The Bench Beside Mine

A High-Heat Divorced Dads MM Romance
by Milo Hart

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The Bench Beside Mine book cover by Milo Hart

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Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Standalone (Briarwood, PA)
Tropes: Divorced Dads, Single Dads, Friends to Lovers, Co-Coaches, Bisexual Leads, First Time with a Man, Over 35, One Bed, Forced Proximity, Opposites Attract, Secret Relationship, Ranked List, Praise, Instruction Kink, Light Bondage, Safe Word, Switch Dynamic (Both Vers), Mutual Pining, Hurt/Comfort, Grief Recovery, Found Family, Decent Exes, No Cheating, HEA

He keeps buying a second coffee for the wife who left. The dad on the bench beside him drinks it.

Peter Lyle brings the spare water bottle, the signed forms, Band-Aids in three sizes, and a second coffee he keeps buying for a wife who divorced him fourteen months ago.

Then Dev Malhotra drops onto the bench beside him, drinks it, and saves him a seat every Saturday after.

Dev is everything Peter isn’t. Loud. Easy. Built like he hauls goalposts for fun. A devoted dad so scared of becoming the optional parent that he plans every weekend like a cruise director. When the coach’s knee gives out and they’re both drafted as assistants, Peter gets three practices a week of Dev’s hands, Dev’s laugh, and Dev’s soaked T-shirt in a very small equipment shed.

Peter has known he’s bisexual since he was nineteen. He has never done anything about it.

So he makes a list. It’s ranked.

They have two kid-free nights a week, one king bed at an overnight coaching clinic, and a buttoned-up accountant who turns out to give very precise orders. The sex is the easy part.

The hard part is that two fathers falling in love doesn’t make four people a family. Peter is afraid that wanting a new life betrays the one he lost. Dev is afraid of being left outside the next one, so he starts building it before anyone has said yes.

If they want a future, they’ll have to stop treating love like a seat someone else might take.

The Bench Beside Mine is a high-heat contemporary MM romance with divorced dads, friends to lovers, bisexual leads, a first time with a man at thirty-eight, co-coaches, one bed, a ranked list, real kids, decent exes, no cheating, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Alternating first-person POV. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A buttoned-up accountant who keeps a contingency tab for everything, including lightning and pinnies
✅ A loud, warm transit planner who drinks the wrong man’s coffee on day one
✅ Two divorced soccer dads drafted as co-coaches: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday
✅ A dark green stadium cushion, a green thermos, and a seat saved every week
✅ “I’ve made a list.” “A LIST?” “It’s ranked.”
✅ A first time with a man at thirty-eight, and a lot of firsts after that
✅ One king bed at a coaching clinic, a work tie, and a safe word: Pottsville
✅ Polite, precise orders in bed, and a man who finally stops planning
✅ Real kids, decent exes, a new baby sister, and a family worth getting right
✅ Both men vers, praise, edging on a system, no cheating, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including oral sex, anal sex, rimming, a solo scene, phone sex, a light wrist restraint with a safe word, edging, and a semi-public encounter in an empty equipment shed; all on-page sex is between consenting adults). It also includes past infertility, IVF and pregnancy loss (discussed, not on page), divorce and co-parenting, a third-act separation, a hospital birth, alcohol, and strong language. No cheating, no sexual violence, no dub-con. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One: Peter

For the record, the second coffee was an accident.

I’d like that noted, because the alternative is that I stood in Gable Street Coffee at ten past five on a Tuesday and deliberately ordered an oat flat white for a woman who divorced me fourteen months ago, and I am not that man. I’m a different and slightly worse one. I’m the man whose mouth keeps placing orders his life has cancelled.

“Medium latte and an oat flat white,” I’d said, and the girl at the register had both cups marked before I could audit the sentence. I paid. I tipped. I carried the cardboard tray across the Halloran Park lot with my son trotting ahead of me, and I didn’t register what I was holding until I sat down at Field 3 and needed somewhere to put the other cup.

So I put it beside me. Where she used to sit.

Fourteen months. You’d think a habit would have a shorter shelf life than a marriage.

The bench was the only one at Field 3, and it had been installed by someone with a grudge against parents. It was too short. It faced squarely into whatever wind was available. It held the afternoon’s rain in its slats as though saving it for later, and the damp had come through my trousers inside four seconds. I stayed where I was. I arrive twenty minutes early to everything, and the bench is what you win.

