Breaking His Bedframe

MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Forced Proximity, Opposites Attract, Blue Collar / Bookish, Touch Starved, Praise Kink, Renovation Romance, Slow Burn, Small Town

He came to fix the house. He wrecked the homeowner instead.

Theo Wren inherits a crumbling Victorian from his late grandmother and a handwritten note that says: Make it yours. Fill it with noise. He’s a quiet, precise librarian who just escaped a relationship so forgettable his ex probably didn’t notice he left. He can catalog a rare manuscript in four minutes. He cannot fix a faucet.

Garrett Shaw is the town’s best carpenter — confident, flirty, and dangerously good with his hands. He shows up to assess the damage and finds a shy man in crooked glasses holding a tea mug like armor. The house needs months of work. Garrett needs about thirty seconds to know he’s in trouble.

Every repair brings them closer. Every room becomes charged. The measurements require standing too close. The crawlspace requires honesty in the dark. And when Garrett reinforces the antique bedframe with steel brackets and grade-eight bolts, the promise he makes has nothing to do with furniture.

But Garrett has a pattern — he pours himself into people the way he pours himself into projects, and when the work ends, they leave. Theo has a pattern too — he shows too much, wants too openly, and gets set down like a book that wasn’t worth finishing.

The house is almost done. The kitchen is nearly finished. And both men are about to discover that the hardest renovation isn’t the one with a blueprint — it’s the one that requires tearing down the walls you built to protect yourself.

Breaking His Bedframe is a 71,000-word MM contemporary romance featuring a touch-starved librarian, a carpenter who speaks love through lumber, a bedframe that earns its title, and a guaranteed HEA. High heat. No cliffhanger. The bedframe holds.

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, themes of parental neglect and emotional abandonment, and depictions of anxiety and self-doubt. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: The Inheritance

THEO

The house looked like it was trying to die.

Not dramatically, not in the way of condemned buildings with their boarded windows and spray-painted warnings. Margot Wren’s Victorian was dying the way old women did—quietly, with dignity, one system failing at a time while the exterior maintained a stubborn pretense of holding together.

I stood in the driveway with my suitcase in one hand and the for-sale sign I’d just yanked out of the lawn in the other, staring at the sagging porch like it owed me an explanation. The realtor had put it up two weeks after the funeral. I’d called her from my apartment in Boston, still wearing the suit I’d worn to scatter the ashes, and told her to take it down. She’d said, “Mr. Wren, in its current condition, the property would be difficult to—”

I’d hung up. Bought the sign removal as a plane ticket and a resignation letter and a breakup that barely registered as one.

Now I was here. The sign was in my hand. The house was in front of me. And somewhere between the two, my life had become something I didn’t recognize.

I dropped the sign in the overgrown grass and walked up the porch steps. The third one groaned under my weight, which was insulting given that I weighed a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet. The key stuck in the lock the way it always had—a quarter turn left, then jiggle, then force. The door swung open and the smell hit me: dust, old wood, the ghost of Margot’s lavender sachets she used to tuck into every drawer and closet.

I stepped inside and the floor creaked a greeting.

“Hi,” I said to the empty foyer, because apparently I was the kind of person who talked to houses now. “I’m back.”

The house didn’t answer. But the kitchen faucet was dripping, so at least something in here had a pulse.

I did the walkthrough the way I’d been trained to do everything—methodically, room by room, cataloging damage like I was processing an acquisition of water-stained first editions. Living room: wallpaper peeling in the northeast corner, a crack running along the ceiling medallion, the fireplace mantel listing slightly to the left. Dining room: intact, mostly, though the window frame had swollen shut and the chandelier was missing two crystals. Kitchen: the faucet, obviously, plus a cabinet door hanging from one hinge, tile grout that had gone from white to gray to something approaching geological, and a smell coming from under the sink that I chose not to investigate.

The stairs were fine. The stairs had always been fine. Margot used to say the stairs were the spine of the house, and she’d had them rebuilt in 1987 with the insurance money from a tree that fell on the garage. “Everything else can rot,” she’d told me once, pouring lemonade on the porch while I was twelve and sunburned and pretending to read Treasure Island. “But if the stairs go, you can’t get to bed, and if you can’t get to bed, what’s the point of having a house?”

