Before You Ask Him

A Steamy MM Best Friends to Lovers Bisexual Awakening Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Standalone (Bellwether, Finger Lakes)
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Friends to Lovers, Bisexual Awakening, Late Bloomer, Mutual Pining, Proposal Gone Wrong, Love Letters, He Falls First (Thirteen Years Ago), Coming Out, Blue Collar Hero, Artist Romance, Small Town, Found Family, Snowed-In Cabin, Long Distance, Praise, Edging, Both Men Vers, Double Proposal, Wedding, HEA

He wrote the proposal for his best friend. Every word of it was about the man holding the ring.

Owen Bennett can build anything. A six-story cathedral. A walk-in whale. The perfect night for his best friend to propose.

So when Cal asks him to plan it, the lights on the old footbridge, the timing, the words, Owen says yes. Obviously. It’s Cal. It’s been Cal for seventeen years.

Then, at two in the morning, Owen sits down at his workbench to write the speech Cal will read to his boyfriend. Eleven minutes. No drafts. He reads it back and realizes every single line is about Cal.

He hands it over anyway.

Cal reads it aloud on the footbridge to the man he’s supposed to marry, and hears, halfway through, whose voice it’s in. The engagement ends before the ring leaves the box.

Three weeks later, Cal is standing in Owen’s workshop with the yellow paper in his hand. He survived wanting his straight best friend once, at twenty-five, on a stone wall at a vineyard wedding. He’s not sure he can survive it twice.

But Owen isn’t straight. Owen was just late. And the man who has never chosen anything on purpose in his life is about to build the hardest thing he’s ever made: a way to ask.

Before You Ask Him is a steamy contemporary MM best-friends-to-lovers romance with a bisexual awakening, a proposal speech written for the wrong man, mutual pining thirteen years deep, a carpenter and a potter in a small lake town, found family, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Dual POV. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A best friend asked to plan the proposal, and a speech that falls in love on the page before he does
✅ A carpenter who has never once chosen anything on purpose, and the potter who already survived wanting him
✅ Late-bloomer bisexual awakening done with heart, humor, and zero sexuality panic
✅ “Advice or a witness?” The seventeen-year question they finally start asking about themselves
✅ A hand-built walnut ring box, string lights on a 1924 footbridge, and a lopsided blue mug full of pencils
✅ Workbench kisses, a wedging table with clay handprints, a snowed-in cabin, and a truck on Route 90
✅ Praise, edging, instruction, both men vers, and first times that are actually firsts
✅ A dignified ex, a meddling big sister, a brother with donuts, and a ninety-one-year-old making her own urn
✅ Two men who learn to say what they want out loud, and a double proposal in a kiln room
✅ Found family, small-town Finger Lakes setting, no cheating, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including oral sex, anal sex, rimming, fingering, solo scenes, a video-call scene, edging, praise, and semi-public encounters in a workshop, a truck and a studio after hours; all on-page sex is between consenting adults). It also includes a broken engagement (no cheating), the death of a parent (in the past, discussed), divorced parents, a character planning for her own death in old age, a self-inflicted bite in a moment of panic, a third-act conflict and brief separation, alcohol, and strong language. No cheating, no sexual violence, no dub-con. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One: Owen

The table leg has been lying to Cal for three weeks.

I can tell from the floor. I’m flat on my back under his wedging table with a flashlight in my teeth, and from down here the problem is obvious: somebody, sometime in the last century, sank a lag bolt into a knot and called it good. The wood around it has split in a neat little crescent. Every time Cal throws his weight into a lump of clay, the leg shifts a sixteenth of an inch, and the whole table answers him with a thunk he’s been pretending not to hear.

“Well?” he says from the wheel.

I take the flashlight out of my mouth. “Your table has been gaslighting you.”

“It’s a table.”

“It’s a liar. It’s been telling you it’s fine.”

“That’s not lying. That’s optimism.” The wheel hums. Water slaps. “Can you fix it or not?”

“I can fix anything.”

“You can’t fix your own gutters.”

“My gutters are a lifestyle choice.”

He laughs, the low one, the one that comes out of him before he’s decided whether something is funny. I’ve been hearing that laugh for seventeen years. I could pick it out of a stadium.

