The Escort Upstairs

MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Neighbors to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Escort Romance, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort, He Falls First, Praise Kink, Touch Starved

A shy artist becomes obsessed with the escort who lives upstairs — until he realizes every filthy story the man tells clients is actually about him.

Evan Torres moved into the cheapest apartment he could find — big windows, decent light, impossibly thin ceilings. He didn’t plan on hearing his upstairs neighbor’s entire sex life through the floor. He definitely didn’t plan on becoming obsessed with it. Or with him.

Nico Alvarez is a high-end escort with a small client list, a big reputation, and a rule he’s never broken: don’t mix work with real life. The shy comic artist downstairs — the one who blushes when Nico says his name, who draws him with more tenderness than anyone’s ever shown him — is making that rule very hard to follow.

When a misdelivered package, a late-night modeling session, and one devastating kiss on a kitchen counter bring them together, both of them know the line has been obliterated. But Nico still has clients. Evan still has pride. And the walls between them — thin enough to transmit every sound, every secret, every moan — can’t protect either of them from what happens when performance becomes real.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Neighbors to lovers with thin walls and zero privacy
✅ Escort romance that’s sex-work-positive with genuine HEA
✅ Shy artist x confident escort — “fell first, fell harder”
✅ Slow burn that DETONATES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ “Don’t perform for me” as a love language
✅ Found family, a cranky orange cat, and a succulent that refuses to die
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including oral, penetrative, and solo), strong language, depictions of sex work (escort), emotionally manipulative ex-partner (off-page), and themes of vulnerability and self-worth. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One: Move-In Day

The thing about rock bottom is that at least you don’t have to worry about the fall anymore.

That’s what I told myself as I hauled the last box up three flights of stairs in a building that smelled like old paint and someone’s aggressive curry habit.

But the apartment was mine.

Mine.

I shouldered open the door to 3B and set the box down on the floor. The apartment wasn’t much—one bedroom, a bathroom with a shower that looked like it had survived a war, a kitchen the size of a generous closet—but the living room had massive old windows that flooded the whole space with late-afternoon light. Good light. Drawing light.

This was going to work.

By nine p.m., I’d assembled the basics. Mattress on the floor. Desk under the big window. Dual monitors, drawing tablet, my dying succulent—Leonard—on the windowsill.

I cracked a beer, dropped into my desk chair, and pulled up my dashboard. Neon Alibi. My spicy MM webcomic. Fifteen thousand subscribers. A Patreon that covered groceries most months.

I had an episode due in four days and I’d drawn exactly zero panels. I cracked my knuckles, opened a blank canvas, and—

Thump.

I glanced at the ceiling.

Thump. Thump.

Rhythmic. Steady. Coming from directly above me.

Then a voice filtered through the ceiling. Deep. Male. Low, commanding, edged with a laugh. Another voice answered, higher, breathless.

Oh. Oh.

The thumping picked up speed. The bed frame settled into a relentless rhythm. A raw, unfiltered moan punched straight through the ceiling, the subfloor, the cheap carpet, and directly into my nervous system.

I sat at my desk, stylus frozen over the tablet, and listened to my upstairs neighbor fuck someone into next week.

The building was old. Whatever was between my apartment and the one above me might as well have been tissue paper. The creak of springs. A headboard tapping the wall like a metronome. Skin against skin. That deep voice: “—just like that, yeah, fuck—”

My face was on fire. I should put on headphones. I didn’t put on headphones.

The guy upstairs had a voice like velvet dragged over gravel—the kind of voice that didn’t need to shout to command a room. And whoever was with him was losing their entire mind.

Then the deep voice, soothing, almost tender: “I’ve got you. Let go.”

I was gripping the edge of my desk hard enough to leave dents. I was hard. Fully, painfully hard.

Jesus Christ.

Here’s the thing about being an artist: your hands betray you. Whatever’s living in your subconscious comes out through your fingers.

I meant to draw Episode 47. What came out instead was a body. Broad shoulders. A back that tapered to a narrow waist. Hands—large, strong, one braced against a headboard, fingers spread wide.

I drew for an hour. Hands gripping a headboard. A mouth open on a groan. A body curved over another body, dominant, giving, relentless. I saved every file in a folder I named “DO NOT OPEN.”

I stared at the ceiling for a long time.

Three a.m. Still awake. My brain kept replaying those sounds. That voice. The sharp crack of authority, then the raw, unguarded groan. The sigh afterward. The way confidence and loneliness could live in the same person, separated by nothing but an audience.

I’ve got you. Let go.

I fell asleep hard and dreamed about someone I’d never met.

Morning light slammed through the big windows at seven a.m. Normal morning. Normal building. Normal life. I was going to be fine.

I sat down at my desk and started sketching. Forty-five minutes in, I realized I’d given Dominic broader shoulders. A tapered waist. Hands braced with fingers spread wide. I’d drawn him. Again. Without even trying.

“What the hell did I move into?” I said to the empty apartment.

Leonard the succulent did not answer. He was too busy dying.

From above, a door opened and closed. Footsteps—confident, unhurried—crossed the ceiling and faded toward the stairwell. The upstairs neighbor was leaving.

And I knew, with bone-deep certainty, that I was already in trouble.

Spectacular, debilitating, utterly predictable trouble.

Welcome home.

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Visiting Hours — The First Morning — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

The morning after the book launch, Evan wakes up in Nico’s apartment for the first time as something permanent. Counter sex, whispered confessions, and the filthiest, most tender morning-after in the series.

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