Straight on Paper

MM Single Dad Romance
by Chase Power

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Straight Awakening, Single Dad, Neighbors to Lovers, Praise Kink, First Time MM, Touch Starved, Forced Proximity, Found Family, Slow Burn

He measured twice and cut once his whole life. Then the librarian next door made him want to tear everything down.

Adrian Vale has spent thirty-four years being the safe choice. The reliable one. The man people date between the exciting ones. His last boyfriend told him he was perfect on paper but not enough to feel something for, and Adrian has been quietly organizing his life around that sentence ever since — a quiet house, a job he loves, a yard full of wildflowers, and the careful contentment of a man who has stopped expecting more.

Cole Mercer is the tattooed contractor next door with sawdust in his hair, a six-year-old daughter who runs his life, and an ex-wife who left a note on the kitchen table four years ago. He is exhausted. He is stubborn. He does everything alone because needing someone is how you get left.

He is also, definitively, straight. He has never questioned it. Not once.

It starts with a soccer ball over the fence. Then favors. Then dinners. Then Tuesday pickups and bedtime stories and a gap in the fence that both of them keep finding reasons to walk through. And when Cole’s daughter falls at school and Adrian is the one who catches her, something breaks open in a kitchen twelve feet from where Cole sleeps — and Cole kisses him, and everything he thought he knew about himself comes apart in his hands.

What follows is tender, filthy, and devastating: first-time exploration, praise that unlocks something Cole did not know was starving, and a slow domestic burn that pays off in the dark, night after night, after the kid is asleep.

But Adrian has been someone’s secret before. And when Cole’s ex-wife moves back to town and asks who the neighbor is, Cole gives the safe answer instead of the true one — and Adrian, for the first time in his life, chooses himself.

Cole is going to have to figure out how to say what he means. He is bad at words. But he is very, very good at building things.

You will love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Straight guy awakening handled with real emotional weight
✅ Single-dad softness and a kid who steals every scene
✅ Praise kink that is central to the story, not decoration
✅ Neighbors to lovers with a fence gap that becomes a metaphor
✅ First-time MM exploration written slow, careful, and explicit
✅ A grand gesture built with hands instead of words
✅ Domestic heat, after-bedtime intensity, and repeated intimacy
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotionally devastating
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, references to parental abandonment, discussion of untreated postpartum depression, internalized fear around sexuality, and a child character in non-sexual domestic scenes. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One: Adrian

The thing about inheriting a dead woman’s house is that it never stops smelling like her.

Eight months I had been here, and Grandma Bea’s lavender sachets still ambushed me from closet shelves, coat pockets, the hollow space behind the radiator in the guest room I had converted into an office. I had aired the place out, painted the kitchen a shade of sage green she would have hated, replaced the curtains with linen panels that let in actual sunlight. I had done everything short of an exorcism. And still, on certain mornings—always Saturdays, always when the light came through the east window at exactly the right angle—I would catch a whiff of dried lavender and half-expect to hear her slippers on the hardwood.

This was one of those mornings.

I sat in the Adirondack chair I had dragged into the backyard because the patio furniture Grandma Bea left behind was wrought-iron and punishing, and I had decided months ago that my Saturday mornings were no longer going to involve suffering. Coffee in my left hand. Ishiguro in my right. The yard was overgrown in the way I had deliberately cultivated—wildflowers along the fence line, the hydrangea bushes left to do whatever hydrangea bushes do when you stop micromanaging them. It looked careless. It was not. I was a librarian. Control was my love language.

The neighbor’s lawn mower started up around nine, which was approximately when my peaceful morning went sideways.

I did not look over. I was a disciplined man. I had seen the neighbor before—brief waves from driveways, a nod at the mailbox, the back of his head through the kitchen window while I stood at my own kitchen window eating cereal like a normal person and absolutely not cataloging the width of his shoulders. I knew three things about him: his name was Cole, he had a daughter, and he mowed his lawn shirtless.

That third detail was, in my professional opinion, an act of aggression.

I turned a page I had not read and sipped my coffee and committed to the performance of a man unbothered by the sound of a two-stroke engine and whatever was happening on the other side of that fence. The morning was warm. The book was good. I was thirty-four years old, gainfully employed, emotionally solvent, and absolutely not going to develop a fixation on the heterosexual single father who lived twelve feet from my bedroom wall.

The universe heard this and laughed.

The soccer ball cleared the fence with the lazy arc of something that had been kicked by someone very small and very enthusiastic. It bounced twice on the grass and rolled to a stop against my chair.