I climbed them now, one hand on the banister, listening to each step for signs of weakness. Solid. All of them. Margot’s spine held.

The upstairs hallway was another story. The floor had a soft spot about four feet from the bathroom door—I could feel it give under my shoe like stepping on a sponge. I made a mental note, the kind of mental note that meant I have no idea how to fix this and will probably just avoid stepping here for the rest of my life.

The bathroom: functional. The toilet ran. The shower head had a slow drip that had left a rust stain shaped like Italy on the tub floor. The mirror above the sink was clouded at the edges, turning my reflection into something impressionist. I looked tired. I looked like a man who had driven four hours, pulled a sign out of a lawn, and was now standing in a bathroom cataloging his dead grandmother’s plumbing failures.

I looked exactly like what I was.

The master bedroom was last. I’d been avoiding it the way you avoid the final page of a book you don’t want to end, but the house wasn’t going to inventory itself.

I pushed the door open.

The ceiling had a water stain the size of a card table, brownish-yellow and vaguely continental—South America, maybe, if South America had been drawn by someone who’d only heard it described. The hardwood floor had buckled near the window where rain must have been coming in. The curtains were sun-bleached to a color that no longer existed in nature.

And the bed.

Margot’s bed. The antique iron bedframe she’d bought at an estate sale in 1972 and had shipped from Vermont at a cost she’d refused to disclose to anyone, ever. It was a beautiful thing—scrollwork headboard, graceful curves, matte black iron that had developed a patina of age that antique dealers would’ve called “character” and structural engineers would’ve called “corrosion.”

I touched the footboard. The whole frame swayed.

I pushed it, gently. It rocked like a cradle.

I pushed it harder and something in the joint let out a sound that was either a creak or a cry for help.

“Great,” I said. To the bed. Because I talked to furniture now too.

I didn’t unpack in the master bedroom. I couldn’t. It still felt like Margot’s—her curtains, her water stain, her bed frame holding on by sheer stubbornness and forty-year-old welds. I took the smaller bedroom down the hall, the one I’d slept in every summer between the ages of eight and seventeen, the one with the twin bed and the window that looked out over the backyard maple.

The twin bed was fine. Solid, boring, adequate. It had a mattress that was probably older than I was and a quilt that smelled like cedar and time.

I sat on it and opened the nightstand drawer, looking for nothing, expecting nothing.

The note was folded once, tucked under a pen and a packet of throat lozenges. Margot’s handwriting—shaky in the last year but still legible, still precise, still hers.

Theo—

Make it yours. Fill it with noise.

—M

I read it three times. Then I folded it back up and put it in my pocket and sat on the twin bed in the small bedroom and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until the pressure hurt more than the feeling underneath it.

Fill it with noise. That was rich. I was the quietest person I knew. I’d built my entire life around silence—silent libraries, silent apartments, silent relationships with men who were perfectly content to let me disappear into the background of their lives. Daniel had once gone an entire Saturday without speaking to me. Not out of anger. Out of forgetting I was there.

I took my hands away from my eyes. The room was dim. The house was silent. Outside, a bird was singing something repetitive and optimistic, which felt like a personal attack.

I went downstairs to fix the kitchen faucet.

I should note here, for the record, that I am a reference librarian. I have a master’s degree in library science. I can locate a seventeenth-century land deed in a county archive in under four minutes. I can identify a first edition by the binding alone. I once helped a woman trace her genealogy back to the Mayflower using nothing but census records and a microfiche machine that was older than democracy.

I cannot fix a faucet.

I tried. I got under the sink with a wrench I’d found in Margot’s junk drawer, identified what I believed to be the shut-off valve, and turned it.

Water hit me in the face like a rebuke.

I scrambled backward, banging my head on the cabinet, and grabbed the valve and turned it the other way—harder, faster, with the kind of panic that only comes from being personally attacked by plumbing. The water stopped. The dripping stopped. Everything stopped except the inch of water now pooling on the kitchen floor and soaking through the knees of my khakis.