The Old Bellwether School was a high school until 1974, and Cal’s studio used to be the chemistry lab. There are still gas valves in the floor that nobody has trusted since disco. The west wall is all windows, nine-over-nine panes with wavy old glass, and on Labor Day weekend at seven-thirty the sun comes through them low and gold and turns the clay dust in the air into something you’d want to put in a painting. Shelves of bisqueware. A kiln room that smells like hot stone. Bob Dylan on a paint-spattered speaker because Cal believes, sincerely, that you can’t throw a decent bowl to anything recorded after 1979.

I’ve spent more Saturday nights in this room than in my own living room. I’m not ashamed of that. My living room has one chair.

I slide out, sit up, and reach for my beer on the floor. It’s the second one. The first one went fast, because it was ninety degrees in here when I arrived and Cal doesn’t believe in air-conditioning either.

He’s at the wheel with his back half to me, a ball of clay spinning under his hands. Old gray T-shirt with the collar stretched out. Forearms slick and brown and gray to the elbow. His hair’s tucked behind his ears and one piece has come loose and is stuck to his cheekbone with slip, and he hasn’t noticed, and he won’t for an hour.

He opens the clay with his thumbs. The thing rises between his palms like it’s breathing.

I’ve watched him do this a thousand times. I still stop talking when he does it.

“You’re staring,” he says without turning around.

“I’m assessing. Professionally.”

“Assess quieter.”

“I’m not making any noise.”

“You’re thinking loud.” He pulls the wall up, smooth and even, three fingers on the outside and two on the inside, and the bowl goes from squat to graceful in one long breath. Then he stops the wheel, tips his head, frowns at it. “Too thick at the foot.”

“It looks perfect.”

“You think everything looks perfect.”

“That’s not true. I think your table looks like crap.”

He cuts the bowl off the wheel with a wire and sets it on a ware board with the others, six of them in a row, all the same size, all the same curve. He makes things that match. I’ve never once managed to own a set of anything.

“Bolt’s in a knot,” I tell him. “I’m going to pull it, sister the leg with a piece of oak, and through-bolt it. Twenty minutes. Thirty if you keep talking to me.”

“I’m not the one who talks.” He wipes his hands on a towel that’s more clay than towel and walks over, and I hold up my beer so he can take a swig, because that’s what we do, and he takes it, and he drinks, and hands it back. “Tell me you didn’t drive all the way back to your shop for oak.”

“I keep oak in the truck.”

“Of course you do.”

“A man should always have oak in his truck.”

“That sounds like something your father says.”

“My father says a man should always have jumper cables and an opinion. The oak is mine.”

He crouches next to me and peers under the table, and his shoulder settles against my arm. Warm. Damp from the heat. He smells like wet clay and the cedar soap he’s used since he was nineteen, the same bar, the same brand, ordered from the same tiny company in Vermont, because once Cal finds a thing that works he doesn’t see any reason to stop.

“Huh,” he says, looking at the cracked wood. “That’s been doing that this whole time?”

“Lying to you. Like I said.”

“Can you be quiet and fix it.”

I fix it.

It takes twenty-six minutes, because the old bolt fights me and I have to cut it, and Cal sits on a stool with his elbows on his knees and watches me and feeds me commentary I don’t need. When I set the new bolt and lean on it, the table doesn’t move. I put my whole weight on the corner, bounce. Nothing.

“There,” I say. “That’s honest now.”

“You fixed my table’s character.”

“I fixed its relationship with the truth.”

He stands and leans both hands on the surface and shoves, hard, the way he does when he’s wedging, and the table takes it without a word. His face does the thing it does when something works: no smile, just a small easing between his brows, like he’s set something heavy down.

“Thank you,” he says.

“You can thank me with food.”

“I’ll thank you with Gino’s.”

“Then I accept your thanks.”

I’m collecting my tools when I feel it. A bite across the meat of my palm. I’ve been working with wood since I was fourteen and I still get splinters like an amateur, and this one’s a good one, a long dark sliver of old maple from the table leg, buried at an angle.

“Shit.”

“Let me see.”

I’m already holding my hand out. I don’t think about it. He doesn’t think about it either. He takes my wrist and pulls it into the light from the window and turns my palm up, and with the other hand he’s reaching for the tweezers in the drawer beside the sink, where they’ve lived for six years for exactly this reason.

“Hold still,” he says.

“I am holding still.”

“You’re doing the thing with your fingers.”

“What thing?”

“The twitchy thing.” He presses his thumb to the base of my hand, firm, and my fingers go still because he’s told them to. He bends his head. His glasses are pushed up into his hair and he pulls them down onto his nose, tortoiseshell, a little crooked, and he goes in with the tweezers without warning and gets the whole thing in one long pull.

