Heatwave Neighbors

An enemies-to-lovers MM romance · by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Steamy

Tropes: Enemies to Lovers · Neighbors to Lovers · Forced Proximity · One Bed · Grumpy/Sunshine · Praise Kink · Touch Starved · Hurt/Comfort

The grid failed. The wall between us didn’t survive either.

Dylan moved to Marsh Street for one thing: quiet. What he got is the neighbor from hell — a loud, infuriating, unfairly gorgeous line cook whose balcony parties rattle the walls and whose door-slamming starts at seven a.m. sharp. Their war has raged all summer, one passive-aggressive group chat text at a time.

Rafa survives hundred-degree kitchens for a living. What he can’t survive is 4A — the buttoned-up designer whose laminated notes and lawyer texts have become the best part of his day. Not that he’d ever admit it.

Then the heat dome breaks the grid, the whole block goes dark, and the only working air conditioner in the building is bolted into Rafa’s bedroom window. One small, barely cool room. Two sweaty men who claim to hate each other. A truce measured in inches — and a summer’s worth of tension with nowhere left to hide.

Blackout rules say nothing counts. The problem is, everything does.

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

✔️ Enemies-to-lovers with genuinely funny warfare
✔️ Forced proximity and only one cool room
✔️ A grumpy designer × a sunshine line cook who feeds people as a love language
✔️ Praise, banter, and a group chat that ships them harder than anyone
✔️ Found family, a nosy building, and an HEA sealed with a heatwave

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Content note: Heatwave Neighbors is a steamy adult MM romance intended for readers 18+. Contains on-page intimacy, strong language, and discussion of a past emotionally dismissive relationship. Guaranteed HEA.

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Chapter One: Enemy Next Door

Dylan

The weather app said it was ninety-four degrees at midnight, and my air conditioner was making the sound of a dying animal.

Not a peaceful dying animal, either. Something with unfinished business. A rattle, then a wheeze, then a long mechanical groan that suggested the unit had seen things in this apartment it could never unsee. I’d named it Gerald sometime in June, back when naming it felt affectionate instead of like drafting a eulogy.

“Come on, Gerald,” I said, pressing my palm flat against the plastic casing like a faith healer. “Not tonight. Tonight we survive together.”

Gerald coughed out a breath of air that was, at best, room temperature. At worst, it was slightly warmer than the room, which meant I owned a machine whose entire function was making my apartment hotter while charging me for the privilege.

I peeled my shirt away from my back — it made an actual sound, a soft wet separation, which was a new low even for July — and checked my laptop. The logo revision for the Harmon account stared back at me, seventeen artboards deep, due at nine a.m. My client wanted it to feel “warm but not hot.” I wanted to tell her nothing in my life would ever be warm-but-not-hot again. The entire city was hot. The concrete was hot. The tap water came out of the cold faucet lukewarm, like the pipes had given up on the concept.

And then, through the wall — through the floor, through the window, through what I could only assume was the fabric of spacetime itself — the bass started.

I closed my eyes.

Apartment 4B. Of course it was 4B.

It began, as it always began, with reggaeton at a volume that suggested 4B believed the entire block had personally requested it. Then laughter. Then more laughter, the specific multi-person kind that meant the balcony was filling up. Then a voice rising over all of it — that voice, low and rough-edged and carrying like it had been trained in a room full of clattering pans — shouting something in Spanish that made everyone laugh harder.

Rafael Vega. My neighbor. The human embodiment of a car alarm.

I’d never actually spoken to him beyond the building group chat, which was its own circle of hell, but I knew his name from the buzzer panel and his voice from every night of my life since May. I knew he worked late — the parties started at midnight because that’s when he got home — and I knew he had approximately four hundred friends, all of whom smoked on his balcony directly below the airflow path of my one operational window.

I gave it ten minutes. I’m not a monster. I sat there sweating onto my keyboard while a song about, as far as I could tell, someone’s extremely specific feelings regarding a dance floor rattled my water glass, and I gave it ten entire minutes before I picked up my phone.

The group chat was called 145 Marsh Street Fam — a name chosen by our landlord, Mr. Okafor, a genuinely kind man with a genuinely delusional sense of our community spirit.

Dylan (4A): Friendly reminder that quiet hours start at 11 pm per the lease. Some of us have work in the morning. Thanks!

I read it back. The exclamation point was doing heavy lifting. The exclamation point said I am a reasonable person being extremely normal about this. The rest of the message said I have composed seventeen drafts of this text and each one was more unhinged than the last.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Rafa (4B): friendly reminder that its friday

Rafa (4B): also its not even loud lol

I looked at my water glass, which was visibly vibrating.

Dylan (4A): My furniture disagrees.

