Broke His Straight Heart
MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder
Buy the ebook · Buy the audiobook
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, Bi Awakening, Slow Burn, Praise Kink, Body Worship, Size Difference, Mutual Pining, Coming Out, Touch Starved, He Falls First, Single Dad
Twelve years of silence. Three weeks of proximity. One question that changes everything.
Evan Mercer has spent twelve years being the best friend Noah calls first, leans on hardest, and never looks at twice. He’s built a life around the absence of the one thing he actually wants — a life so competent and composed that nobody thinks to ask if he’s okay. He’s not okay. He’s in love with a straight man, and he’s made his peace with it.
Noah Ramsey just signed his divorce papers. His marriage felt like a role he’d memorized but never understood. Now he’s standing in Evan’s doorway with a duffel bag and a question he can’t stop asking: Why did sex with my wife always feel like I was performing?
Three weeks in Evan’s guest room. Twelve years of history. One devastating realization that the man Noah has always called first is the man he should have been calling his.
But wanting Evan means blowing up everything Noah thought he knew about himself. It means coming out at thirty-eight. It means telling his ex-wife, his daughter, and the world. And it means asking the man who’s been silently loving him for over a decade to believe that this time, finally, he’s choosing him on purpose.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Best friends to lovers with 12 years of pining
✅ Bi awakening — watching him discover what he wants
✅ Roommates/forced proximity that turns domestic
✅ Slow burn that DETONATES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Praise kink, body worship, and size difference
✅ Grown men with mortgages who also wreck each other
✅ Single dad hero with the sweetest kid
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, divorce and co-parenting themes, bi awakening/coming out, and depictions of loneliness and emotional repression. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One
The thing about being good in a crisis is that people stop wondering whether you’re having one.
“Breathe, Carl.” I leaned back in my desk chair and watched the ceiling fan make its slow, useless rotation. Carl had been hyperventilating for the better part of three minutes, which was actually an improvement over the sobbing. “Nothing is on fire. Your business still exists. The money is traceable, and we’re going to trace it.”
“He took everything, Evan. Fourteen years we’ve been partners—”
“Business partners. Which means the recovery framework is different than if he’d cleaned out a joint checking account. You have protections you don’t even know about yet.” I pulled up the spreadsheet I’d started building the second Carl’s name hit my caller ID at four-fifteen on a Tuesday. “I need you to authorize me to contact your accountant. Can you do that?”
“I can’t—I don’t—”
“Carl. One thing at a time. Can you send me an email right now authorizing me to speak with Deborah Stein at Stein & Associates about your accounts?”
A shuddering breath. “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”
“Good. Send it while we’re on the phone so I know it’s done.”
I listened to him type. His keyboard sounded like a man stabbing at a life raft, but the email arrived in my inbox thirty seconds later with the authorization I needed and a subject line that just said PLEASE HELP.
“Got it. Here’s what happens next.” I walked him through the steps—forensic accountant, business attorney, freezing the partnership accounts, filing the police report he’d been too stunned to consider. By the time I hung up, Carl sounded less like a man watching his life disintegrate and more like a man with a checklist.
I set the phone down. Stared at it for a moment.
My apartment was quiet. It was always quiet. I’d decorated it the way a person decorates when they’ve accepted that they’re the only one who’s going to see it—tasteful enough that I could respect myself, comfortable enough that I didn’t feel like I was performing for an audience of zero. Gray couch, good coffee table, bookshelves organized by a system no one had ever asked me to explain.
My phone buzzed. Not a call this time—a notification from the dating app I’d downloaded three weeks ago in a fit of something I refused to call desperation.
Drew K., 33. Graphic Designer. 4 miles away.
He’d sent a message. I could see the first few words in the preview: Hey, loved your profile—especially the part about…
I didn’t open it.
Not because Drew K. looked wrong. He looked fine. Better than fine—good jaw, easy smile, the kind of photo where the lighting suggested he actually went outside and did things rather than posing in a bathroom mirror. I just couldn’t summon the energy to construct the version of myself that first messages required. The charming Evan. The available Evan. The Evan who wasn’t still, at thirty-five years old, quietly and pathetically hung up on a man who had never once looked at him the way Drew K.’s profile photo suggested Drew K. might look at someone he found attractive.
I closed the app. Opened my email. Answered three client inquiries with the efficient warmth that paid my mortgage.
The apartment stayed quiet.
My phone rang at 8:47 p.m.
I was on the couch with leftover pasta and a documentary about octopuses that I’d chosen specifically because octopuses had never broken my heart. I checked the screen and my chest did the thing it always did when Noah Ramsey’s name appeared—a sharp, involuntary contraction, like a fist closing around something it had been told not to hold.
I picked up. “Hey.”
Silence. Not the comfortable kind—the loaded kind, where you can hear someone trying to assemble a sentence from parts that don’t fit together anymore.
“Noah?”
“Hey.” His voice was wrong. Tight and careful and stripped of the easy, dry humor that I’d spent twelve years memorizing. He sounded like a man holding himself together with both hands and running out of grip. “Are you—is this a bad time?”
“I’m watching a documentary about octopuses.”
“Why?”
“Because they have three hearts and I find that aspirational. What’s going on?”
He almost laughed. It came out closer to a breath that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. “I signed the papers today.”
I sat up. Set the pasta on the coffee table. Muted the octopuses.
“Where are you?”
“Sitting in my truck outside the house. Sara’s house. Whatever it is now.” A pause. The sound of his hand rubbing across stubble, which I could identify because I’d heard it a thousand times—Noah on the phone, Noah thinking, Noah stalling. “Lily’s asleep inside. Sara said she’d handle bedtime. I said I’d be fine.”
“Are you fine?”
“I’m sitting in a truck outside a house that has my daughter in it and my name isn’t on the mortgage anymore and my apartment won’t be ready for three weeks and I don’t—” He stopped. Swallowed. “I didn’t know who else to call.”
There it was. The sentence I’d been hearing in various forms since we were twenty-three years old. Noah Ramsey, six-foot-three of steady dependability, the man everyone leaned on, didn’t know who else to call. And every single time, the answer was me.
“Come over,” I said.
“Evan, I can’t just—”
“You can. Guest room’s clean. I’ll leave the door unlocked.”
“It’s going to be a few weeks. Until the apartment—”
“I heard you. Come over.”
Another silence. This one was different—less fractured, more the silence of a man deciding whether to accept something he needed but hadn’t given himself permission to want.
“Okay,” he said. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Drive safe.”
“Ev?”
I closed my eyes. Ev. Only Noah called me that. Only Noah had ever been allowed to.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just get here.”
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Scene?
The Barbecue — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
One year later. Everyone’s gone home. Lily’s at Sara’s. The house is theirs. And the man who burned the burgers because he couldn’t stop staring at Evan’s thighs is about to make up for it in every way that matters.
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