His First Man at Forty

MM Contemporary Romance | Bluebird Lanes Book 1
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bisexual Awakening, First Man at Forty, Divorced Dad, Three-Date Rule, Bossy Smaller Top, Size Difference, Friends to Lovers, Praise Kink, Light Bondage, Switch Dynamic, Blue Collar, Small Town, Found Family, No Third-Act Breakup
Length: ~106,000 words

He asked the brewery owner to be his first. The answer was three dates — and nothing comes off until the third.

On his fortieth birthday, Dennis Varga bowled the worst game of his life.

It wasn’t the lane. It was lane seven — where Marc Hanley, the cocky, bearded brewery owner who sponsors his team, showed up with a date. And Dennis couldn’t stop watching Marc’s hand on another man’s back.

Dennis has fixed every broken thing in Ridgeway. He’s never once fixed the fact that some men counted. So he does the craziest thing he’s ever done: he asks Marc to be his first.

Marc has wanted him for two years. But he’s not anybody’s secret.

His deal? Three dates. In public. Kiss me whenever you’ve got the nerve — but nothing comes off until you’ve taken me out three times and asked me again.

Dennis has never been told no so hotly in his life.

Three dates turn into the filthiest, most honest weeks of his life. But falling for Marc in the bedroom is one thing. Saying his name out loud in front of everyone who’s ever known him is another.

Dennis thought he was asking for one first time. Marc wants to know if he’s ready for the last.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A bi awakening at forty that’s earned, funny, and never treated as a punchline
✅ A three-date rule that turns every date into foreplay
✅ The bigger man who finds out he loves being handled by the smaller one
✅ A bossy brewery owner who’s done waiting — and scared to believe it
✅ A repairman who talks dirty in the same flat voice he uses to diagnose a compressor
✅ Praise kink, switching, light bondage — 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ graphic and emotional
✅ A deadpan teenage daughter, a bowling league full of busybodies, and a lucky flamingo shirt
✅ Dual POV, no cheating, no third-act breakup, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including first-time intimacy, praise kink, light bondage, and switching), strong language, divorce and co-parenting, coming out later in life, and family tension. No cheating, no outing, no drunk sex, no breakup. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One: Lane Seven

The ball left Dennis Varga’s hand like it had somewhere better to be.

It hooked early, kissed the gutter, thought about it, and dropped in with a sound like a door closing on the whole evening. Behind him, somebody on the Pin Pals two lanes over let out a low, sympathetic ooooh. Omar Bell didn’t bother being sympathetic. Omar laughed so hard he had to put his nachos down.

“Forty years old,” Omar said, wiping his eyes with a napkin that was mostly cheese. “Forty years on this earth, and that’s what you give me. On your birthday.”

“The lane’s dry.” Dennis walked back up the approach and stood at the ball return, waiting for the machine to cough his ball back up. It took its time. Everything at Bluebird Lanes took its time. The return rumbled somewhere under the floor like an old stomach, and the ball rolled out, teal with a chip in the thumb hole, and sat there looking innocent.

“The lane’s dry,” Omar repeated. “Lanette’s gonna love that. I’m gonna put it on a shirt.”

“Put it on your grave.”

“Oh, he’s got jokes. Ninth frame, a sixty-eight on the board, and the man’s got jokes.”

Dennis picked up the ball and didn’t look at lane seven.

He was very deliberately not looking at lane seven. He’d been not looking at lane seven since seven-fifteen, which was when Marc Hanley had walked into Bluebird with a tall man in a quarter-zip, laughing at something the tall man said, one hand resting at the small of the tall man’s back like it belonged there.

Marc never brought anybody.

Two years Dennis had bowled Wednesday league on the lane beside Second Shift Brewing’s sponsor team, and Marc had never once brought anybody. He brought beer. He brought fresh pretzels in a paper bag gone translucent with butter. He brought his own ball, a marbled blue thing he talked to like a dog. He did not bring tall men with good haircuts who threw a clean straight ball and clapped when Marc hit a strike.

Dennis set his feet. Four and a half steps. He knew the approach the way he knew the inside of a Whirlpool Duet — every bolt and bearing, every place a thing could go wrong. His shoulders were loose. His wrist was locked. He started forward.

On lane seven, Marc bent to pick up a spare and the tall man said something, and Marc laughed with his whole head tipped back, auburn beard catching the lane lights, and the ball left Dennis’s hand again and went directly into the left gutter without bothering to think about it this time.

The ooooh behind him was louder.

Omar didn’t laugh. Omar went quiet, which was worse.

