Description

📖 Paperback Edition — Fifteen years of being his practice husband. Six rules in pencil. One day he finally knows.

Daniel Mercer has a key to Evan Shaw’s house, a drawer in Evan Shaw’s dresser, and his own coffee hidden behind Evan Shaw’s hazelnut. He knows where the passport is. He knows which salad to bring to Labor Day. He has been in love with his best friend since the second week of a summer job at the Harrow Inn, when he was twenty-one and Evan asked him how a spring was tied and actually listened.

Then the woman Evan’s dating takes one look and names the job: practice husband. And Evan asks Daniel, kindly, with his thumb on his wrist, to help get the guest room ready for whoever comes next.

So Daniel gives the key back. Empties the drawer. Signs a lease on the shop he’s wanted for years. Goes on a date.

Evan Shaw fixes boilers, runs crews, and has never once wondered why his best friend’s gray henley smells like that. Until it’s at his face in his own kitchen, and he’s hard, and the house is so quiet he can hear the fridge thinking. Until he’s sitting on Daniel’s stoop at eleven at night because another man kissed him, and he can’t say why.

He wants to find out. Daniel says that’s practice. Then Daniel turns over a fabric invoice and writes the rules in pencil. Not at your house. Nobody sleeps over. No favors. You ask, every time, every new thing. Nobody knows. And the sixth: It ends the day you know what you are.

Evan keeps every rule like it’s a load-bearing wall. He asks before he kisses Daniel’s neck. He asks before he gets on his knees. He learns that the words look at you go through him like current. And then, on his parents’ porch swing in October, he knows exactly what he is, and he can’t say it, because the day he says it, it’s over.

🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno • MM Best Friends to Lovers Romance by Jace Wilder

Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers • Bisexual Awakening • Fifteen Years of Pining • Practice Turns Real • Rules in Writing • Ask Every Time • Praise Kink • Competence Kink • Blue-Collar Hero • Small-Town Upstate New York • Coming Out • First Time with a Man • Grovel Done Right • Found Family • No Cheating • HEA

Paperback details: 6 × 9 in • cream paper • matte cover. Includes a link to the exclusive bonus chapter.

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including solo scenes, hand jobs, oral sex, anal sex and a first time bottoming, praise and instruction play, wrists held down by request, sex in a shower, a truck, a workshop and on furniture, and unprotected sex between tested, committed partners; all on-page sex is consensual and asked for), a hero discovering his bisexuality and coming out to his family and his ex-wife, the aftermath of a divorce, references to the death of a parent, a workplace betting pool on the couple that wounds one of them, a partner going behind the other’s back on a business decision and the fallout, a brief third-act separation, alcohol, and strong language. No cheating, no sexual violence, no love triangle. Intended for readers 18+.

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