The Straight Guy’s Guide to Getting Bent
MM Contemporary Romance — Bi Awakening — Renovation Romance
by Jace Wilder
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Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bi Awakening, Age Gap, Grumpy/Sunshine, Forced Proximity, Fake Dating, Praise Kink, Renovation Romance, Small Town, Practice Turns Real, Touch Starved
He came to fix a house. He didn’t expect to get thoroughly reoriented.
Mason Callahan is forty-three, freshly divorced, and very good at fixing things that aren’t himself. When he takes on the restoration of a crumbling 1896 Victorian in small-town Bellwether, New York, he expects bad plumbing, worse wiring, and a client who doesn’t understand budgets.
He does not expect Julian Vale.
Julian is thirty-two, openly queer, and makes a living teaching people how to want things honestly. He bought Wisteria House to build something permanent. He did not expect his contractor to be the most repressed, brooding, silver-templed man he’s ever met—or that making him blush would become a full-time hobby.
A ceiling collapses. Mason catches Julian. Their hands touch on a piece of etched glass, and something in Mason’s carefully constructed life starts to crack.
What starts as professional friction becomes forced proximity when a burst pipe puts them in the same tiny apartment. What starts as proximity becomes an arrangement—structured, consent-forward, with rules they both agree to follow. What starts as an arrangement becomes something neither of them planned for: real, messy, public, and worth fighting for.
But when a conservative neighborhood association challenges the workshops Julian plans to host, Mason has to decide: protect himself, or stand up in front of a town that’s known him his whole life and say the scariest word he’s ever spoken. Partner.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Bi awakening with a silver-fox contractor who discovers praise kink
✅ Age gap (43/32) with the older MC discovering himself
✅ Grumpy/sunshine that earns every smile
✅ Forced proximity in a tiny carriage-house apartment
✅ Fake dating that was never actually fake
✅ A sex educator who finally gets taken care of
✅ Small-town renovation romance with real stakes
✅ No third-act breakup
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Graphic, explicit, emotional heat
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, themes of late-in-life queer identity discovery, divorce aftermath, small-town homophobia, and emotional vulnerability. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Mason
The ceiling gave its only warning three seconds before it tried to kill a man I hadn’t met yet.
A groan. Not the settling kind — I’d spent twenty years listening to old houses talk, and this wasn’t conversation. This was a goodbye. The plaster overhead bowed like a sail filling with water, hairline cracks racing outward from a central sag that had no business being that deep.
I was already moving.
The guy standing directly beneath it — silk shirt, tight trousers, gesturing at the fireplace mantel like he was directing a film — had his back to the ceiling. He was mid-sentence, something about “reclaiming the sensual potential of domestic spaces,” and the cameraman across the room was either too focused on framing the shot or too unfamiliar with structural failure to notice the load above them shifting.
I grabbed the silk-shirt guy around the waist, lifted him clean off the floor, and hauled us both sideways through the parlor doorway as forty square feet of horsehair plaster and lath came down exactly where he’d been standing.
“Well,” he said, completely calm, tilting his head back to look up at me. Hazel-green eyes. A smile that could’ve cut glass. “That’s one way to make an entrance.”
I put him down. Stepped back. My heart was hammering, but not from the ceiling — or not entirely.
“This house is trying to kill you,” I said. “You should not be standing in it without a hard hat, and your cameraman should not be standing in it at all.”
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Blueprint — Three months after the HEA. Mason finds Julian’s annotated copy of The Pleasure Principle with margin notes about him. What follows is the filthiest, most tender scene in the series—in the library, with the door locked, and Julian finally letting Mason read every word.
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