Not Your Practice Husband

An MM Best Friends to Lovers Bisexual Awakening Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Standalone
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Bisexual Awakening, Fifteen Years of Pining, Practice Turns Real, He Falls First (and Didn’t Know It), Rules in Writing, Ask Every Time, Praise Kink, Competence Kink, Blue-Collar Hero, Upholsterer Hero, Small-Town Upstate New York, Coming Out, Secret Then Out Loud, First Time with a Man, Grovel Done Right, Found Family, No Cheating, No Love Triangle

Fifteen years of being his practice husband. Six rules in pencil. One day he finally knows.

Daniel Mercer has a key to Evan Shaw’s house, a drawer in Evan Shaw’s dresser, and his own coffee hidden behind Evan Shaw’s hazelnut. He knows where the passport is. He knows which salad to bring to Labor Day. He has been in love with his best friend since the second week of a summer job at the Harrow Inn, when he was twenty-one and Evan asked him how a spring was tied and actually listened.

Then the woman Evan’s dating takes one look and names the job: practice husband. And Evan asks Daniel, kindly, with his thumb on his wrist, to help get the guest room ready for whoever comes next.

So Daniel gives the key back. Empties the drawer. Signs a lease on the shop he’s wanted for years. Goes on a date.

Evan Shaw fixes boilers, runs crews, and has never once wondered why his best friend’s gray henley smells like that. Until it’s at his face in his own kitchen, and he’s hard, and the house is so quiet he can hear the fridge thinking. Until he’s sitting on Daniel’s stoop at eleven at night because another man kissed him, and he can’t say why.

He wants to find out. Daniel says that’s practice. Then Daniel turns over a fabric invoice and writes the rules in pencil. Not at your house. Nobody sleeps over. No favors. You ask, every time, every new thing. Nobody knows. And the sixth: It ends the day you know what you are.

Evan keeps every rule like it’s a load-bearing wall. He asks before he kisses Daniel’s neck. He asks before he gets on his knees. He learns that the words look at you go through him like current. And then, on his parents’ porch swing in October, he knows exactly what he is, and he can’t say it, because the day he says it, it’s over.

Not Your Practice Husband is a high-heat MM best-friends-to-lovers romance with a bisexual awakening, an upholsterer who has been saying it’s no trouble for fifteen years, a big careful man who has to learn that asking in bed isn’t the same as asking about a life, a Victorian chaise under a drop cloth, two lighthouse calendars, a lot of on-page spice, no cheating, and a guaranteed HEA. Dual first-person POV. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Fifteen years of pining from the man who’s been there for every Sunday dinner
✅ A thirty-seven-year-old discovering he’s bisexual without throwing out a single year of his past
✅ Six rules in pencil on the back of a linen invoice, and a seventh that changes everything
✅ “Can I?” as dirty talk. Every time. Every new thing.
✅ Praise kink both ways, hands pinned to the pillow, and a first time on a mohair chaise
✅ A power outage, a travel bottle of lube, and “I brought lube to you“
✅ A grovel with no excuses, a family that finally stops treating him like staff, and a proposal written in the margin
✅ Small-town Finger Lakes, a cider guy named Walt, and a crew that had a pool going
✅ No cheating, no love triangle, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

Buy Now

Get the Bonus Chapter →

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including solo scenes, hand jobs, oral sex, anal sex and a first time bottoming, praise and instruction play, wrists held down by request, sex in a shower, a truck, a workshop and on furniture, and unprotected sex between tested, committed partners; all on-page sex is consensual and asked for), a hero discovering his bisexuality and coming out to his family and his ex-wife, the aftermath of a divorce, references to the death of a parent, a workplace betting pool on the couple that wounds one of them, a partner going behind the other’s back on a business decision and the fallout, a brief third-act separation, alcohol, and strong language. No cheating, no sexual violence, no love triangle. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Daniel

The trick to getting four grocery bags, a laptop, and a clearance-rack basil plant through Evan Shaw’s front door is that I never have to knock.