“Ow.”

“Baby.” He holds it up to the light. “Look at this. You could build a canoe with this.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“I know you have. I pulled most of them.” He drops the splinter in the trash and runs his thumb across the spot, once, checking for anything he missed. The pad of his thumb is rough. Clay does that, dries the skin out until it’s half sandpaper. He rubs a little circle into my palm and I feel it all the way up my arm, which is ridiculous, because he’s done exactly this a hundred times, and I’ve never once felt it up my arm.

It’s the heat. It’s two beers and the heat.

He lets go of my wrist. “You’ll live.”

“Tragic,” I say, and I go find my beer.

We eat Gino’s on the floor because every flat surface in the studio has something drying on it. Pepperoni and banana peppers, which is a crime against pizza that Cal has been committing since high school and that I’ve accepted the way you accept a friend’s tattoo. The sun drops behind the hills across the lake and the windows go from gold to rose to a deep summer blue, and Dylan gives way to Joni Mitchell, and Cal sits with his back against the newly honest wedging table and his knees drawn up and a slice folded in half like a New Yorker even though he’s never lived south of Syracuse.

“Can I ask you something?” he says.

“You can ask me anything. I’ll answer about half of it.”

“I’m serious.”

He is. I can hear it. Cal has a voice for when he’s about to say something that matters, and it’s not deeper or slower; it’s flatter, like he’s taken all the color out of it so it can’t be misread. I set down my slice.

“Okay.”

He wipes his fingers on a napkin. He looks at the napkin while he does it. Then he looks at me.

“I’m going to ask Marcus to marry me.”

The floor of the studio is old hardwood, maple strips laid in 1931, and I know this because I helped him refinish a patch of it the year he moved in. I look at it now. I look at the grain. Something in my chest goes heavy and drops, all at once, like a beam that’s been sitting on a bad bracket for years and finally decides it’s done pretending.

“Oh,” I say.

“Oh?”

“Oh, wow.” I find my face. I put it on. “Cal. That’s — wow. Holy shit. That’s huge.”

His shoulders come down an inch. I hadn’t noticed they were up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Are you kidding? Yeah.” I reach over and grab his ankle, which is the nearest part of him, and shake it. “You’re getting married.”

“I’m asking. He has to say yes.”

“He’s going to say yes.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know Marcus. Marcus color-codes his calendar. Marcus has had a five-year plan since birth. He’s not going to have let it get this far without knowing where it ends.” I let go of his ankle. My hand feels strange. I wipe it on my jeans. “When?”

“Soon. Couple of weeks.” He pushes his glasses up into his hair again, which means he’s nervous, which means he’s been thinking about this for a long time. “We’ve talked about it. Not the actual question, but — the idea. Where we’d be in five years. Whether we wanted kids. We’ve had all the conversations people are supposed to have.”

“And?”

“And I think I’m ready.” He says it carefully. Like a man carrying a full glass across a room. “I’m thirty-five. He’s thirty-nine. We’re good together. He’s good to me. He’s kind and he’s smart and he actually reads the articles I send him instead of just liking them, do you know how rare that is?”

“I just like them.”

“I know. I’ve noticed.” He almost smiles. “I want what my parents had before Dad died. Someone at the table. Someone whose coffee order you know. I’m tired of starting over.”

“When did you know?” I ask. “That it was him.”

He thinks about it. Cal always thinks about it; he’s never once in his life answered a real question with the first thing that came to mind. “January,” he says. “The heater in the kiln room died during that cold snap, remember? Minus eleven. I had a whole firing of commission pieces in there and I was losing my mind. I called him to vent. Just to vent. I didn’t ask for anything.”

“And?”

“And forty minutes later he was at the loading door with a space heater from his office and two extension cords and a thermos. He sat in that room with me until two in the morning, reading drawings on his laptop, while I babysat the temperature. He didn’t make a thing of it. He just stayed.” Cal shrugs, and the shrug is soft. “I don’t know. I thought, oh. This is a person who stays.”

I was in Buffalo that week, hanging a forty-foot kelp forest in an aquarium lobby. I remember the cold snap because the pipes in my rental froze. I don’t remember Cal calling me about a heater.

He didn’t, I realize. He called Marcus.

“That’s a good story,” I say, and I mean it, and it sits in my stomach like cold pizza.

“You don’t have to start over,” I say. “You’ve got me.”

