Nothing to Do With the Heat — A Free MM Romance Scene by Jace Wilder (2026)
Another free scene, start to finish, no strings. This one’s from Jace Wilder — MM, roommates, the specific brand of trouble where a guy who’s never questioned himself starts questioning himself. If the voice lands, the full catalog is free with Kindle Unlimited, and every book page has a first chapter waiting.
Heads up: explicit scene, readers 18 and over. Two consenting adults, one apartment, no air conditioning. If that’s not your speed today, our reading guides are a gentler stop.
Nothing to Do With the Heat
The AC had been dead for three days and the landlord’s voicemail was still a recording of a man who had clearly never intended to answer a phone. By Thursday the apartment had stopped being a place to live and become a place to survive: fans in every doorway, blinds down, both of them stripped to whatever was legal.
Danny lay on the floor because the floor was the only cool surface left. Above him, sprawled sideways across the couch with one arm hanging off it, Wes said, “You know they used to hang wet sheets in doorways. Colonial trick.”
“You made that up.”
“Maybe.” A pause. “You want to test it or you want to keep dying dramatically on the rug?”
Danny turned his head. It was a mistake and he knew it was a mistake while he was doing it, the way you know about a step before you miss it. Wes had one forearm over his eyes and the rest of him just there — shorts, no shirt, a long stretch of him going gold in the light through the blinds, a shine of sweat at his collarbone. Danny had lived with him for fourteen months. He had seen this exact sight two hundred times. Something in the last few weeks had rearranged what it did to him.
“You’re staring,” Wes said, without moving the arm.
“I’m overheating.”
“Sure.” Wes lifted the forearm. Looked at him. Didn’t look away, which was new, and which changed the temperature of the room in a way that had nothing to do with the AC. “Danny.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re about to—” Danny sat up, which put them at eye level, which was worse. “I don’t know what this is. Okay? I’ve never — I don’t have a category for this.”
Wes swung his legs down and sat forward, elbows on his knees, close enough now that Danny could feel the heat coming off him separate from the heat of the room. His voice went quiet in a way Danny felt at the base of his spine.
“You don’t need a category. You just need to tell me to stop.”
Danny didn’t say anything.
“Say it and I’ll stop,” Wes said. “Right now. We’ll talk about the Mets and never mention it again, I swear to God.”
Danny’s heart was going like he’d run stairs. Fourteen months. Every shared beer, every three a.m. kitchen conversation, every time he’d caught himself looking and filed it under something else. He was so tired of filing it under something else.
“Don’t stop,” he said.
Wes moved off the couch and onto the floor with him in one motion, and then there was a hand at the back of Danny’s neck, warm and sure, and Wes kissed him like he’d been drafting it for weeks. Danny made a sound he didn’t recognize. Everything in him that had been carefully labeled came unlabeled at once. He got a fistful of Wes’s shorts and hauled him closer, and Wes laughed against his mouth — low, delighted, a little shaky — and said, “Yeah. Okay. There you are.”
The floor was still the coolest surface in the apartment. It didn’t stay that way.
Wes took his time, which Danny had not expected and had no defense against — a hand flat on his chest to press him down, a mouth at his throat, the slow deliberate mapping of a man who’d clearly thought about this in detail and was in no hurry now that he’d been given permission. Every time Danny tried to rush it Wes eased him back down with a hand and a murmured easy, and every time, Danny found he liked being eased back down more than he liked winning.
“Still with me?” Wes asked, somewhere south of Danny’s ribs.
“If you stop talking and keep doing that, yes.”
“Noted.” And then he didn’t talk for a while, and Danny stopped being able to, and the two box fans went on pushing hot air uselessly around a room that had entirely given up on the concept of cooling down.
Later they lay side by side on the floor, both wrecked, the light through the blinds gone orange.
“So,” Wes said, to the ceiling. “Colonial wet-sheet trick. Still on the table.”
Danny laughed, which hurt. “You are unbelievable.”
“I’m resourceful.” Wes turned his head. The cocky thing had slipped off him and what was underneath was much more dangerous — open, careful, a little scared. “Hey. You okay?”
And Danny, who had spent fourteen months not knowing what to call any of it, found that the answer arrived without any trouble at all.
“Yeah,” he said. “Ask me again tomorrow, though. I want to be asked again tomorrow.”
Wes’s whole face changed. “Tomorrow,” he agreed. “And I’m still not fixing the AC.”
Want the whole book?
If a guy figuring it out fourteen months too late is your flavor, that’s Jace Wilder’s entire lane — bi-awakening, roommates, age-gap, hockey, the works, with the tension wound tight and the payoff fully on the page. Every title is free to read with Kindle Unlimited. New to him? Straight Until Him is the usual starting point — newly divorced dad, spare room, younger coworker with more patience than he has defenses — and you can read its first chapter free.
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