I hook the screen with my boot, shoulder the inside door, and the house breathes out at me — onions going soft in butter, the lake coming through the back windows, the hot-dust smell of the window unit that has been dying with great dignity since 2019. My key goes back on my ring. My ring goes in my pocket. My boots come off on the mat and my feet find the slippers by the radiator without my looking, because the slippers have been by that radiator for six years and they are mine.

“That you?” Evan calls from the kitchen.

“No. It’s a burglar with very specific opinions about olive oil.”

“Burglar can put it on the left side this time.”

“Burglar will put it where it goes.”

He laughs, and I hear the pan spit as he turns something over. I’ve been on my feet for ten hours — a Queen Anne wingback with a collapsed seat deck, a client who wanted mustard velvet and then got mustard velvet and was devastated by it, a staple gun that jammed every fourth shot like it was being paid to — and that laugh does what nothing else today has managed. My shoulders come down from around my ears. I hate how fast it works. I’ve always hated how fast.

The kitchen is small and yellow and has been the center of my life for so long that I only see it clearly when I’m walking out of it. Evan’s at the stove in a gray T-shirt washed thin enough to read the tag through, sleeves shoved up over forearms that have no business being that thick on a man who now mostly holds a clipboard. Six-foot-two of him in a kitchen designed for a 1952 housewife. He doesn’t duck the pot rack. He has never once ducked the pot rack. There is a dent in the copper saucepan exactly the curve of his skull.

“Your mom’s chops?” I set the bags on the counter.

“It’s Sunday.”

Like that’s a reason. In this house, it is.

I unpack without thinking. Eggs, second shelf. His yogurt that tastes like a scented candle, in the door. My coffee — Ruby Lake dark roast, the bag with the heron — into the cabinet above the coffeemaker, behind his hazelnut sludge, where it lives. I bought the coffeemaker. I don’t remember deciding to. I remember a December three years ago, his divorce papers stacked on this counter like a second, uglier toaster, and Evan saying the old machine made everything taste like pennies, and then there was a new machine, and I’d paid for it, and neither of us said a word.

That’s how most things got into this house. Nobody said a word.

“Basil,” Evan says, delighted, like I’ve pulled a puppy out of the bag.

“It was ninety-nine cents and dying. I related to it.”

“Rough one?”

“Mrs. Albrecht wanted mustard.”

“And?”

“And I gave her mustard, and she said it looked like mustard.” I flip my laptop open on the end of the counter. “I have to answer her before she leaves me a review comparing my work to a condiment.”

“You’re not a condiment.” He reaches past me for the salt and bumps me with his hip on the way back. “You’re more of a fine reduction.”

“Stop flirting with me, I’m working.”

That gets the big laugh. It always does. That’s the joke — the long-running bit of the two of us. I say things like that, and he laughs because it’s absurd, because I’m Daniel and he’s Evan and it’s been fifteen years, and I laugh along, because the alternative is saying it in a voice that isn’t joking, and I have never once found out what happens after that.

Dear Mrs. Albrecht, I type. Mustard is a historically significant color with roots in—

“Roots in what,” Evan says over my shoulder, reading. “The hot dog?”

“Go away.”

“‘Dear Mrs. Albrecht, I regret to inform you that you are a philistine.'” He does it in a stuffy voice, chin on my shoulder, beard scratching the side of my neck. He smells like the pan and like the cedar soap I keep buying because he forgets soap exists until he’s standing wet in the shower yelling about it. “‘Your chair is gorgeous. You are wrong.'”

“That’s actually closer to the truth.”

“So send that.”

“I’d like to keep my business.”

He plates the chops and sets one beside my laptop, because he knows I’ll eat standing up while I finish this, and I do — left hand on the fork, right hand typing. On my third bite he leans in and takes it straight off the tines. Just snaps it off my fork like a dog at a picnic.

“You have your own,” I tell him.

“Yours tastes better.”

“It’s the same pig.”

“Your half of the pig is better.”

He turns to the sink, and on the way he passes behind me, and his hand lands flat on my lower back. Warm. Wide. The pad of his thumb right on the knob of my spine. “Behind you,” he says, which is what you say in a kitchen, and the hand stays one second longer than a kitchen needs it to, and then it’s gone.