I looked at the ball. Looked at the fence. And then a face appeared in the gap between the boards—one missing slat at ground level that I had noticed but never investigated, because investigating gaps in fences that separated me from shirtless men felt like a slope I should not start down.

The face was small, brown-eyed, and framed by a tangle of dark hair that suggested either a strong personal style or a father who had lost the morning’s brush negotiation.

“Hi,” the face said.

“Hi,” I said.

“That’s my ball.”

“I see that.”

“Can I have it back?”

“Sure.” I set my coffee on the arm of the chair and picked up the ball. Walked it over to the fence. Crouched down to the gap. Up close, the kid was maybe six, with a gap-toothed grin and a smear of something purple on her chin—grape jelly or marker, no way to tell. “Here you go.”

She did not take it. Instead she pressed her whole face into the gap and peered past me into the yard. “Do you have any cool bugs?”

“I—” I looked over my shoulder at the wildflowers, the hydrangeas, the general state of mild botanical chaos. “Probably? I have not conducted a formal survey.”

“I like beetles,” she said, like this was critical information I needed to proceed. “And pill bugs. And praying mantises. But not centipedes because they have too many legs and it’s suspicious.”

“Suspicious,” I repeated.

“Nothing needs that many legs unless it’s up to something.”

I was in love with this child.

“That’s a strong thesis,” I said. “I’m Adrian.”

“I’m Lily. My dad is right there.” She pointed vaguely behind her. “He’s mowing. He always mows on Saturday. He takes his shirt off because he says it’s hot but I think he just doesn’t like shirts.”

I pressed my lips together very hard.

“LILY.” The voice came from across their yard—deep, a little rough, the vocal equivalent of someone running on three hours of sleep and coffee-fueled determination. “Lily, are you bothering the neighbor?”

“I’m not BOTHERING him, Daddy. We’re having a conversation about BUGS.”

Footsteps in the grass. Getting closer. I stood up from the fence gap and took a breath and reminded myself that I was a composed, rational adult who did not get flustered by—

Cole Mercer came around the corner of the fence, and every composed, rational thought I had ever had packed a bag and left.

He was shirtless—of course he was shirtless, Lily had just told me he did not like shirts, and the evidence was right here, six-foot-one of evidence with sweat on his collarbones and sawdust in his hair and tattoo sleeves that started at his wrists and disappeared over shoulders wide enough to make the fence look narrow. He had a jaw that belonged on a wanted poster and stubble that suggested he had stopped shaving around the same time he had stopped sleeping and hands that were rough and huge and currently holding a water bottle with an ease that made me feel personally victimized.

He was, objectively, the most physically devastating human being I had ever seen in my life. And he was looking at me with an expression of mild parental exasperation and absolutely zero awareness that he had just ruined my entire morning.

“Hey. Sorry about her.” He hooked a thumb at Lily. “She treats property lines as suggestions.”

“I don’t mind,” I said, in a voice that sounded almost normal. “She was telling me about centipedes.”

“The leg thing?”

“The leg thing.”

He shook his head, but the corner of his mouth twitched. “She’s been on that for weeks. I made the mistake of showing her a nature documentary and now everything with more than four legs is part of a conspiracy.”

Lily appeared at his side, leaning against his leg with the casual ownership of a child who knew she was the center of someone’s entire universe. Cole’s hand came down to rest on top of her head automatically, fingers disappearing into that tangle of hair. The gesture was so unconscious, so practiced, that something behind my sternum did a slow, painful roll.

I had always been weak for competent tenderness. And this man was radiating it like body heat.

“I’m Adrian,” I said. “We’ve waved a few times but I don’t think we’ve actually—”

“Cole.” He shifted the water bottle to his left hand and extended his right. I shook it. His palm was calloused, warm, and his grip was firm without being performative. The handshake lasted exactly the appropriate amount of time, and I felt it in my spine. “You moved into Bea’s place, right? She was great. Used to give Lily cookies through the fence.”

“She was my grandmother.”

“Oh.” His face changed—softened. “Shit. I mean—sorry. She was a really good neighbor. Lily loved her.”

“She loved kids.” I cleared my throat. “I’m settling in. Still finding her hidden stashes of butterscotch in every drawer.”

He smiled, and the wanted poster jaw turned into something warmer and infinitely worse. He had a dimple. One. Left side. It appeared without warning and vanished just as fast, like his face was not sure it had permission to do that.

Absolutely not, I told myself. You will not fixate on the dimple.

