Hands Full

A Single Dad, Best Friend’s Brother MM Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Single Dad, Best Friend’s Brother, Forced Proximity, Thin Walls, Six Years of Pining, Age Gap, Praise, Touch Starved, Hurt/Comfort, Vers Couple, Divorced Dad, Small Town, Found Family

One good hand. One thin wall. His best friend’s little brother on the other side of it.

Callum Reed has a system for everything.

Daycare bags. Delivery schedules. Two three-year-olds and a custody calendar he could recite in his sleep.

He does not have a system for a broken wrist. Or for Avery Sloan.

Avery is his best friend’s little brother. He’s twenty-nine, deadpan, covered in ink and paint, and he needs a place to stay for six weeks. A spare room in exchange for a little help around the house should be simple.

Except the wall between their bedrooms is thin. Except Callum has one working hand and eighteen months of nobody touching him. Except Avery has wanted him for six years, and he’s done pretending otherwise.

One kiss against the refrigerator, and Callum finds out what it’s like to be told to stop managing, lie back, and take it.

But Avery didn’t wait six years to be the help. He wants a vote, a door that closes, and a man who chooses him when it isn’t convenient.

And Callum is about to learn the difference between needing someone and making room for them.

Hands Full is a high-heat MM romance with a divorced single dad, his best friend’s younger brother, forced proximity, thin walls, six years of pining, a seven-year age gap, praise, a vers couple who can’t keep their hands (or hand) to themselves, 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:

✅ A divorced dad who can do nine of the eleven steps of toddler pants with one hand, and nothing at all for himself
✅ His best friend’s little brother, all grown up, with paint on his knuckles and six years of wanting
✅ One thin bedroom wall, headboard to headboard, that works in both directions
✅ A contract on the refrigerator, written on the back of a daycare flyer: Avery owes nothing
✅ The man who handles everything being told to put his hand at his side and do nothing. “Good. That’s good, Callum.”
✅ Six weeks in a purple cast, and then the night he gets both hands back
✅ A vers couple, a seven-year age gap, and a bossy illustrator who likes being held down
✅ Twins who sort the toothbrushes, a rabbit named Button, an ex-wife who is nobody’s villain, and a best friend who knocks now
✅ He falls first (by six years), no cheating, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, including praise, edging, wrists held and bodies pinned by consent, rimming, a vers couple, and sex without condoms after on-page testing), divorce and co-parenting, a parent who repeatedly failed to come home in a character’s childhood (recounted), a broken wrist and recovery, a workplace truck rollover with a minor injury to a side character, a temporary breakup that is repaired on page, alcohol, and strong language. Two three-year-old children appear throughout and are never present in or near an intimate scene. No cheating, no dub-con, no sexual violence. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One: Callum

There are eleven steps to getting a three-year-old into a pair of pants, and until last Tuesday I could do nine of them with my right hand.

“Foot,” I said.

Kit looked at his foot. Then at me. Then at the purple fiberglass that ran from my knuckles to just short of my elbow, which he had personally covered in dinosaur stickers and still seemed to regard as a toy I was refusing to share.

“Other foot, bud. That one’s already in.”

He put the same foot into the same leg hole a second time, with tremendous concentration, and tipped over sideways onto the rug. Button the rabbit went down with him. Neither of them appeared to mind.

Six days in a cast had taught me things. You cannot pinch a waistband with your left hand and pull with a right hand that has been turned into a club. You can’t do a snap. You can’t open a string cheese, sign a permission slip so that it resembles a name, or tie a size-eight sneaker, which was why both of my children now owned Velcro.

(I’d started a list. Things I Can’t Do, on the back of a pharmacy receipt. I quit at twenty-three, when it started reading like a personality.)

“Daddy.” Wren, from the doorway of the room she shared with her brother. “My socks are wrong.”

“Your socks are great. I put them on you four minutes ago.”

“They have a line.”

“That’s the seam, sweetheart. Every sock has a—” I looked up. She was barefoot. The socks were balled in her fist and held out to me like evidence. “Where are your shoes?”

“In the bathtub.”

I decided that was a seven-fifteen problem.