It was the last week of August and eighty-one degrees, and I was wearing my suit jacket. I wore it for the pockets. Left outside: tissues. Right outside: a pen, plus the medical release, the photo consent and the code of conduct, signed, paper-clipped, in the order the league’s email had listed them. Inside breast: Band-Aids in three sizes. Simon’s spare water bottle didn’t fit anywhere, which I considered a flaw in the jacket, so it stood on the ground by my left shoe. I had come straight from Kestrel Valve & Fitting, where I am a senior accountant, and I’d kept my tie on, because taking off a tie in a parking lot felt like the first step toward becoming someone who owns a hoodie.

Out on the grass, a dozen or so children in green practice shirts were orbiting Coach Denise Bell the way gnats orbit a porch light. My son was not among them. My son was sitting on the sideline with his left leg stuck out in front of him, drawing on his shin guard.

“Simon. Is that the marker from the kitchen drawer?”

“It’s a different one.”

“Is it also permanent?”

He examined the barrel. He’s nine, and he has my habit of checking a fact before he commits to it. “Yes.”

“Carry on.”

He bent back over his shin with his tongue between his teeth. From where I sat I could make out a panel border and a small figure in a cape. Simon plays defense for the Briarwood Comets for reasons that have very little to do with soccer and nearly everything to do with a boy named Owen and the halftime snack. I’ve made my peace with it. A child who plays for his friends is at least a child who has some.

The whistle went. He capped the marker, handed it across to me for safekeeping, and ran to join the gnats. Number seven. The shirt hung to his thighs.

I drank some of my latte. I looked at the other cup. Oat milk, extra hot, because Celia’s hands were always cold, and I’d spent eleven years knowing that and could not now work out where to set the information down.

“Is this seat taken?”

He was standing with the low sun behind him, so the first thing I got was an outline, and the outline was wide. Then he shifted and I got the rest. A gray T-shirt washed soft enough to give up on having a shape of its own. Dark hair. A short beard with gray coming in at the chin, as if someone had pressed a thumb there. And forearms. I noticed his forearms the way you notice a stair that isn’t where you expected it to be.

He had a steel thermos hooked in two fingers, green, with a dent in its side the size of a fist. Behind him a boy had peeled away at a sprint and was already on the field greeting every other child individually and at volume.

“No,” I said. One syllable seemed stingy. “It isn’t. Please.”

He sat.

The bench had room for two grown men on the condition that they were prepared to be honest with each other about their thighs. His landed against mine from hip to knee, solid and startlingly warm through two layers of cloth. He didn’t apologize for it. There was nowhere for either of us to go. I had the end of the bench on my other side, and after that, air.

“Dev,” he said, and offered a hand. “Malhotra. Mine’s the loud one.”

“Peter Lyle.” His grip was dry and unhurried. “Mine’s the one who was drawing on himself.”

“I saw that. Is it allowed? Because Arjun’s going to want one.”

“There’s nothing prohibiting it in the code of conduct.”

He turned his head and looked at me properly. His eyes were very dark and already amused. “You read the code of conduct.”

“I signed it. It seemed polite to find out what I’d agreed to.”

He laughed. It was not a sideline laugh. It came out of him at a volume that made a mother thirty feet away turn around in her camp chair, and it went through the slats of the bench and up my spine like a hand.

“Okay, Peter Lyle,” he said. “What did we agree to?”

“We won’t coach from the sideline, we won’t address the referee, and we’ll model gracious behavior in victory and defeat.”

“I’m going to break two of those by October.”

“Which two?”

“Depends on the referee.” He nodded at the cup on my other side. “You waiting on somebody? I can move.”

“There’s nowhere to move to.”

“I can stand. Heroically. Arms folded.”

This was the point at which a sensible man lies. My wife’s parking the car. I had the sentence ready. I’d used versions of it on a barista, on a neighbor, and once, God help me, on a dental receptionist. I held it for about as long as it takes to breathe in.

“No,” I said. “Nobody’s coming. I bought it by mistake. It’s my ex-wife’s order.” I straightened the cup a quarter turn so the lid’s seam lined up with the logo. “We’ve been divorced fourteen months. Apparently the part of me that orders coffee hasn’t been informed.”

Then I waited for the face.

There is a face. Anyone who’s been divorced can draw it for you: the head tips eight degrees, the mouth goes soft, and a small damp oh comes out. I’ve received it from colleagues, from my mother, and from a man installing my internet.

Dev Malhotra didn’t make the face. He looked at the cup, and then at me, with plain interest, as if I’d told him the bus he wanted ran on the next street over.

