Pretty Dogs by Riley Nash

It’s hard to imagine dating when I secretly share a bed with my best friend every night. When we can barely spend an hour apart. When he’ll kill anyone who tries to touch me. We finally escaped the trailer park, but maybe we weren’t ready for freedom. My best friend Beck doesn’t know how to leave the gang he’s always known, even if it costs him his life. And I don’t know how to find my purpose and confidence as a trans man. We’re too lost in our fears to see what’s right in front of us. But when I almost lose him, it only takes five words for us to fall: I heard about a game. I run. He hunts me. And if he catches me… there are no limits in the dark. Daylight is a different matter, full of the ghosts of everything we’ve lost. Until we stumble across someone who needs us, who forces us to take the broken pieces of our pasts and put them together into something strong. The courage it takes to become who we were all along.

Adult • Diversity Representation/LGBTQ+/Own Voices • Romance/Contemporary • Diversity Representation/LGBTQ+ • Contemporary Fiction • Romance/Erotica

Content Warning: Primal kink (light CNC roleplay, physical roughness and restraint, and fantasies involving chase and capture) Transphobia (internalized transphobia, insecurity involving birth anatomy, some instances of misgendering, brief strong transphobic rhetoric and threats of violence) Scene of violence and threat of violence involving a gun. Mentions of poverty, homelessness, parent/child abuse, death and loss of a parent, sex work, gang activities, and descriptions of medical injections.

Reviewed by Shrike on 2026-05-10T23:34:13Z:

God bless white t-shirts and NASCAR. Beck and Dallas have built something lovely together and it was incredible to watch it grow even stronger. As a trans reader I loved how the trans characters were treated and was so exited to learn that Nash is an own voices author.