My phone went off against my hip for the third time since six. I knew who it was without looking, because only one category of human being texts in bursts of four before sunrise, and that’s a site superintendent whose delivery didn’t show.

“Okay. New plan.” I hooked my good arm around Kit’s middle, stood him up, and held the waistband open with two left fingers and my teeth. “Step in. Both. There he is.”

“You bited my pants.”

“I did. Don’t tell your mother.”

Wren considered this. “I’m telling Mommy on Wednesday.”

“That’s fair.”

She would, too. Wren kept a schedule the way other kids kept a blanket. Monday and Tuesday were Daddy’s house. Wednesday and Thursday were Mommy’s. Weekends took turns, and God help the adult who tried to describe it any other way.

The kitchen was where the morning went to die. I’d made eggs at six-forty, back when I still believed in myself, and they had since achieved the texture of a pencil eraser. Toast: triangles for Wren, squares for Kit, cut with a pizza wheel because I couldn’t hold bread still and saw at it at the same time. (Item eleven.)

I didn’t put the plates on the dining table. Nobody had put a plate on the dining table since roughly Easter. It had laundry on it, three weeks of mail, a stack of finger paintings I couldn’t throw away and couldn’t find a home for, and somewhere under all of that, I was fairly sure, a table. We ate at the counter. They sat on stools. I stood.

“This egg is cold,” Wren reported.

“It’s a room-temperature egg. Very fancy. Restaurants charge extra.”

Kit fed a toast square to Button, who took it well.

The phone again. I gave up and read it with my left thumb.

Truck’s not here. Crew’s here. Where’s my storefront.

Reed.

REED.

I got six guys standing around a hole in a building.

Forty-two linear feet of aluminum storefront framing, due in Allentown at six, which meant it had left our yard at four-thirty, which meant it was currently somewhere on Route 22 being somebody’s problem, and that somebody was me. I typed on it, 20 min with a thumb that had never in its life been asked to do more than hold the phone. It came out in it 20 mom. I sent that.

“Shoes,” I said. “Bathtub. Go.”

Getting two toddlers into car seats with one hand is a thing I had not, before last week, thought of as a skill. The chest clip is fine. The crotch buckle is a two-handed design by a person who hates me. I’d worked out a method: knee on the seat edge, cast braced against the shell, left hand feeding the tongues in one at a time while I talked the whole way through so nobody noticed how long it took.

“Why is your arm purple?” Wren asked, as she had asked every morning.

“Because you picked purple.”

“Yes.” Deeply satisfied. “I did.”

She had. She’d been next to me at the orthopedic clinic, swinging her feet, when the tech fanned out the color samples, and I’d been too busy doing math about six weeks to form an opinion.

I broke it carrying a box. That’s the entire story. No ladder, no pickup game, nothing a man could tell at a bar. One of nine boxes Elise had packed and labeled for me when we split the house down the middle, and that I’d never opened, on its way down the hall to the spare room where the other eight lived. My sock caught the runner. I put my hand out. The floor did the rest.

Little Sprouts was an eleven-minute drive and I took two calls on it, one from the super and one from dispatch, and solved neither. I walked the twins in, one on each side, Kit’s fist around two fingers of my left hand and Wren holding the hard edge of the cast because she liked the sound it made when she knocked. I signed the clipboard in a scrawl. I told the woman in the Butterfly Room that Kit hadn’t napped well Sunday. I had a pleasant ninety seconds with another father about the parking lot repaving. I kissed two heads. Wren reminded me it was Monday, in case I’d lost track, and went to sort the block bin by color.

Then I got back to the truck, caught myself in the driver’s window, and saw the tag.

Flapping. At my throat. White, rectangular, MACHINE WASH COLD.

Buttons were item four, so I’d been living in the company polos all week, the navy ones with Keystone Architectural Supply stitched over the heart. I looked down. The stitching was there, all right. Backward, and fuzzy, with the little knots showing.

Inside out. I had conducted an entire daycare drop-off and held a conversation about asphalt with my shirt on inside out, and three adults had looked directly at me and decided it was kinder not to mention it.