It comes out before I can sand it down, and it sounds wrong in the air, too heavy, and Cal looks at me for a second longer than he needs to.

“I know I’ve got you,” he says. “That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Asking me what?”

“To help.” He sets the pizza box aside and sits forward. “I want to do it on the footbridge. At night. Just the two of us. I don’t want a flash mob, I don’t want a photographer hiding in a bush, I don’t want a string quartet.”

“No string quartet. Got it.”

“I want it to feel like me. Like us. But I don’t want a production, you know? Small. Private. Perfect.” He laughs at himself. “I know, I know.”

“No, I get it.”

“I need lights. Something on the bridge. Warm, not Christmas-y. I need to figure out the timing, where to stand, whether we walk there from dinner or I make up some excuse. And I need someone who can keep a secret and who’s good at—” He makes a vague gesture at me. All of me. “Making a place feel like something.”

“So you need a set designer.”

“I need you,” he says. “You’re the best person to ask.”

I’ve been asked to build a lot of things. A six-story Gothic cathedral for a regional production of Notre-Dame. A walk-in whale for the science museum in Rochester. A bar for a man in Skaneateles who wanted it to look like the inside of a cigar box and then refused to pay for the humidor. I’ve said yes to most of them, because I say yes to things; it’s what I’m known for. Owen Bennett will make it work.

I’ve never had anyone say I need you like that, though. Like I was the answer before they’d finished asking the question.

“Yes,” I say. “Obviously. Yes.”

His face does the easing thing again. “Yeah?”

“I’m in. Lights, timing, all of it. I’ll make that bridge look like a dream you had once and couldn’t remember.”

“Not too dreamy.”

“Subtle dream. Tasteful dream. A dream with a budget.”

I’m already doing it, in my head. I can’t help it; it’s the job. “South end of the bridge,” I say. “Not the north. The north lamp buzzes and you hate it. You said it sounds like a mosquito with a grudge.”

He stares at me. “When did I say that?”

“Summer of 2014. We were eating ice cream. You had the black raspberry and it melted down your wrist.”

“How do you remember that?”

“I remember everything. It’s a curse.” I keep going. “Dinner first, somewhere you don’t have to dress up for, because you get grumpy in a collar. Walk there. Don’t drive, you’ll be too wound up to park. Go at the end of September, after the tourists leave but before it gets cold enough that you’d want a coat, because you’ll want your hands free, and you’ll fidget with your sleeves if you wear one. And you’ll want to say it before you kneel, not after, because once you’re on one knee you’ll lose your nerve and start making jokes.”

He’s quiet for a beat.

“That’s—” He stops. “Yeah. That’s exactly right.”

“I know.”

“That’s a little terrifying, O.”

“I’m good at my job.”

He laughs, and he leans over, and he knocks his shoulder into mine, and then he says, “I just want to get it right. You know? I want him to look back on it when we’re old and know it was real. That I meant it. That I chose him.” He picks at the label on his beer. “God. My husband. I’m going to have a husband.”

There’s that word again.

Husband.

It lands somewhere under my ribs and sits there. I can feel the shape of it. Hard edges.

I laugh, too loud. “You’re going to be one of those guys who says my husband in every sentence. ‘My husband and I love this restaurant.’ ‘My husband thinks that’s hilarious.’”

“I am absolutely going to be one of those guys.”

“‘My husband doesn’t like banana peppers.’”

“Marcus loves banana peppers.”

“That’s how I know it’s real,” I say. “That’s how I know he’s the one.”

He tips his head back against the table and grins at the ceiling, and I look at his throat, the line of it, the clay dust in the hollow above his collarbone. I don’t know why I look. I look away.

“June offered me the space in the east wing,” he says, half to the ceiling. “The old shop classroom. For a teaching studio.”

“The big one? With the loading door?”

“That one. Eight wheels, maybe ten. I’d have to hire someone to run classes. Do payroll.” He grimaces at the word. “She needs an answer by the middle of October.”

“Do you want it?”

He’s quiet. “I think so. I think it’s the next thing.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know what you asked.” He rolls his head toward me. “One giant life decision at a time, O.”

“Fair.”

“You’re good, though, right? You’re actually okay with this? I know it’s a lot. The planning. It’s probably going to eat a couple of your nights.”

“Cal.” I bump him back. “It’s you. Eat all my nights.”

He smiles. He goes back to his pizza. I go back to mine. It’s cold now and the cheese has set into a rubbery sheet and I eat it anyway, all of it, because if I’m chewing I don’t have to say anything else.

