Call Me When You’re Curious
MM Bi-Awakening Romance
by Jace Wilder
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bi Awakening, Neighbors to Lovers, Friends with Benefits, Praise Kink, Size Difference, Secret Relationship, Divorced Dad, Slow Burn, He Falls First, Touch Starved
He asked for one night of experimentation. He keeps inventing reasons to call back.
Merrick Dane is a divorced construction foreman who hasn’t wanted anyone since his marriage ended. Then his new neighbor dances barefoot through an uncurtained window, and something cracks in a wall Merrick didn’t know he’d built. He’s never been attracted to a man before. He’s never been attracted to anyone like this.
Soren Vale is a freelance interior stylist who’s done being someone’s secret. When the gorgeous, clueless neighbor asks for one discreet night of experimentation, Soren agrees — but sets one condition: Merrick has to say what he wants. Out loud. In words.
What starts as a once-a-week arrangement behind closed doors becomes something neither man can contain. Merrick discovers that Soren’s praise unlocks a side of himself he didn’t know existed — bolder, hungrier, openly possessive. Soren discovers that the careful man who fixes things without being asked is the first person who’s ever made him feel impossible to erase.
But Merrick’s rules are clear: only at night, only at Soren’s house, no public acknowledgment. And Soren has promised himself he’ll never again be the man someone loves in the dark and ignores in the light. When the arrangement collapses, Merrick has to decide: keep building walls, or tear them down and become the man who knocks on Soren’s door in daylight.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Bi-awakening with a divorced dad who falls HARD
✅ Neighbors to lovers with a shared wall (and everything that implies)
✅ Praise kink that transforms both men
✅ Size difference played to devastating effect
✅ Rules that break one by one until nothing’s left but honesty
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ A twelve-year-old daughter who steals every scene she’s in
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including penetrative sex, oral, and mutual exploration), strong language, bi-awakening, themes of parental abandonment, and depictions of emotional avoidance. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: The Neighbor in the Window
The leak in my kitchen had been dripping for eleven days.
I knew because I’d set a mixing bowl under it the first night and told myself I’d fix it in the morning. Eleven mornings later, the bowl was still there, collecting water in a rhythm I could hear from the living room if the house was quiet enough — which it always was.
I could rebuild a stranger’s entire bathroom in a weekend. Reframe a load-bearing wall before lunch. I’d once replaced a rotted subfloor during a thunderstorm because the homeowner had a baby sleeping upstairs and couldn’t wait until Monday.
My own kitchen faucet leaked, and I set a bowl under it like a man who didn’t own a wrench.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about divorce. It’s not the loneliness that surprises you — you expected that, prepared for it, bought new sheets and a smaller coffee maker like supplies for an expedition. What surprises you is the way your own competence starts to feel like a performance. You spend all day being the guy who fixes things, and then you come home to a house where nothing is arranged for anyone’s comfort, and the faucet drips, and you think: Who exactly am I performing for?
It was a Thursday in late September. I’d spent nine hours on an emergency call-out — a first-floor bathroom renovation that had gone sideways when the plumber found galvanized pipes behind the original tile. The homeowner, a retired teacher named Gladys who kept offering me lemonade, had looked at the exposed wall cavity like it was an open wound. I’d talked her through the options, priced the repair on the spot, and promised my crew would be back Monday to make it right.
By the time I pulled my truck into the narrow driveway, my shoulders ached from working overhead, there was thinset dust in my beard, and a blister had opened on my right palm where the grout float had rubbed through my glove. I sat in the cab for a minute with the engine off, listening to the lake wind push through the trees behind the townhouse row.
My place was the end unit. Two-story, brick-front, built in the eighties with the kind of solid bones that made up for the uninspired layout. I’d bought it after the divorce because it was close to Elodie’s school, structurally sound, and priced for a man whose ex-wife had kept the real house. I’d painted the walls a warm white, installed better lighting in the kitchen, and replaced every doorknob and hinge with hardware that actually fit. Then I’d stopped.
The furniture was functional. The art was nonexistent. I had one good lamp in the living room, a couch that had been on clearance because the fabric was a color nobody wanted, and a kitchen table where only one of the four chairs ever got pulled out.
It was a house that looked like someone was about to move into it. Two years later, I still hadn’t.
I climbed out of the truck, grabbed my tool belt from the passenger seat, and headed for the front door. The air smelled like woodsmoke and the first edge of cold — someone on the row had started using their fireplace. My boots were heavy on the concrete path, and I was thinking about the shower I needed and the leftover pasta I’d eat standing over the sink when I saw the light.
Soren’s place was the next unit over. We shared a wall — my bedroom backed up against his living room, a fact I tried not to think about on the nights I could hear his music through the drywall. He’d moved in five months ago, and in that time I’d learned three things about him: his name was Soren, he did something with interior design, and he had more visitors in a month than I’d had in two years.
The light came from his front window. He never closed his curtains — not fully, anyway. They were some kind of gauzy linen, the sort of thing that filtered light instead of blocking it, which meant his living room glowed like a lantern after dark.
He was rearranging furniture.
That’s what I told myself I was watching: a man moving a chair. Nothing worth stopping for.
But I stopped.
Soren had his back to the window, barefoot on what looked like a cream-colored rug, and he was positioning an oversized art print against the far wall — stepping back, tilting his head, shifting it two inches to the left. He wore a linen shirt, untucked, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and a pair of dark lounge shorts that sat low on his hips. His hair was black and thick with curls that fell across his forehead, and even from this angle I could see the small gold hoops in his ears catching the lamplight.
He moved to the other side of the print, and that’s when his hips shifted.
It wasn’t a dance, exactly. It was the kind of unconscious movement that happens when someone is alone and comfortable — weight transferring from one foot to the other, a slight roll through the spine, his free hand trailing along a bookshelf as he passed it. There was music playing, something I couldn’t hear through the glass but could read in the way his shoulders responded to a beat.
I stood on the path between our front doors, tool belt in one hand, keys in the other, and watched a man I barely knew move through his own living room like it was choreographed.
My chest did something I didn’t have a name for. Not exactly tightening — more like a catch, the way a lock engages when you turn the key to the right position. A mechanical sensation. Something slotting into place that I hadn’t known was out of alignment.
He turned.
Soren looked directly at me through the window. No startle, no embarrassment. His expression shifted from concentration to amusement in the space of a breath — dark brows lifting, that sharp mouth curving into something that was either a smile or a challenge. He held a wine glass in his left hand. He raised it in my direction.
Not a toast. An acknowledgment. I see you seeing me.
My neck went hot. The heat climbed up from my collar and spread across my jaw, and I was suddenly, vividly aware of how I looked — sawdust in my hair, dried thinset on my forearms, standing in the dark like a man who’d forgotten where his front door was.
I turned away. Got inside. Shut the door behind me and leaned against it like I was keeping something out.
The kitchen faucet dripped into the mixing bowl.
In the morning I fixed the faucet. It took nine minutes. I’d known it would take nine minutes for eleven days.
I stood at the kitchen sink, testing the handle, watching the water flow clean and steady with no drip, and I did not look out the window at Soren’s house.
I didn’t need to. I already knew the light was on.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Garden Gate — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Six months after the gate. Merrick comes home from a job site to find Soren working in the studio wearing nothing but his henley. What starts as a homecoming kiss against the drafting table becomes the filthiest, most tender encounter in the series — sawdust, white oak, and the man who built the room worshipping the man he built it for.
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