I stood in the parking lot and laughed once, through my nose. Then I got in the cab, wrestled the thing over my head one-armed, got it hung up on the cast, sat there shirtless and blind inside a polo for what felt like a fiscal quarter, and put it back on the right way.

The phone buzzed.

REED.

“I’m fine,” I told the windshield, and pulled out.

The storefront turned up in Bethlehem. Wrong job site, right truck, a driver three days into the job who’d been handed two manifests and trusted the top one. By the time I had it rerouted, the super talked down, and a credit memo written for six guys’ standing-around time, it was five-ten, and Little Sprouts charged a dollar a minute per child after five-thirty.

I made it at five-twenty-six.

They both fell asleep on the drive home. It happened maybe one day in five: the heat of the cab, the hum of the road, two heads tipping toward the middle like they were sharing a secret. I pulled into the driveway, put the truck in park, and didn’t turn off the engine.

Here is something I have never told anyone. Some nights I can’t go in.

Not won’t. Can’t. The house is right there, a brown craftsman with a porch I keep meaning to repaint, and inside it is dinner, bath, the negotiation over which pajamas, two rounds of the rabbit book, a glass of water, a different glass of water, and then a kitchen that looks like the morning happened to it. All of which I’d do. All of which I wanted to do, if wanting is the word for the thing that gets you up. But between the truck and the front door there is a gap, and some nights I have to stand on the near side of it for a minute before I can cross.

Two minutes. I timed it once, the way I time everything. A hundred and twenty seconds in which nobody on earth needed a single thing from me.

I watched the dashboard clock turn over twice. Behind me, Kit sighed in his sleep.

Then I shut off the engine and went to be their father.

By eight-ten the house was quiet and I was standing at the counter, eating the twins’ leftover buttered noodles out of the pot and staring down a jar of marinara I couldn’t open.

It had a dish towel wrapped around the lid. I had tried the towel, a rubber glove, hot water, and clamping it between my knees. I was eyeing the door frame when a key turned in the front lock.

“Don’t shoot,” Seth called, at a pitch calibrated to carry without waking children. “I’ve got pizza and a DeWalt.”

Seth Sloan had owned a key to every place I’d lived since I was twenty-two. He came down my hall the way he came into any room, like he’d been sent to inspect the wiring, which half the time he had: work boots, a pizza box balanced on one palm, a drill case in the other fist.

“You said the gate came out of the wall.”

“I said it Thursday.”

“And I’m here Monday. That’s four days, for a friend, for free. Where’s the— Jesus, Cal. What happened to your table?”

“That’s its natural state.”

“There’s a fitted sheet on it.”

“It’s folded.”

“It is absolutely not folded.” He set the pizza on the stove, the only clear horizontal surface in the room, and jerked his head back toward the hall. “Also, I brought a stray. Don’t be weird.”

I hadn’t heard the second set of footsteps. He had always been quiet, the youngest Sloan. At their mother’s table he was the one who passed you things before you asked, laughed half a beat behind everyone else, and was up washing dishes before you’d registered he’d left his chair. I had known him eleven years. If you’d asked me that morning to describe him I’d have said: nice kid, draws.

The man who came around the corner of my hallway with a duffel on his shoulder and a flat black portfolio case under his arm was not a kid.

I don’t know when I’d last actually looked. Two years ago, maybe. Somebody’s Fourth of July, across a yard, a wave. He’d have been twenty-seven then, so it wasn’t as though he had grown up in the meantime. It was me. I’d been married, and then I’d been getting divorced, and then I’d been tired, and somewhere in there I had stopped looking at anybody at all.

So I looked.

Lean. An inch or two under my height, built like a line somebody had drawn in one stroke and not corrected. Dark-blond hair that needed cutting and had been shoved back with a hand, recently. A gray sweater with the sleeves pushed to the elbow, and below the sleeves, forearms: corded, tendon and vein, the arms of a person who did something precise with them for hours at a stretch. Old jeans with a swipe of yellow ocher across one thigh. And his hands, when he shifted the portfolio, had paint dried into the creases of the knuckles, cobalt and a rusty red, like he’d scrubbed for a while and then given up.