“What is it?”

“An oat flat white.”

“Still hot?”

“I’d estimate lukewarm.”

“Do you mind if I drink it?” He said it easily. “I’ve been up since five, and it seems like a waste to leave it for the bench.”

I’d carried that order around for fourteen months and nobody had ever asked to take it off my hands.

I gave it to him.

He drank. He gave it real consideration, looking out at the field. “All right. I want to be respectful of your marriage.”

“Thank you.”

“This is warm milk with a rumor of coffee.”

“She liked it.”

“I’m sure she’s a wonderful person. That’s a drink for somebody who’s afraid of drinks.”

The sound I made surprised me. It came out mostly through my nose, like something that had gone a long time without use and seized up. I put my knuckles against my mouth. He looked delighted with himself.

“Three years, for me,” he said. “Divorced. And it took the rest of me about eight months to catch up. I kept buying her yogurt. This specific coconut yogurt. I can’t stand it. I ate so much of that yogurt, Peter.”

“Why didn’t you stop buying it?”

“I’d be in the aisle and my arm would just go.” He demonstrated. His arm was a persuasive argument. “It quits eventually. One day you get home and there’s no yogurt and you feel like you’ve been promoted.”

He unscrewed the cap from the thermos, and the smell reached me before he’d finished: something dark and nearly burnt, and over the top of it a spice I couldn’t place.

“Here. Trade. It’s only fair.”

“What’s in it?”

“Coffee. Moka pot. Cardamom. That’s how my mother makes it. She thinks American coffee is a cry for help.” He filled the cap and held it out between two thick fingers. “Go slow.”

I didn’t go slow. I’ve no excuse. I’m a careful person and I drank it like a man with something to prove.

It’s hard to describe the next several seconds without exaggerating, so I’ll say only that I saw my own future very clearly and that my heart did something a cardiologist would want reported. I coughed. My eyes filled. Dev struck me between the shoulder blades, twice, with a palm like a hardback book, and then left his hand there for a moment while I got my breath.

“Is it supposed to do that?”

“It’s supposed to get me through a three-hour public meeting about moving a bus stop forty feet.”

“It would get me through my own funeral.”

That laugh again. Closer this time, because he hadn’t sat back yet. He took his hand off my back, and the place where it had been stayed warm for a ridiculous length of time.

“I plan transit,” he said. “For the county. Bus routes, mostly. If your bus has ever been late, I’ve been yelled at about it in a middle-school cafeteria.”

“I’ve never taken the bus.”

“Then you’re who I’m mad at.” He drank more of Celia’s flat white and winced, not unkindly. “What about you? The tie says lawyer. The paper clip says something else.”

“Accountant. A company that makes industrial valves.”

“Somebody has to.”

“Make the valves, or count them?”

“Either. Both. I’ve never thought about a valve in my life and I’ve probably used nine today.”

“Considerably more than nine,” I said, and found I was about to tell a stranger how many valves there are in a municipal water system, and that he was going to let me.

Coach Denise split them into a scrimmage, and inside two minutes I understood the boy in the number ten shirt. He played the way his father laughed. He went straight through the middle of the field with the ball stuck to his foot and an expression of furious joy, he put it past the keeper low and to the left, and then he screamed. It wasn’t a word. He dropped to his knees and slid a yard and a half on wet grass with both fists up.

“There go the knees of those socks,” Dev said. He’d half risen off the bench. I felt it all along my leg. “His mother’s going to send me a photo of the laundry with no caption. ARJ! Nice! Get back!”

“That’s coaching from the sideline.”

“That’s parenting at a distance. Different section.”

Four minutes later the ball came loose at the top of the box and rolled to my son, who had drifted up from defense without, I think, meaning to. He was alone. The keeper was off her line. Even I could see it, and I’ve read more about this game than I’ve watched.

Simon looked at the goal. He looked to his right, where Owen was jumping on the spot with both arms in the air. And he passed it, carefully, with the inside of his foot, the way he’d been shown.

Owen missed by a distance I’d call generous.

“He had that,” Dev said.

“He did.”

“He had the whole goal.”

“He prefers Owen to have it.”

Dev thought about that. On the field, Simon was patting Owen on the back. “So that’s either terrible strategy or really excellent character.”

“His mother and I have agreed not to find out which.”

“No, keep him. I’ve got the other kind.” He tipped the thermos toward number ten, who was arguing a throw-in with the whole of his body. “Maybe they average out.”