It means nothing. Officially.

I have built a whole language out of that hand. Palm on the low back, passing: excuse me. Knuckles against my knee at the movies: this part’s sad, I know. His whole hand cupped around the back of my neck at his father’s sixtieth when his uncle asked if I’d found a nice fella yet: I’m right here, ignore him. Years of translating a man who doesn’t know he’s talking. I’m fluent. I’m the only living speaker. And not once have I been brave enough to ask him what any of it means in his language.

I hit send on Mrs. Albrecht. I don’t remember what I wrote.

We eat at the little round table by the back window, the lake going dark orange behind the neighbors’ maple. He tells me about a hotel in Geneva whose boiler is apparently possessed, about a new kid on his crew who calls everybody boss including the vending machine. I tell him about the wingback. He asks the right questions — how deep the seat deck sagged, whether the frame was original, whether I had to re-glue the stretchers. He’s always asked the right questions about my work. That’s the trouble. If he were careless, this would’ve been easy to quit years ago.

“Oh,” he says, pointing his fork at me like he’s just remembered he’s holding a grenade. “So, Mara.”

Mara. Four dates. A pediatric dental hygienist with good teeth, obviously, and a laugh like a car alarm she’s very proud of. I met her twice. I liked her both times, which was its own small humiliation.

“How is Mara.”

“Good. Great, actually. She’s—” He’s grinning now, already laughing at a thing that hasn’t happened yet. “Okay, so she asks about you. And I’m telling her how you came over and fixed the porch swing chains, and you did my brakes paperwork, and you’re the one who knows where my passport is—”

“Top drawer of your desk, blue folder, behind the warranty for the snowblower you’ve used once.”

“See, that. That’s what she meant.” He’s delighted. “She goes, ‘Okay, but when do I get to meet your practice husband?'”

And I laugh.

I laugh exactly right. It’s a good laugh — surprised, a little wry, the laugh of a man who finds this extremely funny on a cosmic level. I’ve been rehearsing it for a decade and a half without knowing I was rehearsing. My knife goes through the pork chop very precisely. I cut a perfect rectangle.

“She’s funny,” I say.

“She’s hilarious. I mean.” He shrugs, still grinning. “She’s not wrong.”

“She’s not wrong,” I agree, and put the rectangle in my mouth, and chew it, and it tastes like his mother’s chops, which is to say like every Sunday since I was twenty-two.

“Actually, speaking of.” He sets his fork down. Rubs the back of his neck, which is what he does before he admits anything, and every part of me goes quiet and waiting, the way a room goes quiet right before a glass breaks. “I want to get this place in shape. Like, really. The guest room’s still that color Rachel picked—”

“Surgical mint.”

“Surgical mint. And the closet in there’s all my crap from the divorce. Boxes I never opened. The rowing machine.”

“The rowing machine of shame.”

“I thought I’d paint it. Clear it out. Make it — I don’t know.” His ears are going pink. “Make room. For whoever comes next. If it’s Mara, great. If it’s not, it’s not. But I’m thirty-seven, Dan. I want somebody to come home to. I want this to look like a house somebody would want to come home to.”

There’s a beat where the window unit kicks on and rattles.

“And you want my help,” I say.

“You’ve got the eye. You’d walk in there and know what to do in ten seconds, and I’d stand there for six months holding a paint chip.” He reaches over and squeezes my wrist, right on the little tattooed needle, thumb dragging once over the ink. “I’ll pay you in pork chops. For life.”

He means it kindly. I know he does. That’s the part I’ll think about later, lying awake — that there wasn’t a mean bone in it. He wants to be loved, and he wants a home, and he’s asking the person he trusts most in the world to help him build one.

What I hear is: help me make room by moving you out of it.

“Sure,” I say. “Of course. It’s no trouble.”

