Description

They’ve been best friends for twenty-five years. It took one bed to ruin everything.

Colin Ward and Mateo Silva have done it all side by side. High school football. Each other’s weddings. Raising sons across the street from each other. Getting divorced in the same miserable year.

So when their teenage boys guilt them into one last road trip to the Outer Banks, Colin figures he can survive nine days in a car with the man he’s spent his whole life not looking at.

Then a booking error puts them in one room.
A storm puts them in one bed.
And one kiss in the dark puts an end to twenty-five years of pretending.

Mateo’s been in love with his best friend for as long as he can remember, and he’s done settling for whatever’s left over. If Colin wants him, he can say it sober, in daylight, out loud.

Colin wants him. God, does he want him. But wanting Mateo at a beach house is one thing. Wanting him at home — in front of an ex-wife, a son, and a whole small town — is another.

The road back is nine hours long. And only one of them is done hiding.

The Year We Stopped Pretending is a high-heat MM romance with lifelong best friends to lovers, divorced dads, bisexual awakening, only one bed, a road trip that goes very wrong and very right, and a hard-won, out-loud HEA.

Ebook edition (EPUB). For readers 18+.

Why you’ll love this book

Lifelong best friends to lovers, twenty-five years in the making
Two divorced dads and the teenage sons who set them up
Bisexual awakening at thirty-eight
One car, one motel room, then only one bed
A boundary worth swooning over: sober, daylight, out loud
Praise kink, dirty talk, and a history teacher who turns out to be very loud
Small-town coming out and a found family at one long table

Ebook edition

Format: Digital EPUB ebook (not a printed or audio edition). Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno. Audience: 18+.

Content notes

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including oral, anal, rimming, mutual masturbation and a solo scene), strong language, alcohol use, divorce and co-parenting, bisexual awakening and coming out later in life, a teenager seeing his father kiss a man before he has been told, a parent lying to his son about a relationship (and repairing it on the page), references to a disapproving late father, and a temporary breakup. There is no cheating between the leads. Intended for readers 18+.

Read Chapter One free · See the audiobook edition · More books by Jace Wilder