Old Dog, New Tricks
MM Age Gap Romance
by Jace Wilder
Available at all major retailers
Available at all major retailers
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Age Gap (23/41), Bartender x Grad Student, Lessons-to-Lovers, Praise Kink, Forced Proximity, Grumpy/Sunshine, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort, He Falls First He Falls Harder
Standalone: Yes, HEA guaranteed
He went to the bar to teach the kid a lesson. The kid taught him how to want things again.
Reid Turner has spent twenty years behind the bar watching people make bad decisions. He’s good at it — the watching, the not-wanting, the staying put. Then a broke grad student starts haunting his end stool every Tuesday, asks him to teach him how to flirt, and looks at him like he hung the back-bar lights.
Noah Kim is hopeless at dating. Too intense, too in his head — he’s heard it all. But Reid doesn’t laugh at him. Reid teaches him: eye contact, easy lines, steady hands. And when Noah asks to practice on someone who won’t break his heart, Reid breaks his own rule instead.
The lessons were supposed to stay behind the bar. Now Noah’s learning exactly what it takes to make a careful man reckless — and Reid’s about to find out whether an old dog can learn the one trick that’s always beaten him: letting himself be kept.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Age gap MM with a jaded bartender and an earnest grad student
✅ “Teach me” lessons that escalate into full-blown obsession
✅ Praise kink with a “good boy” problem (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Grumpy/sunshine energy with genuine emotional depth
✅ A hero who’s afraid to be the destination, and the man who proves he already is
✅ Bar intimacy, domestic warmth, and the filthiest Tuesday nights in fiction
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), praise kink/light D/s dynamics, strong language, age gap (23/41, no power imbalance), and depictions of anxiety, self-doubt, and a past emotionally dismissive relationship. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One
The kid showed up every Tuesday like a bill Reid didn’t mind paying.
Eight o’clock, give or take ten minutes. End stool, the one nearest the wall where the light from the back bar went soft and gold. One lager — the cheapest tap Reid carried — nursed for two hours like it was scotch older than the kid was.
“You’re staring at the calendar,” Marisol said. “It’s Tuesday. You’ve known since Sunday.”
“Maybe you should comp the professor a real beer.” She gestured at all of him. “Lurking. With your face.”
“This is just my face.”
“That’s the sad part.”
The door opened at 8:04 and the kid blew in with the weather. Black hair shoved in six directions, bleached streak flopping over one eye, oversized hoodie swallowing him. He made for the end stool with his head down, running the gauntlet of a nearly empty room like it was packed.
Reid had the lager poured by the time he sat down. The kid blinked at it, then up at Reid, and there it was — the thing Reid had been refusing to file under any name for six weeks.
“You didn’t ask what I wanted.”
“You want the cheap lager. You’ve wanted it for six weeks.”
“You counted?” The kid’s ears went pink.
“I count everything. Kegs, registers, Tuesdays. Occupational hazard.”
The glass broke at 9:40. Noah came off his stool like he’d been shot at. “Sorry — God, sorry—”
“You’re apologizing for a glass another man broke. That’s advanced.” Reid kept his voice low and level. “It’s a startle reflex. Mine’s the ice machine.” He set a fresh lager down. “Hazard pay.”
Noah drank. And stayed. And later, chin up, with a glint that was dry and deliberate and aimed: “Seventy-five cents. In quarters. With a napkin apology. I’m told that’s worth a B.”
Reid laughed. The real one. The one from under the floorboards.
“Grade inflation. This is how standards die.”
“Cry about it,” said Noah, “to someone who isn’t holding a red pen.”
At 11:30 Noah cashed out. Four dollars. Three quarters. A napkin: Sorry. (B?)
“A-minus. You’re improving.”
“This is the only part of my week that doesn’t feel like a test.” Then he went pink, said “Okay, bye,” and was gone.
The red pen lay by the rail. Forgotten.
“Oh my God,” Marisol said. “Just put it somewhere you’ll remember it exists, you enormous coward.”
Reid set the pen in the glass by the register. Killed the lights. Stood in his dark, quiet bar. Counted to Tuesday. Seven days.
“Christ,” he told the empty room, and locked the door.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Ring — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Reid’s been opening the office safe forty-three times. Noah finally asks why. What follows is a proposal on the sacred oak, a ring made of bar wood, and the filthiest, most emotional celebration sex in the history of Tuesday nights.
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