He washes. I dry. We’ve done it this way since the apartment on Seneca Street with the sink that ran either scalding or arctic and nothing in between, and we don’t talk about it any more than we talk about which side of the couch is whose. After, he collapses onto the green sofa like he’s been shot, and I sit in my corner, and he swings around and drops his head in my lap like it’s a pillow he paid for.

The Yankees are losing in a way that requires him to groan every few minutes. My fingers are in his hair. I don’t remember putting them there. That’s another thing about knowing someone this long — your hands stop asking you.

His hair is softer than it looks, sandy and thick, going a little coarser at the temples. He’s started finding grays and showing them to me like a kid with a loose tooth. I trace the shell of his ear without meaning to and he makes a noise, low in his chest, pleased and sleepy, the noise a big dog makes when you find the spot.

My body notices. My body always notices. I shift my knee and think very hard about upholstery tacks.

“Dan,” he mumbles, eyes shut. “You do the thing. The hair thing.”

“I’m doing the thing.”

“Do it more.”

I do it more.

His right hand is curled on my knee, the knuckles up. There’s a pale scar across the second one from when he was twenty-three and a drywall lift collapsed on a job site, and I drove him to urgent care in his own truck because he’d been too proud to say it hurt and too pale to drive. I’ve kissed that scar exactly zero times. I know its shape better than my own signature.

Somewhere around the seventh-inning stretch his breathing goes long and even. His mouth falls open a little. He looks younger asleep — the lines between his eyebrows let go, the beard looks less deliberate. He looks like the kid on the Harrow Inn maintenance crew the summer I was twenty-one, sunburned to the elbows, hauling a ladder across the lawn while I sat on the porch steps re-tufting a footstool and pretending very hard that I didn’t notice how he moved.

I’d been at the Harrow a week when I met him. I’d been an idiot about him a week after that. I’ve been an idiot about him ever since, steadily, the way a faucet drips.

“Mm,” Evan says in his sleep. “Daniel.”

That’s all. Just my name, round and soft in the back of his throat, the way he only ever says it when he’s barely awake. He doesn’t know he does it. He’s said it on this couch, in hospital waiting rooms, in the cab of his truck on the way back from his father’s heart scare. If he ever said it like that on purpose, I think I’d die where I stood.

There’s a smear of tomato sauce on my shirt from dinner and wingback dust in the creases from the shop. I slide out from under him by degrees, the way you’d move a cat — a throw pillow under his head before he can notice the loss, one leg, the other. He frowns at the pillow. He wraps an arm around it. I watch that for longer than I should.

Then I go down the hall to change.

His bedroom smells like him. Of course it does. The bed’s unmade, gray sheets twisted into a rope where he fights them every night. On the nightstand, on his side — I know which side is his side; I know it because the other side has only ever been mine on top of the covers, those terrible weeks after Rachel left, when he couldn’t stand to be alone in here and I lay rigid on the comforter in my jeans like an Edwardian chaperone — there’s a hair tie.

Lavender. Thin elastic. A long dark hair wound around it.

Mara’s.

Right. Good. Four dates. Grown adults. Good for them. Good for him. I mean that. I think I mean that. I stand there and look at it like it’s a stain I could lift if I had the right solvent.

Then I open my drawer.

Left dresser, second from the top. He cleared it for me that first winter after the divorce — just pulled out his own T-shirts one night, dumped them on the floor, and said, “You’re here more than I am. Take a drawer.” Like it was nothing. Like you’d give a man a drawer every day of the week.

I know exactly what’s in it without looking, but I look.

Two henleys, navy and black. The gray one’s missing — must be in the wash; he steals it to sleep in when I forget it here. Sweatpants. Three pairs of socks. A phone charger. Reading glasses I need and refuse to wear in public. A travel toothbrush in a plastic case. Ibuprofen. And, at the very bottom, folded so many times the logo’s half gone, the faded red T-shirt that says HARROW INN — GROUNDS & MAINTENANCE that Evan threw at me the night we closed out that summer, because I was cold on the dock and he was showing off.

Fifteen years. And there it is. My whole life in this house, in one drawer.

Everything in it is for one more night.

Nothing in it is for staying.

