Eli Navarro knows how to hide. For three years he's avoided looking too long at Cade Brennan, his college soccer team's captain — until the night their eyes meet under the shower spray and "nothing happened" stops working.
What starts as unbearable tension in the locker room grows, week by week, into something Eli never planned on first Cade, then Jonah, then Theo and Marcus — four men, one house, and a choice that has to be remade every single day. It isn't about hiding who he is anymore. It's about learning that being fully seen, by people who keep choosing to stay, might be the safest thing he's ever felt.
But fear doesn't disappear just because desire won once. A comment from the coach that lands too close to home. A teammate who almost walks in on the wrong moment. A phone call to a father who doesn't know yet — or knows more than he's letting on. When the pressure of keeping it all hidden gets to be too much, Eli disappears for days, testing exactly how far the group's loyalty can stretch before it breaks.
AFTER PRACTICE is a story about explicit male desire, about the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding trust after a fracture, and about the courage — messy, non-linear, full of relapses — to choose being known over staying hidden. For readers of adult MM romance who want group dynamics, real emotional stakes, and an ending that doesn't pretend any of it was easy.