A shadow fell across my forms.

“Lyle and Malhotra,” said a woman with a clipboard, a visor, and the bearing of someone who has been denied a larger command. “Kendra Voss. Team manager. I run the snack rotation, the group chat, and for all practical purposes this league.”

I had the paper-clipped forms out before she’d finished. She took them, flipped through, and looked at me with an interest I would in time learn to fear.

“In order,” she said. “Signed. On the first day.” She made a mark. “You’re week three. Malhotra, week four. No nuts, no red dye, nothing that needs a spoon. Orange slices are permitted, but people will talk.”

“What do they say?” Dev asked.

“That you didn’t try.” She glanced from his shoulder to mine and at the complete absence of daylight between them. “Good. You found each other. That bench eats the ones who sit on it alone. I’ve seen it. They stop coming by October.”

She was gone before I could work out a reply, and her place was taken almost at once by a blonde ponytail and a great deal of expensive athletic fabric.

“Hi! You’re new.” This was to Dev. Her hand was out to him before she’d finished arriving. “Tessa Brandt. Lily’s mine. In the gloves.”

“Dev. She’s good. She nearly got a hand to that one.”

“She’s going to be so mad about that one.” Tessa held on to the handshake about a second longer than a handshake takes. Then she shook mine, the way you’d accept a receipt. “And you’re?”

“Peter.”

“Peter! Great.” Back to him. “There’s a parents’ happy hour, first Friday of the month. I’ll make Kendra put you on the chat. It’s a fun group. Some of us are fun.”

“I love fun,” Dev said, perfectly friendly, and I couldn’t tell whether he’d understood the offer or was only being polite to it.

She touched his forearm when she left. Two fingers, just above the wrist.

I understood the impulse. I resented understanding it.

Here is what I did about Dev Malhotra’s thigh during the seventy-five minutes of that practice: nothing. I’d like to be exact about the nothing, though, because it wasn’t the passive kind.

I could have stood. Fathers stand. There’s a whole class of them who watch from the corner flag with their arms crossed, and I could have joined them at any point with no explanation owed. I could have gone to the car for something. I own a great many somethings and most of them live in the car.

I stayed on the bench. I stayed, and I paid attention, which is the thing I’m best at and until that evening had considered harmless.

He was warmer than the weather. He talked with his hands, so every few sentences the hair on his arm brushed the rolled cuff of my shirt and I lost a word or two of whatever he was saying. When he laughed I got it through the wood before I heard it. He smelled of coffee and cut grass and some ordinary laundry soap, and under that, when he leaned across me to see the far goal, of skin, of a man at the end of a hot day. He leaned across me four times. I wasn’t counting on purpose.

I’ve known I’m bisexual since I was nineteen. This isn’t that story. I told Celia on our third date and she said “Okay” and asked whether I was going to finish my calamari. It’s been a fact about me ever since, like my blood type: known, filed, and not once since required for anything.

What I hadn’t known, until a stranger’s leg informed me, was the other number.

Two years. Celia and I had been separated for two years, and it had been a good while longer since we’d touched except to hand each other a plate or a child. Leaving out my son, my dental hygienist, and the man who helped me up off the ice in the Kestrel lot last January, no one had put a hand on me in twenty-four months. I hadn’t added it up. I’m an accountant and I add everything up. I had simply declined to open that column.

Now a man I’d known for forty minutes was pressed against me from hip to knee because of a piece of municipal furniture, and my whole body had turned toward him the way a plant on a windowsill turns. Slowly, and without asking me.

And his hands. I’d like to claim I noticed them in a general way. He had the thermos held loosely in both of them between his knees. They were broad, blunt-fingered, with a pale nick of scar across one knuckle, and they looked like hands that had carried a lot of things for a lot of people and would do it again if asked. The left one had patted my back twice. I could still have told you exactly where.

I looked at the field. I located my son. I drank my latte, which had gone cold, and which tasted of nothing after what had been in that cap.

“You went quiet,” Dev said.

“I was thinking about valves.”

“Liar.” He said it comfortably and knocked his knee into mine, on purpose, as though the two of them hadn’t already been in contact for over an hour. “It’s all right. I’ll get it out of you. I’m very annoying.”

“I’d gathered.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me today, and I had a guy call me a communist at lunch.”

The final whistle let them loose all at once, and two of them came straight at us.

“DAD. Did you see it? Did you see the second one?”