I stand in the blue television glow leaking down the hallway, holding the drawer open by its brass pull. It’s a nice drawer. Solid maple, dovetailed. I refinished this dresser for him, the spring after he bought the house, and Rachel said it was the nicest thing in the place, and she wasn’t wrong. I sanded the drawer runners myself so they’d glide.

They glide. I slide it shut. It doesn’t make a sound.

I don’t change my shirt.

When I come back out, Evan’s half awake, squinting at the TV, which is showing a truck commercial with a lot of mud in it.

“Hey,” he says, thick. “Did they lose?”

“They lost.”

“Course they did.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “You staying? I’ll do the eggs thing in the morning. The one with the cheese you pretend you don’t like.”

“Can’t. Early client.”

He blinks. “On a Monday?”

“Mrs. Albrecht’s mustard won’t fix itself.”

“You’re going to dye it?”

“I’m going to do something to it.” I get my laptop. I get my bag. I don’t look at the hall, because I know I’d look at the bedroom door, and I’m not going to do that either.

He hauls himself up off the couch and follows me to the front hall, barefoot, rumpled, one cheek creased from the pillow. “Tuesday?” he says. “Dinner?”

“Maybe. I’ll text you.”

“You don’t have to text.” He’s frowning, a little, the faint frown of a man whose Sunday has gone a half-step off its usual shape and who can’t figure out where the step went. “You know you can just come over. Anytime. You don’t need groceries or a reason or anything.”

“I know.”

He hugs me at the door. Evan hugs like he’s trying to keep something from falling off a truck — arms all the way around, chin dropped on the top of my head, because he’s five inches taller and has never once let me forget it. His chest is warm through the thin shirt. His heart’s slow and steady under my ear. I could fall asleep here. I’ve done it before, on that couch, in this exact smell, and woken up to him snoring and the TV asking if we were still watching.

I put my hands flat on his back and I think: this is the last one I’m going to take for free.

“Drive safe, practice husband,” he says into my hair, grinning — I can feel the grin — and lets me go.

My apartment is a ten-minute drive and a whole different temperature.

It’s the second floor over what used to be Kowalski’s Corner Store, on Water Street, and the ghost of the old sign still shows through the brick out front if you know where to look. Inside it’s tidy and pretty and almost no one lives here. I re-covered both armchairs in a deep teal wool that I love. I hung the lamps myself. There’s a radiator under the window that bangs like a drunk at a door every November through March, and a view of the lake I paid too much rent for and mostly see at six in the morning on my way out.

In the fridge there’s mustard, seltzer, and half a lemon. That’s an inventory. That’s not a life.

I don’t turn on the overhead. I drop my bag, toe off my boots, and stand in the dark in my bedroom with the window open and the lake slapping the seawall across the street. My bed is made. My bed is always made, because I’m barely ever in it on weekends. Saturday nights I’m on the green sofa on Linden Street. Sunday nights, too, usually. Tonight is the first Sunday I’ve slept here since — I actually don’t know. Since spring? Since Easter, when his mother had the flu and we did the ham at his place?

I lie down on top of the duvet in my sauce-smeared shirt. I stare at the ceiling. And because I’m thirty-six years old and pathetic and I’ve never once been able to stop, I open my jeans.

I’m already half hard. That’s the most embarrassing part. Not the drawer. Not the hair tie. Just him on my lap, mumbling my name, and my traitor of a body hanging onto it for ten miles.

The lube is in the nightstand where it always is. I warm it between my fingers. Then I wrap my hand around my cock and give in.

The first stroke is slow, the foreskin sliding back, slick, and I let my head fall against the pillow and stop pretending. I don’t think about anybody else. I never do. I tried, in my twenties — the bartender, the guy from the restoration conference, a series of very nice men I dated for a year and a half apiece and then let go when it became clear they’d noticed. Nobody else works. My imagination has one channel.

It’s Evan. It’s always Evan.

