mugs, doing what parents do, which is watch their own child while pretending to watch all of them.

A woman broke off from the backstop and came at us with a clipboard under one arm. Fifty or so, built low and square, a gray braid pulled through the back of a faded cap that said MUDCATS over a fish with an attitude. Sunburned already, in April. A whistle on a shoelace.

“Pierce?”

“Nolan. This is Sadie.”

“Denise Bell.” She shook my hand once, hard, then turned the full weight of her attention on my daughter. “Sadie. You ever play before?”

Sadie looked at her cleats. “No.”

“Outstanding. No bad habits. I’ve got a nine-year-old over there who learned to throw from his uncle, and it’s going to take me till July to undo it.” She tipped her head toward the infield. “See the kid with the glove on his head? Go stand near him. He’s harmless and he’ll talk enough for both of you.”

Sadie glanced at me. I nodded. She went—slowly, picking her route as though the grass had contour lines.

Denise watched her go, then handed me the clipboard. A roster, twelve names, a column of empty boxes.

“You’re my volunteer,” she said. “So here’s the one rule I’ve got for adults. You come every time or you don’t come at all.”

“Understood.”

“I don’t think it is yet, so I’ll finish. I don’t need a dad who’s a hero for two Saturdays and then has a thing. Every spring I get one. He shows up with a brand-new fungo bat and opinions about my batting order, and by Mother’s Day he’s a text message.” She tapped the roster. “These kids can count. They know exactly who came. So if your job’s going to eat you, tell me now and you can lean on the fence with a coffee like a civilian. No hard feelings.”

“I changed jobs so I’d be home by five,” I said. “I’ll be here.”

It came out with more in it than I’d intended. She looked at me a beat longer than was comfortable, the way you’d look at a plank before trusting your weight to it.

“Huh,” she said. “All right. You’re cones and water. Cooler goes under the bench, not on it, or they’ll have it empty in six minutes and be peeing in my outfield. My assistant’s digging out the ball buckets—he’ll tell you where he wants the stations.” She was already walking. “And don’t tidy his shed. He’ll know.”

“I wasn’t going to—”

“You’ve refolded that roster twice since I handed it to you, Pierce.”

I looked down. I had.

The equipment shed stood past the third-base dugout, a cinderblock box with a steel door that had been painted so many times the hinges looked upholstered. I was halfway to it with a stack of orange cones against my chest when the door swung out and a man came through it sideways, a five-gallon bucket of baseballs in each hand.

My body knew before I did.

I don’t have a better way to say it. Something behind my breastbone dropped two inches and stayed there, and I was still thinking, idly, he’s carrying those like they’re empty, when the rest of me had already finished the paperwork. The set of the shoulders. The walk—unhurried, a little rolling, weight carried low, like a man who’s never been knocked off his feet and doesn’t plan to start. The forearms below the shoved-up sleeves of a gray henley, corded and brown already, dusted with dark hair. He set the buckets down at the edge of the grass, straightened, and looked out over the infield counting heads, and while he counted, two fingers of his right hand tapped against his thigh.

Twenty-three years, and that was what took my legs out. Two fingers. A habit.

He’d been twenty the last time I saw him. All elbows and sunburn, a body still deciding what it was going to be. It had decided. He’d filled out through the chest and shoulders into something solid and settled, built by work rather than by a gym, and there was silver in the dark hair at his temples that caught the light when he turned his head. Work boots on a ball field. A coach’s whistle looped twice around one thick wrist.

Jesse Ramos.

He turned his head a little further and saw me.

I watched it happen. It took about as long as missing a stair. His eyes went past me, came back, and stopped, and for one unguarded second there was something in his face that I felt in my stomach like a dropped elevator.

Then it was gone. Not hidden. Just put away, neatly, by someone who’d had a long time to practice where it went.

“Nolan,” he said.

His voice was lower than I remembered. Rougher at the bottom, like it had been used.

“Jesse.” Mine came out as if I’d borrowed it. I was holding eleven traffic cones and a baseball glove and could not think what to do with any of them. “I didn’t know you coached.”

“No reason you would.”

It wasn’t unkind. That was the thing about it. He said it the way you’d read a number off a tape measure.

“Denise said she had a new dad helping out,” he went on. “She didn’t say which one.” His gaze moved over me once, quick and thorough—the good work shirt I’d worn to a children’s baseball practice like an idiot, the gray at my own temples, the cap. I had the sudden, total sense of being looked over by someone who knew how I was put together underneath all of it. “You look well.”

“So do you.”

That was nowhere near big enough. He looked like he’d grown into every promise his twenty-year-old frame had ever made. I was watching his mouth while he talked. I had always watched his mouth while he talked. I had never, until this exact second, noticed that I did.