His jaw had a day’s stubble on it, darker than his hair. That was the detail that got me. I couldn’t have told you why. You don’t think of your best friend’s little brother as a person who has to shave.

“Hi, Callum,” Avery said.

His voice was lower than the one I had on file. Unhurried. Hazel eyes went to my face, then to the cast, then, in one clean pass, over the kitchen. The pot I was eating from. The jar in its towel. The dining table with its drifts of laundry and mail and construction paper. He took all of it in the way I’d take in a loading dock, and I waited for the joke, because there’s always a joke. Seth had made his in under five seconds.

Avery didn’t say a word about it.

He set the duffel down against the baseboard, quietly, like a man who’d been told there were children sleeping and had believed it. Then he crossed my kitchen, lifted the jar off the counter, and unwrapped the towel. One short turn of his wrist. The seal popped. He put the lid down beside it, folded the towel in thirds, and went back to stand by his bag.

“Number nine,” he said.

“What?”

He tipped his chin at the pharmacy receipt magneted to the fridge. “Your list. Nine is ‘jars.’ Twelve is ‘the good can opener,’ which implies a bad can opener, and I have questions.”

“The bad one’s electric. Kit’s afraid of it.”

“Sensible.” Not a smile, exactly. A shift at one corner of his mouth, there and gone. “I would be too.”

Something moved in my chest, low and heavy, like a load shifting in a truck bed. I looked at the open jar. It had been eighteen months since anyone had touched me because they wanted to and not because they needed something carried. I’d made my peace with that. I really had. And here I was going warm in the face because a man with paint on his knuckles had opened my pasta sauce.

I put the pot down.

“Gate,” Seth said, oblivious, already at the top of the basement stairs with the drill out. “Cal, hold this. No. You can’t. Ave, hold this.”

Avery went. He crouched at the hinge side, sweater pulling tight across his shoulders, and held the gate plumb with one hand while his brother ran new anchors into the stud. He didn’t flinch at the noise. He watched the bit go in, and then, while Seth swore at a stripped screw, he turned his head and looked down the dark hall toward the bedrooms.

Checking, I realized, whether we’d woken them.

Nobody checks that. Nobody who doesn’t live here.

“These are too short.” Seth squinted at the screw in his palm. “I’ve got three-inch in the truck. Don’t let go of that.”

The front door closed behind him, and I was alone in a room with Avery Sloan for the first time in eleven years.

He didn’t fill it. Most people, left in a near-stranger’s kitchen, will reach for the weather. He kept one hand on the gate and studied my cast.

“Does it hurt?”

“Itches. Mostly at two in the morning.”

“Knitting needle.”

“I have toddlers. I don’t own anything pointed.”

“Chopstick, then.” His gaze traveled over the stickers: a stegosaurus, half a T. rex, most of a sheet of gold stars. “Who chose the purple?”

“Wren. My daughter.”

“She’s got an eye. That’s a good purple. Close to dioxazine.” He said it like a real answer and not a thing you say to be nice. Then his eyes came up off my arm, and they took their time about it. Wrist. Forearm. Shoulder. The open collar of my shirt. My mouth.

For about a second and a half I was being looked at. Not checked for damage, the way Seth had been checking me lately. Looked at.

Then it was shuttered, so smoothly I would have sworn I’d invented it. He turned back to the hinge.

“You should sit down when you eat,” he told the drywall.

“I’ll put it on the list.”

“The other list.”

I didn’t have another list. I was still turning that over when the front door opened.

“Three-inch,” Seth announced. “Now we’re in business.”

I cleared my throat. “So what’s the bag?”

“Tell him,” Seth said, around a screw.

“The annex flooded.” Avery stayed where he was, steadying the gate. “A pipe let go in the ceiling over the weekend. I’ve got the caretaker flat upstairs, over the library annex. Had. My kitchen is on the periodicals floor now.”

“Christ. Your work?”

It was the first thing out of my mouth, and I watched it land. A flicker, quick: surprise that I’d asked that before anything else.

“The bedroom side stayed dry. I got everything out.” He nodded at the portfolio case. “That’s the part that matters. The rest is a couch and some plates.”