“So what do you do?” he asked, and I realized with a start that he was making conversation. Voluntarily. Shirtlessly. In my grandmother’s backyard.

“I’m the head librarian at the Elm Street branch.”

“Oh yeah?” His eyebrows went up—genuine interest, not the polite glaze I usually got. “Lily, did you hear that? Adrian works at the library.”

Lily’s eyes went wide. “The one with the fish tank?”

“The very one.”

“Can I come see the fish?!”

“Lily—” Cole started.

“Anytime,” I said. “We have a new angelfish. His name is Gerald.”

“GERALD.” She said it like I had just told her the fish was also a secret agent. “Daddy, can we go? Can we go to the library and see Gerald?”

Cole rubbed the back of his neck—bicep flexing, tattoo stretching, sweat trailing down the side of his rib cage, all of which I cataloged with the clinical detachment of a man in crisis. “Yeah, sure, bug. This week.”

“I’m there Tuesday through Saturday,” I offered, because apparently I had decided that being helpful was more important than self-preservation. “Story time is Wednesday mornings if she’s interested.”

“Story time,” Lily whispered, like I had offered her the Holy Grail.

Cole looked at me with something between gratitude and helplessness—the expression of a man who had just been outmaneuvered by a six-year-old and a librarian in the same sixty seconds. “Thanks. That would be—yeah. Thanks.”

He held my gaze a beat longer than necessary. Or maybe I held his. The moment had a texture to it—warm air, fresh-cut grass, the particular quality of late-morning light on bare skin—and I could feel myself filing it away in the part of my brain that cataloged beautiful, useless things I was not allowed to keep.

“So, librarian,” he said, and leaned against the fence post in a way that suggested he was not leaving yet and also that fence posts had been specifically invented to make his shoulders look like that. “You do anything to this yard? Looks different from when Bea had it.”

“I let it go feral on purpose.” I gestured at the wildflower border. “Structured neglect. It’s a whole philosophy.”

He looked at the yard with real attention, not the cursory glance of someone being polite. “Huh. Looks good. I’ve been saying I need to do something with mine but—” He blew out a breath. “There’s always something else.”

“You do construction?”

“Renovation. I run my own thing—kitchens, bathrooms, the occasional full gut.” He lifted his chin toward his house. “That place is my longest-running project. Been at it two years and the guest bathroom still doesn’t have baseboards.”

“The cobbler’s children go barefoot.”

He blinked. Then grinned—a real one, the dimple reappearing like a warning shot. “Yeah. Exactly that.” He shifted his weight, and Lily squirmed against his hip. “If you ever need anything looked at, I’m right there. Twelve feet.” He pointed at the fence, echoing what I had said about the library, and something about the symmetry of it—you know where I live, I know where you live—made my chest tighten.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Lily, come on. Let the man read his book.” He glanced at my chair, at the Ishiguro abandoned on the armrest. “What is it?”

“Never Let Me Go.”

He squinted. “That a romance?”

“Not exactly.”

“I haven’t read a book since high school,” he said, with the cheerful self-deprecation of someone who had made peace with that particular gap in his life. “Unless you count IKEA instructions, which I don’t, because those aren’t written in any human language.”

I almost said something flirty. Something about how I could recommend him something better than IKEA instructions. Something about how I was literally a professional at putting the right book in someone’s hands. The sentence was right there, formed and ready, and I caught it between my teeth and swallowed it. Because flirting with the straight single dad through the fence on a Saturday morning was not a chapter I was opening.

No.

“Well,” I said, “if you ever want a recommendation, you know where I live.”

He laughed. Short, surprised, like he had not expected to. “Yeah. Twelve feet that way.” He pointed at the fence. “All right, Lily, let’s go. You’ve still got a yard to destroy.”

“Bye, Adrian!” Lily waved with her whole arm, her whole body really, vibrating with the seriousness of a new friendship she had unilaterally decided into existence. “I’m gonna come see Gerald!”

“He’ll be waiting.”

Cole scooped her up with one arm—one arm, effortlessly, like she weighed nothing—and she perched on his hip with her arms around his neck and her legs swinging. He gave me a nod, a half-smile, and turned back toward their yard. I watched them go, because I was standing right there and looking away would have been weird, and not because I needed to see the way his back muscles shifted when he carried her.

They disappeared around the side of their house. The lawn mower did not start again. I heard the screen door bang shut, and then it was just me, and the abandoned soccer ball I realized she had left behind, and the quiet.

I did not go back to the book.

