NEW RELEASE: To Failure by C.J. Ashworth (Excerpt)

NEW RELEASE

Book Title: To Failure (MM PHYSIQUE, Book 1)

Author and Publisher: CJ Ashworth

Cover Artist: Wolfsparrow Covers

Release Date: October 27, 2026

Tense/POV: First person/Alternating POV — Eli’s chapters in past tense, Soren’s in present tense.

Genres: Contemporary MM Sports Romance (competitive bodybuilding)

Tropes:  Rivals to lovers, opposites attract, forced proximity, hurt/comfort, touch-starved, age-gap-adjacent (both men in their forties)

Themes: What a body is for; addiction and withdrawal; grief for an older brother; a father who only knows how to ask what his son weighs; asking for help

Heat Rating: 4 flames

Length: 78 000 words / approx. 300 pages

It is a standalone story with a hard-won HEA. It does not end on a cliffhanger. 

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Buy Links – Available in Kindle Unlimited

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He calls it strength. Knowing when to stop.

 

Blurb

In a sport that runs on the word more — more size, more chemistry, more — Eli has spent fifteen years on the opposite one: enough.

He competes natural, carving his body down to exactly what it should be and no further — a shape that has to win on proportion, because it gave up winning on size. He trains before dawn, alone — the hand at everyone else’s back on the last brutal rep, and no one at his. He calls that strength. Knowing when to stop.

Then Soren walks into his gym. Open-division, sponsored, engineered past anything a natural body can do — and still convinced, in the place no trophy touches, that he isn’t enough. He’s everything Eli swore off. He’s also the first man who’s ever wanted to stand at his back.

A rivalry of opposites becomes something Eli has no careful word for, just as the chemistry in Soren’s blood starts taking him apart.

 

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR 

A note from the author: I build these books and write them with an AI as my drafting partner — the English prose is AI-drafted from my direction and worked over by me, line by line. My KDP listing declares it in full. The cover is not AI.

 

CONTENT NOTES 

Running through the book: anabolic steroid use, dependence and withdrawal — no substance is named and no injection appears on the page. Heart damage caused by it, diagnosed late and permanent. Extreme contest preparation, and a body watched in a mirror until the watching has stopped being a choice.

In particular: a man whose brother died of this sport at thirty-one, and a father who has only ever known how to ask his son what he weighs. One scene in which one of these men goes looking for the cruelest thing he can say, says it, and puts a hand on the other’s chest and shoves. A video of the two of them, filmed without their knowledge, makes the rounds of the sport. Two explicit sex scenes. In a late chapter, a character describes how close he once came to going off a bridge and feels the pull of it return; he does not act on it, and he asks for help.

Not in this book: blood, beatings, sexual assault, cheating, homophobic abuse, or a coming-out story. Nobody is outed to their family. Nobody dies inside these pages.

 

Excerpt 

Before five most mornings the gym is mine, which only means it’s a thing nobody else is awake to want. I’d come up off the bench an hour earlier out of the dream I always have — my brother on a stage, the lights, my own hand not finishing the reach — and done what I do after that dream, which is go to the rack in the dark and take the one or two reps I make every client of mine leave behind. I unrack the bar onto my back, step out, and go down with it, alone. There’s no one to catch it out of the hole. There never is. At the bottom — where the legs hand off to nothing, where a man wants the spot most — I drive it up myself, rack it, and the iron rings too loud in the empty room and sinks. That’s the morning. Every morning. I’d have told you I wanted nothing else from one.

By the time the gray started thinking about coming up I’d wiped down, pulled a shirt on, and gone up front to open — counted the float, keyed the register, reached to turn the sign on the door.

That’s when it went, and let a man in out of the dark. Cold air came crawling in low across the floor. I looked up, my hand still on the sign.

A man in the doorway, streetlight at his back, and for a second only a shape — and the shape was big. You read it before he’s all the way in: the spread of the shoulders, the column of the neck, the swell where the arms tie in. Enhanced, said the clerk in the back of my skull, before I’d asked it to. Natural doesn’t lay thickness on like that, and I’d know. I’m one of the ones it never came to.

But it wasn’t the size that stopped me.

He came off the door and the light let go of him, and in those few steps across my floor the ceiling went, all at once, low. Same rubber, same chalk, and still there stood some other height over his head the building hadn’t accounted for — a body that belonged on the far side of the wall of light, come down to this side of it by some clerical error. The illusion had me in under a second. Beyond the ceiling.

The body moved before I did. Something in my chest jumped without asking my leave, skipped the whole practiced read I do without thinking, and only wanted to look. To look longer. I caught up late to how rude the wanting was and pulled back exactly as far as I’d been drawn.

Then the glare came off his face. Not handsome — that wasn’t it, and it wasn’t trying to be. The eyes. Eyes used to being priced, and behind them something held hard and shut, that wasn’t going across any counter no matter who was paying.

And I’d looked up into those eyes before.

Never met him. Didn’t know the face, the name, would have sworn on anything I’d never stood in a room with him in my life. And still the dream came up whole behind my open eyes — my brother under the finals light, finding the back row without trying, his eyes coming down to land on a boy who couldn’t lift his hand to answer. I knew the exact distance of those eyes. I’d spent the whole night reaching for it and waking before I closed it. And here a man stood in my doorway at the wrong end of that same distance, and started across it, toward the counter, toward me.

“You’re not open,” he said. Not a question; he’d seen the sign.

“Few more minutes.”

He didn’t leave, and he didn’t come further in. He stood there and let his eyes go around the room instead — the rubber curling at the edges, the mirror on half the walls with the haze that won’t come off, the plates worn smooth past reading. Not pricing it. Making sure of it. A man checking whether a place was what he’d hoped, and the thing he seemed to be hoping was not that it’d be any good.

“I’m not a member,” he said. “What’s a day pass.”

I told him the visitor rate, which is low, the way everything here is low, and slid the waiver across the counter. “Sign at the bottom.”

 

About the Author 

CJ Ashworth writes MM romance set inside physique competition — the gyms at four in the morning, the food weighed to the gram, the years of it, and what men manage to do for each other in the middle of all that.

CJ started lifting at forty-five and first stood on a competition stage at fifty — then twice a year for the three years after that. The competing stopped; the training didn’t. Fifty-five now, and still five or six mornings a week, ninety minutes at a time.

The gyms in these books aren’t real gyms. The four a.m. is real, and so is the arithmetic.

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