“I saw both. I saw the slide. All of Briarwood saw the slide.” Dev had the boy’s head under his hand, briefly, a palm on damp hair. “Water. Now. This is Peter. That’s Simon’s dad.”

Arjun Malhotra looked at me with his father’s eyes at half the size and twice the speed. Then he rounded on my son, who had arrived half a step behind him and stopped at my knee.

“You passed it to Owen. You were right there.”

Simon looked at me first. He does that before he answers anyone new. I kept my face still.

“Owen hadn’t had a turn,” he said.

I watched a ten-year-old striker process this, and it cost him something. “Okay,” Arjun said finally. “That’s actually nice.” Then, without drawing a breath: “What’s on your leg?”

Simon looked down at the shin guard as though he’d forgotten it. The ink had smudged at one corner. “Captain Shin.”

“What does he do?”

“He blocks stuff.”

Dev had crouched, forearms on his knees, so that his eyes were level with it. “What’s his weakness? They’ve all got one.”

My son gave this the consideration it deserved. “Grass stains,” he said.

“Oh, that’s bleak. That’s a tragic hero.” Dev glanced up at me, and the grin went all the way up into his eyes. “You’ve got a real one here.”

“I’m aware,” I said, and my voice came out less even than I’d have liked, so I bent down for the water bottle.

He stood, and the bench creaked as it gave me back the whole of its width. The side of my leg was cold. It was eighty-one degrees and the side of my leg was cold.

The boys had drifted toward the parking lot, bent together over the shin guard. Dev screwed the cap onto the thermos. He was still holding Celia’s cup in his other hand. He’d finished it, I saw. All of it, rumor and all.

“Thursday?” he said.

“Thursdays are his mother’s.”

“Yeah. Mine too.” He tipped his head. “His mother’s, I mean. I only get to yell on Tuesdays.” He looked at the bench and then at me, and for the first time all evening he seemed to think about a sentence before saying it. “Saturday, then. First game. I’ll save you a seat.”

“I’m generally twenty minutes early.”

“Then I’ll be twenty-five.”

He wouldn’t be. I knew it already. He had the look of a man who arrived everywhere at a jog, carrying something. But he said it like a promise, walking backward for two steps with the thermos held up in a kind of salute, and then he turned and caught up to his son, dropped the empty cup in the recycling without looking, and didn’t glance back.

I noticed that I’d watched to see if he would.

The listing for my townhouse on Linden Court described the walls as Sandstone. Sandstone at least has the dignity of being a rock. This was the color of an envelope.

I’d lived there fourteen months. In that time I’d assembled Simon’s bed, his desk and his bookshelves, hung his drawings at his eye level, and let him pick a rug with a planet on it. His was the only room with any color in it. The rest of the house still looked like the photographs in the listing, with a few of my belongings set down in it carefully, so as not to leave a mark.

He was asleep by eight forty. I’d washed the grass off him and found the shin guards on the bathroom floor and stood Captain Shin up on the dresser, where the ink could finish drying. I had my hand on the light switch when he spoke.

“Dad?”

“Yes.”

“Arjun’s dad drank Mom’s coffee.”

I stood there in the doorway. He worries, my son. He worries about who gets a turn, and whether one of us will mind what he enjoyed at the other one’s house.

“He did,” I said. “I gave it to him.”

“Is that okay?”

“I think so. It was going to go to waste.”

He considered it in the dark. “Okay,” he said, and turned over, and that was the end of it for one of us.

Downstairs I rinsed the water bottles and laid out his lunch things and then stood at the kitchen counter with my phone. There’s a recurring reminder on it. I set it up three seasons ago, back when there were two of us on the sideline and one of us had cold hands. Tues 4:55. Gable St. Coffee x2. It had gone off every practice Tuesday since, I’d obeyed it every time, and I’d never once looked at it.

I looked at it now. I pressed edit and changed the two to a one.

Coffee x1.

It was accurate. It looked like a tax return filled out by a widower.

I thought about a dented green thermos, and a capful of something that had nearly killed me, and a hand flat between my shoulder blades. I thought about being asked do you mind if I drink it by a man who hadn’t made the face. I thought, for longer than was sensible in a kitchen at nine o’clock at night, about his hands.

Then I changed the one back to a two.

It wouldn’t be an oat flat white. I’d have to ask him how he took his.

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Number Seven — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Peter’s list has twelve lines, and Dev has never been allowed to read it. It’s December, the season’s over, and Peter has been holding line seven since September. He’s put towels on the chair. He’s prepped two washcloths. Tonight he reads it out loud.

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