I tried. Sat down, picked up the Ishiguro, read the same paragraph three times without absorbing a single word. My coffee had gone lukewarm. The morning was still beautiful, still exactly what I had designed it to be—calm and solitary and mine—and all I could think about was a dimple and the sawdust in his hair and the way his voice sounded when he said his daughter’s name.

I put the book down and pressed my palms against my eyes.

This was a familiar feeling. Not the attraction—that was just chemistry, just biology, just my body doing what bodies did when confronted with someone who looked like that. I could handle attraction.

No, the familiar feeling was the other thing. The pull beneath the want. The part of me that had watched Cole Mercer hold his daughter and talk about IKEA instructions and rub the back of his neck with a calloused hand and thought, not just I want him, but I want that. The warmth. The chaos. The someone-to-come-home-to of it.

I had done this before. Fallen for the warmth of someone else’s life and mistaken proximity for invitation. David had been warm, too—in the beginning. And then, gradually, he had stopped pulling. Stopped introducing. Started leaving me in the other room altogether, where I would wait with a drink and a smile and the growing suspicion that I was not the main character of my own love story.

You’re perfect on paper, Adrian. I just don’t feel it.

Perfect on paper. What a thing to say to someone who had built his whole life out of paper.

Then Grandma Bea died and left me a house with lavender in the walls, and I had moved here because a fresh start seemed healthier than admitting the truth, which was that I was thirty-four and lonely in a way that had calcified into personality. Where you build a yard full of wildflowers and read novels about loss and drink your coffee and call it peace, and maybe it is peace, and maybe peace is just loneliness with better lighting.

And then a soccer ball clears the fence and a six-year-old tells you about centipedes and her father stands in your yard looking like something carved out of cedar and exhaustion, and suddenly the lighting changes.

I picked up my phone.

Me: I’m in trouble.

Nina: Scale of 1 to David?

Me: Don’t say that name to me.

Nina: That bad? Who is he.

Me: The neighbor.

Nina: Lawn mower neighbor? Shirtless lawn mower neighbor??

Me: I need you to stop using that many question marks.

Nina: Adrian. ADRIAN. He is heterosexual. He has a CHILD.

Me: I’m aware.

Nina: Gay men do not develop crushes on straight dads. That’s not a thing you’re doing.

Me: His daughter told me he doesn’t like shirts, Nina. She told me that with her mouth. While he stood there. Without a shirt.

Nina: I’m going to need you to go inside, drink some water, and think about what you’re doing.

Me: He has one dimple.

Nina: Oh no.

Me: Just one. Left side. It shows up without warning.

Nina: Adrian Vale, do NOT fall in love with a straight man through a fence gap.

Me: I’m not falling in love. I’m reporting a hazard.

Nina: Same thing with you.

I put the phone down and stared at the fence.

She was right. She was always right, in the annoying, undeniable way of best friends who had watched you make the same mistake enough times to recognize the opening sequence.

I was not going to do this again. I was going to be the man I had spent eight months becoming—settled, self-sufficient, at peace with the quiet life I had chosen in a dead woman’s house. I was going to wave at Cole Mercer from my driveway and recommend age-appropriate books for his daughter and never, ever think about the sweat on his collarbones or the way his hand looked on top of Lily’s head.

I was going to be smart about this.

I picked up the soccer ball and set it by the fence gap, where Lily could find it. Then I went inside, washed my coffee mug, and stood at the kitchen window and watched the empty yard next door and told myself it was fine.

It was fine.

That night I lay in bed in the dark and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood settling. A dog barking two streets over. The hiss of sprinklers. And through the wall—the thin, shared wall between my grandmother’s house and Cole Mercer’s half-renovated one—the faint melody of someone singing.

It was off-key. Barely a murmur. But I recognized it after a moment, something from a kids’ movie, the kind of song a father sang when he was putting his daughter to bed and did not think anyone could hear. He held the notes too long and flattened the high ones and it was, without exaggeration, the most disarming thing I had ever listened to through a wall.

I pressed my face into the pillow and breathed.

The singing stopped. A door closed softly. Footsteps moved through his house—heavy, tired, familiar already.

I lay in the dark and did not sleep for a long time.

The lavender smell found me from somewhere—a sachet I had missed, tucked behind the headboard, papery and faded and still holding on.

I left it where it was.

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Sunday Dinner — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Cole brings Adrian to his parents’ house for brisket. Marco asks about his workout routine. Cole’s mother hugs him goodbye like he is already family. And then they get home, and Cole finds out exactly what being claimed in daylight does to a man who spent his whole life being someone’s secret.

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