“Jesse, it’s been—” I stopped, started over, and got out the truest stupid thing available. “It’s been too long.”

He held my eyes. Brown, warm by nature, and at the moment giving me precisely nothing.

“Yes,” he said. “It has.”

And that was all.

No whose fault is that. No where the hell were you. No door left open even a crack for me to shoulder through with an explanation. Just agreement, level and courteous and complete, and I stood there learning that it was possible to be hit with good manners. I had four or five sentences loaded. Every one of them began with I.

“Dad?”

Sadie had materialized at my hip. She did that—approached new adults from behind the cover of my leg and stepped out only when she’d finished her assessment. She was looking up at Jesse with her chin pulled in.

And he changed.

I don’t mean he smiled. I mean every guarded thing went out of him at once, like a fist opening. He dropped into a crouch right there in the grass, forearms on his knees, so his eyes were a little below hers, and when he spoke it was in a different voice entirely. Easy. Interested. In no hurry at all.

“Hey. You’re Sadie?”

A nod.

“I’m Jesse. Coach Jesse, if Denise is in earshot. She likes things official.” He tilted his head at her closed left hand. “What’ve you got?”

She thought about whether he’d earned it. Then she opened her fingers. A stone the size of a quarter, gray-green, water-polished.

“Oh, that’s a good one,” Jesse said, with complete seriousness. “Where’s it from?”

“Behind our house. There’s a ditch.”

“A ditch stone. Those are underrated.” He didn’t reach for it. He looked at it the way you look at something that belongs to somebody. “You know the rule? Flat ones are for skipping. Round ones are for keeping. That one’s a keeper.”

“I know,” said Sadie, who had not known there was a rule and would now defend it to the death.

“Thought you might. Got a pocket with a zipper?”

She showed him. He nodded his approval, and she zipped the stone away, and then she asked him—him, a stranger of forty seconds—the thing she’d asked me in the car.

“Do I have to be good today?”

“God, no.” He actually laughed, low in his chest. “Today’s for finding out which hand the glove goes on. You’d be amazed how many people get it wrong. Grown adults. I’ve seen it.” He stood, knees cracking, and pointed with his chin. “Go pick a cone with nobody on it. Any one you like. That’s your cone for the day, and nobody’s allowed to argue.”

She went. She didn’t look back at me for permission.

I was smiling. I couldn’t help it; she’d walked onto that field as though the ground might be rated to hold her after all. I turned with the smile still on my face and some dumb grateful sentence already forming, and Jesse looked at me, and the fist had closed again.

“Cones in a line down the first-base side, ten feet apart,” he said. “Water under the bench.”

“Under, not on. I’ve been briefed.” I tried for light. “Jesse—”

“Twelve kids, Nolan.” He bent and took up both buckets as though they weighed nothing, and the muscles of his forearms slid under the skin, and I looked, and then I looked at the cones. “Fifty minutes. Let’s give them a practice.”

I set cones. I am extremely good at setting cones. Ten feet on center, sighted down the line, dead straight—it was the one part of the morning I could do without thinking, so naturally I thought the entire time.

Denise ran the thing like a site foreman. Three stations, eight minutes each, a whistle that could have stopped traffic on the turnpike. She took hitting off the tee. I got throwing, which meant standing in shallow right field while four children at a time hurled baseballs at approximately me. A boy named Marcus wound up like a major leaguer and buried one in the dirt a yard in front of his own shoes.

“That was a changeup,” he informed me.

“It certainly changed,” I agreed.

Jesse had grounders.

Sadie’s group reached him second.

He was rolling them. Not hitting—just an easy underhand roll across the dirt, slow enough to read the stitches. The boy with the glove on his head, who turned out to be named Toby and to have a great many thoughts about sharks, dropped to his knees and smothered his like it owed him money. A girl named Priya scooped hers clean and looked around to see who’d noticed.

Then Sadie.

The ball came at her at the speed of a sleepy cat. She watched it the whole way. At the last instant her entire body went sideways—head turned, eyes shut, glove flung out somewhere to the left as an offering—and the ball trundled past her ankle and died in the grass.

My hands closed. I knew that flinch. I’d seen it the first time I tried to teach her to ride a bike; I’d seen it when she handed me a report card. It was the flinch of a kid braced to be bad at something in front of people. Every muscle I owned wanted to jog over there and say something encouraging and specific and make it worse.

Jesse rolled her another. Same result. A third. She got leather on that one by accident and stared at her glove with open betrayal.

He never said a word about it.

That’s what I couldn’t get past, standing out there getting pelted. He didn’t say keep your eye on it. He didn’t say it won’t hurt you, which every child alive correctly identifies as a lie. He just wandered over, casual, set a hand on top of her cap and steered her two steps to the right—out of the direct line, I realized, so the ball would run past her glove side instead of at her shins—and then he straightened up and announced to the group at large that grounders were boring and they were switching to alligators.