Evan’s hand instead of mine — bigger, rougher, the scarred knuckle dragging up the underside of my cock. Evan’s weight pressing me into the mattress. That beard, the one that scratched my neck over the laptop four hours ago, scraping down my stomach, down the inside of my thigh, leaving it burning. I imagine him not knowing what he’s doing and not caring. I imagine him looking up from between my legs with that face he gets when he’s concentrating on a job — the furrowed brow, the bitten lip — like I’m a problem he intends to solve all night.

I twist on the upstroke and my hips come off the bed.

“Fuck,” I say to my empty apartment.

I push my jeans down farther. Get my knees up. Slick two fingers and reach between my legs, and I’m breathing hard already, and I push them in — slow, a stretch that makes my thighs shake — and imagine it’s him. Imagine him saying Can I? Is this okay? in that low serious voice he uses on job sites when someone’s on a ladder that shouldn’t be. Imagine him sinking into me an inch at a time with his forehead against mine. He’d go slow. He’s careful with everything that matters to him. He’d be so careful it would kill me.

I fuck myself on my fingers and jerk my cock in the same rhythm, too fast, too desperate, my heels digging into the duvet. Wet sounds in a dark room. The lake keeps slapping the wall. My shirt’s rucked up under my arms and I’m sweating through it.

In my head he’s got one hand braced by my face and the other on my hip, holding me down, and he’s looking at me like he’s seeing me. That’s the part that does it, every time. Not the size of him or the weight of him. Just Evan, looking at me — at me, not at what I can do for him — and saying, low and rough and on purpose, the way he never has:

Daniel.

I come so hard it hurts. It pulls up from somewhere under my ribs, and I curl into it with a noise I’d never let anyone hear, my fingers buried in myself, spilling hot and messy over my fist and my stomach and the sauce stain, pulse after pulse, until I’m shaking and wrung out on a bed nobody sleeps in.

And then the part I hate. The quiet after.

I lie there sticky and stupid with my heart slamming and stare at the ceiling. There’s a water stain up there shaped like Ohio. It’s been there since I moved in. I’ve never called the landlord.

I’ve had years of this. Of that hand on my back meaning nothing. Of my drawer and my slippers and my coffee behind his coffee. Of being the one who knows where the passport is. I have been, I realize, an extremely good practice husband. I’ve been so good at it that the woman he’s dating took one look and named the job.

And tonight he asked me, kindly, with his thumb on my wrist, to help him get the house ready for the real one.

I think about the guest room. Surgical mint. The rowing machine of shame. I know exactly what I’d do with it, too. Warm white on the walls. Pull up that awful carpet, because I’d bet my shop there’s oak under it. A good reading chair by the window — I’d re-cover it myself, something soft, something a woman with a lavender hair tie would sink into on a Sunday morning with her coffee. His coffee. The hazelnut. Mine would be gone from the cabinet by then. Somebody would’ve thrown it out, not even meanly. You just clean house when you’re making room.

I’d be good at it. That’s the worst part. I’d make it beautiful. I’d hand him the key to a room I’ve never once slept in, and he’d hug me in the front hall and call me a lifesaver, and I’d drive home to a fridge with mustard in it.

I get up. I wash my hands. I strip the shirt off and drop it in the hamper and stand at the window in my underwear with the lake black and wide and indifferent beyond the seawall.

My phone buzzes on the bed. I don’t need to look. It’s him. It’ll be something like home ok? or a picture of the dead Yankees score with a skull emoji. It’s always something. It’s never anything.

I don’t pick it up.

For fifteen years I’ve known exactly what Evan Shaw needs before he knows he needs it. Groceries. A coffeemaker. A man on his couch to make the house feel less empty while he waits for someone better to fill it. I’ve anticipated every single thing.

I’ve never once asked what happens to me when he finds the life I’ve been helping him rehearse.

I think I just found out.

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.

Buy Not Your Practice Husband

🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?

Rule Seven — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

The wedding night. The top-floor suite of the Harrow Inn, right above the third step where it started. Evan asked to take the rules out of their frame for one night, and he’s written a seventh in the margin. Daniel has to read it before Evan’s allowed to take a single button off him. Then he has to say it out loud.

Get the Bonus Chapter →