Read it here → Holding Pressure
Author Page → Brandon’s Books on Amazon
What happens when survival and connection can’t coexist?
When showing up for a patient means bleeding out in the process?
When you want to let someone in, but your trauma has a waiting room with no open chairs?
That’s what I asked myself when writing Holding Pressure—a queer trauma romance set in the fractured core of Parkland Hospital. This isn’t a love story about healing. It’s about endurance. Collapse. And what it means to hold space for someone when you’re barely keeping yourself upright.
Why I Wrote Holding Pressure
I’ve lived in hospitals—literally and metaphorically. I’ve run trauma departments, watched patients code, been the one who signs death notices, and the one who isn’t allowed to grieve. I’ve loved people who could barely function, and I’ve been loved in return when I couldn’t either.
This book wasn’t written as an escape. It was written as a confrontation—with grief, with resilience, with the quiet ways men try to love each other in systems that demand they harden, compartmentalize, and survive in silence.
What It’s About
Holding Pressure follows two men:
- Avery, an emotionally-locked-down attending physician who’s spent the past decade treating Parkland like a bunker and his trauma like a credential.
- Noah, a newly transferred nurse with a quiet rage, a messy past, and no interest in getting involved with anyone—especially not someone like Avery.
They’re opposites in every way. And yet, amid lawsuits, code blues, and nightly ethical contortions, they keep orbiting each other.
“You don’t have to fix it,” Noah said, eyes unreadable. “Just stop pretending it doesn’t hurt.”
Their chemistry is undeniable—but so is the damage they carry. Neither of them wants to be saved. They just don’t want to be alone anymore.
And in a hospital held together by caffeine, lawsuits, and barely-suppressed burnout, that need might be the most dangerous thing of all.
Why It Matters
Because we don’t talk enough about what it means to survive love—not just fall into it.
Because queer men deserve stories where the pain isn’t prettied up for mass appeal, where attraction is laced with history, and where connection costs something.
And because I was tired of watching trauma get wrapped in a bow.
“There’s no such thing as closure,” Avery muttered. “There’s just scar tissue you learn to stop picking at.”
The Pressure That Builds
The hospital isn’t just a setting—it’s a third character. It shapes the rhythm of the book: fast, then suffocating; sterile, then intimate. Characters argue in med closets, flirt over triage boards, and unravel during quiet elevator rides between floors.
“You treat everything like a code,” Noah said. “You show up, do the work, and clock out like it didn’t happen. But people aren’t patients, Avery. You don’t get to walk away when the vitals stabilize.”
You’ll meet an ensemble of staff—brilliant, broken, funny, traumatized. You’ll see the rituals that keep them sane: shared snacks in the break room, dark humor in the ICU, and the fierce loyalty of people who’ve learned to trust each other with life and death—but not emotions.
What Holding Pressure Is (and Isn’t)
It’s not a rescue fantasy.
It’s not a tidy trauma-healing arc.
It’s not a story where one character saves the other.
“This isn’t safe,” Avery whispered.
“I’m not asking you to be safe,” Noah replied. “I’m asking you to be honest.”
It is a story about holding on—imperfectly, stubbornly. It’s about consent, contradiction, and the courage it takes to let yourself be witnessed, even when you don’t feel worthy.
It’s also queer to the core—not in aesthetic, but in emotional logic. The way these men communicate, hurt, hide, and risk? It’s queer survival. Messy, tangled, real.
Final Thoughts
I didn’t write Holding Pressure to make anyone feel better. I wrote it to feel less alone. And if you’ve ever stood in a room full of people and still felt like you were flatlining, this story might be for you too.
“Sometimes the pressure is the only thing holding the pieces together.”
Read now on Kindle or free with Kindle Unlimited:
👉 Holding Pressure
📚 Author Page: Brandon’s Books