The drive home is eleven minutes along the lake road. The windows are down and the air off the water has finally gone cool, and there are still boats out, little green and red running lights scattered across the black like somebody dropped a handful of beads. I don’t turn on the radio.

My phone buzzes in the cupholder at the stop sign by the marina. I pick it up because the road’s empty.

An email. Meridian Exhibits — Built Worlds Lead Install.

Rita Salgado. I worked under her on a natural history build in Pittsburgh two years ago, eight weeks of fiberglass rock formations and a project manager who never once raised her voice and never once let anything slide. I liked her. I think she liked me.

Owen — sending the formal offer for the lead installer role on Built Worlds. Six cities, January through June, roughly three to four weeks on site at each. Details and rate attached. We’d love to have you. Need a decision by December 15th so we can lock the crew. Call me with questions. — R.

I read it twice. Six cities. Lead. The rate is the best number anyone has ever put in front of me.

Behind me someone honks. I’m still at the stop sign. I wave an apology into the mirror and drive.

My house is a two-bedroom ranch on a half-acre off Cayuga Street that I bought four years ago because it had a detached workshop and the price was right. Sophie and I lived in it for three of those years. She painted the kitchen yellow. She bought throw pillows. She said, in the last year, that the house felt like a waiting room, and I said that was crazy, and then she moved out and took the throw pillows and I realized she’d been right, because without them there was nothing in it but the furniture I’d always meant to replace.

I sit in the truck in the driveway with the engine ticking and text Cal the word home, because I always do, because once in college I didn’t and he called the campus police.

He answers before I’ve got the door open.

Thank you. For real. I couldn’t do this with anyone else.

I type anytime. I delete it. I type of course, and that looks worse. I send a thumbs-up, which is the coward’s emoji, and he sends back a picture of the wedging table with a gold star sticker on the leg, and I laugh out loud alone in my driveway like an idiot.

I don’t go inside. I go to the shop.

It’s the only room I’ve ever really finished. Workbench down the center, maple top, built it myself. Table saw. Band saw. The good lamp, an old industrial pendant I salvaged from a mill in Auburn, swinging low over the bench so the light falls exactly where my hands go. Clamps on the wall arranged by size. Everything has a place.

And on the bench, in the corner where it always is, Cal’s mug.

It’s the first thing he ever threw that didn’t crack in the kiln. He was nineteen. It’s lopsided and the glaze ran in a long blue drip down one side and pooled at the foot, and he tried to throw it out, and I took it out of the trash and put my pencils in it, and he’s been threatening to replace it for sixteen years. I won’t let him. I’ve moved it from an apartment, to another apartment, to this house. It’s held pencils the whole time.

I stand at the bench and open the email again on my phone. I could forward it to Ben. I could make a pros-and-cons list, the way Sophie used to beg me to. I could call Rita in the morning and ask the questions I should ask.

I flag it. I put the phone face down.

December’s a long way off. Things change. I’ll know more later.

That’s what I always say. My whole childhood was depending on. Depending on the house sale, depending on whose weekend it was, depending on whether Dad took the job in Elmira. I learned to keep my bag half-packed and my answers open. Nobody can take back a door you haven’t walked through.

I pick up a pencil out of Cal’s mug and turn it over in my fingers.

My husband.

And here’s the thing that stops me. I stand there under the good lamp and I try to picture it, Cal married, because I’m going to help him do it, I’m going to string the lights and pick the spot and make it perfect, so I should be able to see it.

I’ve got a picture of Cal at fifty. He’s a little gray at the temples and he’s still wearing those glasses and still pushing them up into his hair. He’s in this shop, on the stool by the band saw, telling me my dovetails are sloppy. I’ve got Cal at seventy, sitting on a porch I don’t own yet, complaining about the cold. I’ve got Cal at my kitchen table on a Sunday, his feet on the other chair, the newspaper in pieces. I’ve got a hundred of them. A thousand. Seventeen years of assuming he’d be in every room I’d ever walk into, and I never once questioned it.

I go through every single one of them.

There’s no husband in any of them.

Not Marcus. Not anybody.

Just Cal. And just me.

I put the pencil back in the mug, very carefully, the way you’d put down something that might go off.

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The Night He Wrote It — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

The last night of their honeymoon week, Owen finally tells Cal what he did in the shower the night he wrote the speech. Every detail. So Cal makes him show him. And this time, Cal doesn’t stay on the other side of the glass.

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