I sat on the wet floor with my back against the cabinet and my wrench in my lap and my glasses speckled with water droplets, and I laughed.

It wasn’t a good laugh. It was the kind of laugh that’s one degree of separation from the other thing, the thing that happens when you’re sitting on the floor of a dead woman’s kitchen with water on your face and a house you can’t fix and a life you dismantled in three weeks because a handwritten note told you to make something yours.

But I laughed, because the alternative was worse, and because somewhere in the walls the pipes made a sound like the house was laughing with me.

I changed into dry clothes. Made tea on the stove because the electric kettle’s cord was frayed in a way that suggested electrocution. Sat at the kitchen table—the one piece of furniture in the house that was genuinely indestructible, a farmhouse oak table Margot had inherited from her mother—and drank my tea and looked at the water on the floor and accepted a fact I’d been avoiding since I’d pulled that sign out of the lawn:

I could not do this alone.

Bev Kowalski had texted me the number three days ago, when I’d mentioned the house during our phone call about my start date at the library. Garrett Shaw, she’d written. He’s the best in Colton Springs. Possibly the only one in Colton Springs, but also the best. Tell him I sent you.

I pulled up the number. Stared at it. Calling a stranger to admit I couldn’t handle basic home maintenance felt like one more entry in the long catalog of things Theodore Wren couldn’t do: couldn’t fix a faucet, couldn’t keep a boyfriend interested, couldn’t fill a house with noise if his life depended on it.

I called.

Voicemail. A voice that was low and unhurried and sounded like it belonged to someone who knew how to use his hands: “You’ve reached Shaw Renovations. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

The beep came and I was not ready for it.

“Hello. This is Theodore Wren. Theo. I’ve recently—I’ve inherited a house on Maple Street? The Victorian. Margot Wren’s house. Bev Kowalski gave me your number. The house needs… work. Quite a lot of work, actually. The kitchen faucet is—well, I attempted to fix it and I think I may have made it worse, and there’s a soft spot in the upstairs hallway floor, and the bedroom has a ceiling stain that suggests either a roof leak or an act of God, and the bedframe is—” I paused. Regrouped. “There are structural concerns. Several of them. If you could call me back at your convenience, I would appreciate it. My number is—”

I left my number. Twice, because the first time I transposed two digits and had to correct myself.

“Thank you. I apologize for the length of this message.”

I hung up.

Then I put my phone face-down on the table, pressed my forehead against the oak, and stayed there for a while, breathing in the smell of old wood and accepting that I had just left the most pathetic voicemail in the history of home renovation.

Upstairs, the bedframe creaked in the empty room, shifting in a draft I couldn’t feel, like the house was settling in for the night. Or settling in for something else entirely.

I finished my tea. Washed the mug. Wiped the water off the floor with a towel I’d have to replace. Walked through the downstairs one more time, turning off lights, checking locks, running my hand along the walls the way Margot used to—palm flat, feeling for the hum of the house beneath the plaster.

“I’m going to try,” I told the hallway. The wallpaper was peeling near the ceiling and the light fixture buzzed faintly and the whole place smelled like a century of living and a year of dying.

“I’m going to try,” I said again, quieter, to the note in my pocket.

Then I went upstairs, stepped carefully over the soft spot in the hallway floor, climbed into the twin bed in the small bedroom, and lay in the dark listening to the sounds of a house that had spent a year being empty and didn’t quite know what to do with a person in it again.

The pipes ticked. The walls sighed. Somewhere in the master bedroom, the bedframe shifted and groaned, its iron joints protesting the simple weight of silence.

I pulled the quilt up to my chin and stared at the ceiling and thought about the carpenter’s voice on the voicemail. Low. Steady. The voice of a man who fixed things.

I thought about that until I fell asleep, which didn’t take long, because I was exhausted, and because the house—for all its leaks and creaks and slow decay—was still the only place that had ever felt like it was glad I’d come home.

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