“What’s alligators?” Toby demanded.

“Alligators is you get down low, like this—” Jesse sank into a squat with a grunt, bare hand above his glove, and snapped the two together. “And you eat the ball. Chomp. Top jaw, bottom jaw. Loudest chomp wins.”

“Wins what?”

“My respect, Toby. It’s very hard to get.”

He dumped the hardballs and came back with a bucket of tennis balls gone bald and gray. They bounced. They were funny. Inside two minutes he had four kids crouched in the dirt chomping and shrieking, and my daughter was one of them, and nobody on that field except him and me knew the whole drill had been rebuilt around one scared girl without her name coming anywhere near it.

A baseball hit me in the hip.

“Sorry, Mr. Pierce!”

“My fault,” I said, and meant it.

I made myself watch my own station after that. Mostly. When the rotation brought the oldest group around to him he switched back to real balls and started them on throws across the diamond, and one of the boys couldn’t get his fingers right, and Jesse took the ball out of the kid’s hand and showed him.

“Two fingers across the wide seams. Thumb underneath, right on the leather. Don’t choke it—there. See daylight between the ball and your palm? That’s what you want.”

He turned his wrist to show the gap. He had square, capable hands, a white scar across one knuckle, a healing nick at the base of the thumb. The tendons stood out along the back when he set his grip. He let the ball roll off his fingertips and caught it again without looking, the way you’d flip a coin, and something low in my stomach turned over, slow and hot.

I noted it. I’m a man who notes things.

I told myself it was the strangeness of the morning. A long week, a short night, an old friend. I put it in that box and set the lid on, and the lid sat a little crooked, and I looked somewhere else.

Somewhere else turned out to be the dugout bench, where a carriage bolt had backed out far enough to snag a kid’s shorts. At the water break I had my multitool out and the nut run down tight before I’d properly decided to.

“Did you just fix my bench?” Denise said behind me.

“It was loose.”

“It’s been loose since 2019.”

“Well.” I folded the pliers. “Now it isn’t.”

She made a sound that wasn’t quite approval and went to break up the spitting contest.

The last ten minutes were a free-for-all she called a scrimmage. I wound up at first base because somebody tall had to, taking throws from infielders whose aim was more of a mood. It was the first time all morning I’d actually put the glove on. It closed around my hand like it had been waiting. A throw came in high from short; I went up and got it without thinking, twenty-four years sliding off my shoulder, and the pop of the ball into that old leather ran straight up my arm.

When I came down, Jesse was looking at me.

Not at me. At my left hand. He stood in the third-base coach’s box with his arms folded, and his eyes had dropped to the heel of the glove, to that line of darker stitching, and for one second—one; I counted it afterward more times than I’d like to admit—his face did something it hadn’t done for me all day. Not softness. Nothing that simple. It was the look of a man reading his own handwriting on a letter he’d been told was lost.

Then a kid slid into third on his stomach for no reason at all, and Jesse turned to deal with it, and whatever it was got put away with the rest.

Practice ended the way they all do: abruptly, in a blizzard of water bottles. Sadie came off the field with dirt to the elbows and a tennis ball she had apparently been awarded.

“I was the second-loudest alligator,” she reported.

“Who was first?”

“Toby. But he cheats. He does it with his mouth too.”

“That’s a serious allegation.”

“I know.” She was glowing and working hard not to, in case it turned out she wasn’t supposed to. “Can I go look at the creek? Just look. Coach Denise said there’s a fence.”

“To the fence and back.”

She ran. Actually ran.

I stacked the cones. I hauled the cooler up the slope, and the tee, and a mesh bag of helmets nobody had asked me to carry. By the time I came down for the last load the lot had mostly emptied. One truck was left, backed up to the gate: a dark blue Ford with a ladder rack and the tailgate down, and Jesse was loading buckets onto it with his back to me.

I stopped a few feet off. The sun lay on the back of his neck. I had a helmet bag in one hand and the glove in the other and those four or five sentences still loaded, and every one of them still began with I.

“She did well today,” I said instead. “Sadie. What you did out there, with the—I saw it. Thank you.”

“She did the work.” He slid a bucket back against the wheel well. “She’s a good kid.”

“She is.” I waited. The creek ran. Somewhere behind me my daughter was explaining something to a fence. “Jesse. I’d like to—”

“Tuesdays and Thursdays,” he said, not turning around. “Five-thirty. Denise means it about showing up.”

He lifted the tailgate and shut it.

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Quarry Road — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Twenty-three years ago, Nolan pulled back on a tailgate on Quarry Road and drove away. This August, he has a borough key to the gate, a forty-eight-quart cooler, and something he’s owed Jesse since 2003. This time he leans first. And this time nobody sits up.

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