Rafa (4B): your furniture should come down and have a drink then. sounds tense

Somewhere below me, the party laughed at something, and I chose to believe it wasn’t me, and I also knew it was me.

Dylan (4A): Some of us can’t sleep in a nightclub.

Rafa (4B): some of us cant sleep at all in this heat so we stopped trying. adapt papi

I stared at the word papi for longer than I will ever admit to another living soul. It was condescending. It was clearly condescending. There was no reason for the back of my neck to go warm, except that the back of my neck was already warm, because everything was warm, because it was ninety-four degrees at midnight and my air conditioner was named Gerald and Gerald was dying.

Mrs. Petrakis (2C): Both of you shut up I’m trying to watch my program

The chat went quiet. The music did not.

I got four hours of sleep and delivered the Harmon revisions at 8:57 a.m. with the pixel-eyed precision of a man running entirely on cold brew and spite. My client replied love the energy!! which meant she’d asked someone in her office and they’d shrugged.

By noon the apartment was an oven with a mortgage. I’d read that the heat dome parked over the city was breaking records — day nine of temperatures above ninety-five, the kind of weather where the local news anchors stopped saying “scorcher” with a smile and started saying it like a threat. The city had opened cooling centers. The power company was sending emails with words like “unprecedented demand” and “we appreciate your patience,” which is what companies say right before they stop deserving it.

I worked in my underwear with three fans triangulated on my desk chair and Gerald doing his best, which was nothing. Every hour or so I’d hear 4B’s door — Rafa slammed it, always, like the door had wronged him personally — and footsteps in the hall, and I’d feel my blood pressure tick up on principle.

We’d been at war since May, and like most wars, nobody could point to the exact first shot. Maybe it was the first balcony party. Maybe it was the note I’d taped to his door in June — polite, laminated-looking in its neatness, a mistake I understood only in hindsight. Maybe it was the morning after that note, when he’d started leaving for work by slamming his door hard enough to knock my framed print crooked, every single day, at seven a.m., a time I was fairly sure he did not actually need to leave for a dinner-shift job.

The man weaponized doors. Who does that.

I’d seen him exactly enough times to be furious about it. That was the thing I didn’t examine closely, the thing I kept in a box at the back of my brain marked DO NOT: Rafael Vega was, objectively, catastrophically good-looking. It would have been so much easier if he weren’t. If the guy blasting music at one a.m. had been some crusty finance bro, I could have hated him cleanly, with my whole chest. Instead the universe, which despises me, had given the apartment next door to a broad-shouldered line cook with forearms like he moonlighted as a warning label, dark curls perpetually damp at the temples, and a grin I’d seen deployed on other people in the lobby — never me — that looked like it should require a permit.

He was loud, inconsiderate, chaotic, and hot in a way that felt like a personal insult. I hated him with the focus of a man who had nothing else going on, which — inventory of my summer — I did not.

The elevator had been broken since Tuesday, which is how I ended up on the stairs at six p.m. with a grocery bag in each arm, my glasses sliding down the sweat-slick of my nose, climbing toward the fourth floor like a pilgrim doing penance.

The stairwell was airless. By the third floor my shirt was translucent in patches and I’d stopped thinking of it as a body and started thinking of it as cargo. I rounded the last landing with my head down, hip-checked the door open —

— and walked directly into a wall of person.

The impact knocked one bag out of my arms. I watched, in slow motion, as a cantaloupe made its bid for freedom, hit the hallway floor, and rolled with tremendous dignity toward the far wall.

“Whoa — hey, I got it—”

I knew the voice before I looked up, and I looked up anyway, because I am a fool who never learns.

Rafael Vega was shirtless.

He was shirtless, holding two grocery bags of his own against one hip, with a mesh sack of limes hooked over two fingers, and he was — the whole hallway was ninety degrees and he was gleaming with it, sweat tracking down a chest that belonged in an anatomy textbook under a chapter titled You Have Got To Be Kidding Me. There was a tattoo along his ribs I’d never been close enough to read. There was a scar on his forearm, a long pale line, the kind cooks collect. There was a drop of sweat making its way down the center of his sternum with a slowness I found frankly hostile.

I had been staring for — I didn’t know. A duration. A measurable duration.

His mouth was doing something. It took me a second to register it as a grin, the permit-requiring one, aimed at me for the first time in recorded history, and at close range it was so much worse.

“4A,” he said, like it was a name. Like it was a funny name. “So you do leave the apartment.”

“I—” My brain, which had delivered seventeen artboards by nine a.m., produced nothing. “You dropped my cantaloupe.”

“You dropped your cantaloupe.” He crouched — I fixed my gaze on the exit sign with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb — and scooped the melon off the floor one-handed, giving it a little toss. “Bruised. Tragic. You want to file a noise complaint about it?”