“They’re telling him six weeks,” Seth said. “Gut the ceiling, replumb, dry it out, new drywall. And he was going to stay with us, except Dana’s sister is on our couch through Halloween with a ferret—”

“Two ferrets.”

“—two ferrets, Cal, in my house. And Mom’s is forty minutes out, and she’d have him regrouting her shower by Wednesday. So as of tonight he’s at the Starlite out on 309, and I have done service calls at the Starlite. I’ve seen that panel. I wouldn’t let him charge a phone in that building.”

“It’s sixty-one dollars a night,” Avery said mildly. “I’ve accepted the risk.”

“I’ve got a room.”

It was out before I had run it past anything. No list. No pros column. I heard it hanging in the air of my own kitchen and thought: huh.

Seth’s head came up. Avery didn’t move.

“The spare,” I said, because apparently I was still talking. “End of the hall. It’s got boxes in it, I haven’t— there’s a bed under there. Full size. It’s a real bed. The boxes can go against the wall.”

The wall. I knew that wall. The spare room and mine shared it, headboard to headboard, old plaster over lath, and for sixteen months there had been nothing on the other side of it but cardboard. Back when we had guests, you could hear a suitcase zipper through it. You could hear a drawer.

I hadn’t thought about what else you could hear.

“That’s—” Seth aimed the drill at me. “Yes. That. That’s two birds. He needs a bed, you need a second set of hands, and I have been saying so since you did that to yourself. You can’t even open a jar.”

“I had it loosened.”

“You did not,” Avery said.

He stood, finally, and let go of the gate. It held.

“I could help. If I stayed. Around the house, while that’s on.” A glance at the cast. “I’m not offering to raise your children. But I can carry a laundry basket, and I know how a dishwasher works.”

“You don’t have to earn—”

“I know I don’t have to.”

He said it evenly. Pleasantly, even. It stopped me like a palm laid flat on my sternum.

“Great,” Seth said. “Done. Solved. I’m a genius. Cal, have you got plates, or are those in the laundry too?”

He was already flipping the pizza box open, shoulders coming down, relief rolling off him. He’d been carrying both of us around all week, I understood: his brother in a motel with bad wiring, his best friend eating out of a pot. Seth fixed things. He had found a way to fix two of them with one screw, and he was thrilled with himself.

Avery was not thrilled.

He wasn’t unhappy, either. He stood in the middle of my kitchen with his thumbs hooked in his back pockets and his eyes on me, and he had the look I get when a contract comes back too fast. A man who’d been handed precisely what he needed and was reading it for the clause.

I became aware of several things at once. That there was a noodle on my shirt. That I hadn’t shaved since Friday. That he was standing near enough for me to see the cobalt had worked its way under one thumbnail, and that I was wondering, with a specificity that startled me, what those hands looked like when they were busy.

My body, which had spent a year and a half filing nothing but fatigue reports, submitted an opinion. Low. Warm. Unmistakable. I knew that pull. I hadn’t felt it aimed at a man in eight years, and never once in this kitchen.

“Six weeks,” he said.

“That’s what they told me about this.” I lifted the cast an inch. “So. Same clock.”

“And you’d want what, exactly? From me.”

“I don’t know. Whatever you—”

“That’s what I thought.”

Seth looked up, a slice folded halfway to his mouth, finally catching the weather. “Ave. He’s offering you a free room.”

“He is.” Avery hadn’t looked away from me. Up close his eyes ran more green than brown, steady, with something behind the steadiness I couldn’t read and badly wanted to. He was the quietest person I had ever let into this house. He was not, I was learning, easy. “It’s a kind offer. I mean that.”

“But,” I said.

That corner of his mouth again. Not gone so fast this time.

“I’ll take it,” Avery said. “But I want it in writing.”

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The Night Before — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Nine hours before the cast comes off, Callum can’t sleep. So Avery climbs on top of him with a legal pad and a pen and makes him say it out loud: every single thing he plans to do with two hands. Itemized. In order. With a preview of each. And he isn’t allowed to finish until the list is.

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