“That’s very funny.”

“I thought so.” He held the cantaloupe out. Up close his eyes were dark brown with a lighter ring around the iris, and he smelled like lime and clean sweat and something faintly smoky, kitchen-smoke, and I hated that I catalogued all of it in under a second like some kind of resentment sommelier. “You’re the graphic designer, right? Mrs. Petrakis told me. She tells me everything. She thinks you’re too skinny.”

“I’m— that’s not—” I took the cantaloupe. Our fingers overlapped for a quarter second on the rind and my entire nervous system filed a report. “I’m a brand designer.”

“Oh, excuse me.” His grin widened. He shifted the bags on his hip, and a line of muscle moved in his side, and the exit sign and I renewed our commitment to each other. “A brand designer. That why you type your little texts like a lawyer? Per the lease. Quiet hours. You bill by the word?”

“Some of us communicate like adults.”

“Adults come knock on the door, man.” He said it easily, no heat in it, which was somehow more infuriating than anger would’ve been. “Adults say, ‘hey, Rafa, turn it down.’ You’ve lived through that wall for what, eight months? You never once knocked. You just type.” He mimed it, thumbs going, an expression of prim fury on his face that was — okay, it was an impression of me, and it was accurate, and I wanted to die. “Tap tap tap. Friendly reminder.“

“You want me to knock at one in the morning?”

“I want you to be a person.” He stepped past me toward his door, close in the narrow hallway, close enough that the heat came off his skin like an open oven door, and I stood extremely still the way you do when a large animal passes. He got his key in the lock, then looked back over his shoulder. Sweat had stuck a curl to his temple. It was ridiculous. He was ridiculous. “For what it’s worth, 4A — party tonight’s cancelled. Too hot even for me. So you’ll get your beauty sleep.”

“I don’t need—” I stopped. Recalibrated. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Grid’s about to eat it anyway.” He shouldered his door open — didn’t slam it, for once, just held it with his foot. “My boy works for the power company. Says this heat keeps up, they’re gonna start cutting neighborhoods. Rolling blackouts. Real Lord of the Flies hours coming.”

Something cold moved through me despite the heat. “They can’t just cut the power.”

“They can do whatever they want, it’s a utility.” He shrugged, and the bags shifted, and the limes swung from his fingers. “I’d charge your little devices, brand designer. Fill some water bottles.” The grin came back, slower this time, and he looked at me — actually looked, a top-to-bottom pass that took in the translucent shirt and the fogged glasses and the cantaloupe clutched to my chest like a shield — and something in his expression flickered, too quick to name, before the smirk closed over it. “You’re gonna melt, man. You’re already melting.”

“I’m fine.”

“Sure you are.” The door swung. “Night, 4A.”

“It’s Dylan,” I said, to the closed door.

Through the wall, faintly, I heard him laugh.

He wasn’t lying about the party. That night, for the first time in weeks, 4B was quiet — no bass, no balcony chorus, just the occasional sound of him moving around, water running, a cabinet closing. It should have been bliss. I lay on top of my sheets in front of two fans with Gerald rattling his death-song, and the silence was somehow worse, because now there was nothing to be furious at, and fury had been doing a lot of load-bearing work in my brain.

Without it there was just: the heat. The Harmon account. The fact that I hadn’t touched another human being since a handshake in February. The drop of sweat on Rafael Vega’s sternum, which my memory had preserved in insulting high definition and kept screening on a loop.

You’re already melting.

“Shut up,” I told the ceiling.

At 11:48 p.m., my phone buzzed. The group chat.

Mr. Okafor (Landlord): Good evening everyone. I hope you are staying cool. I have received a notice from the utility company. Due to unprecedented demand they may implement emergency rolling blackouts in our area beginning as early as tomorrow evening. Please conserve power where possible and prepare accordingly — water, flashlights, charged phones. We are a community and we will look out for each other. 🙏

The chat exploded. Mrs. Petrakis demanded to know what would happen to her program. Someone in 3F asked if rent would be prorated, a question so bold I almost respected it. I stared at the message and felt Gerald’s warm exhale against my calf, and did math I didn’t like: no power meant no Gerald meant no fans meant a fourth-floor apartment with western exposure in a record heat dome.

Meant an oven. With me in it.

Three dots. Then:

Rafa (4B): told you

I looked at the wall between our apartments. Four inches of drywall and a century of bad decisions.

Rafa (4B): hope your furniture is prepared 4A

Dylan (4A): It’s Dylan.

Rafa (4B): i know

I put the phone face-down on my chest and lay there in the dark, ninety-four degrees at midnight, listening to the man next door run his tap on the other side of the wall, and told myself the heat was the only reason I couldn’t sleep.

Gerald, rattling, called me a liar.

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