Dennis came back up and sat on the molded orange bench, and Omar slid down so their shoulders were almost touching, and chewed a nacho very slowly while looking at the side of Dennis’s face.

“What,” Dennis said.

“Nothing.”

“You’re chewing at me.”

“I’m eating, Denny. It’s a thing I do.” Omar crunched. “You keep looking at lane seven like it owes you money.”

“I’m not looking at lane seven.”

“You looked at it right now while you said that.”

Dennis made himself look at the scoreboard instead. The overhead screen was an old CRT that Rita had nursed along with prayers and electrical tape, and it showed his sixty-eight in slightly purple numbers next to a cartoon bluebird that was supposed to flap when you rolled a strike and hadn’t flapped since the Obama administration.

“His form’s off,” Dennis said.

Omar turned to look. On lane seven, Marc Hanley stepped up, four smooth strides in tight dark jeans, released, and the pins went down in a clean white explosion. Then again on his next turn. Then again. The tall man whistled through his teeth. Somebody on the Second Shift team yelled “TURKEY!” and Marc did a little shimmy with his shoulders, grinning, and turned around and caught Dennis looking.

He lifted his chin. Hey.

Dennis lifted his chin back. Hey. His neck felt hot.

“Hm,” said Omar. “His form’s off.”

“Shut up.”

“That was three strikes in a row.”

“I know what a turkey is, Omar.”

“I just want to understand the diagnosis. You’re the expert.”

Dennis stood up to get a water he didn’t want.

Somebody had ordered him a cake.

It was a grocery-store sheet, half chocolate and half vanilla because the Kroger on Route 9 had never in its history been able to commit to one flavor, and on top were two wax candles, a 4 and a 0, that had slumped sideways in the car so the zero leaned into the four and the whole thing read something like 4O. Omar carried it out from behind the snack counter with Rita Copeland behind him, and the Pin Pals and the Gutter Queens and the Tuesday overflow guys and half the Second Shift team sang, loud and badly, while Dennis stood there with his hands in his pockets and his ears burning.

He blew out the candles. The zero went out. The four stayed lit, sputtering, and three people told him it meant something and nobody could agree on what.

“Speech,” somebody yelled.

“No,” Dennis said.

“That’s the speech,” Omar told everybody. “That’s all you get. He’s a man of few words, and most of them are about compressors.”

Dennis cut the cake because somebody put the plastic knife in his hand. He cut it into even squares, twenty-four of them, because a sheet cake cut into uneven pieces was a small crime against order and he didn’t have it in him tonight to watch Omar hack at it. His hands were steady. He was good with his hands; it was the one thing about himself he’d never doubted. Big hands, rough in the palms, a crooked left pinkie from a lathe in shop class in 1999, a shiny burn scar on the inside of his right forearm from a commercial fryer that had tried to kill him in 2011. He knew what his hands could do. It was everything above the wrists he’d lately started wondering about.

“Happy birthday, Mr. Fix-It.”

The voice came from right behind his shoulder, low and amused, and Dennis nearly cut a square in half.

Marc stood there with two plastic cups of beer — Second Shift’s amber, the one on the chalkboard across town that said DENNIS’S SPARE TIRE in Marc’s loopy handwriting because of one bad night eight months ago when Dennis had left a ten-pin standing four frames in a row. Marc held one of the cups out.

This close, Marc was shorter than you’d think from across the alley. Five-ten, maybe, compact and tight, all shoulders and cyclist’s thighs. Freckles across his nose that his beard didn’t cover. Blue-gray eyes that always seemed like they were in on a joke. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and there was a hop cone inked on the inside of his left biceps, geometric, black lines, and Dennis had spent more time than was reasonable over two years trying not to look at it.

“You didn’t have to,” Dennis said, and took the beer.

Marc’s fingers brushed his on the cup. They were cold. Marc’s hands were always cold — from kegs and glassware and the walk-in, Marc said, but Dennis had shaken hands with him in August and they’d been cold then too. It was like touching a bottle straight out of the cooler. The contact went all the way up Dennis’s arm and did something to the back of his neck.

“I absolutely did,” Marc said. “It’s the law. If a man bowls a sixty-eight on his fortieth birthday, somebody has to get him drunk.”

“Sixty-eight’s in progress.”

“Oh, sure. You’re gonna come roaring back. Tenth frame, three strikes, the crowd goes wild.” Marc sipped his beer and looked at Dennis over the rim, and his eyes did that thing, went a little narrow and warm, like he was reading the fine print on something. “You okay, though? You look like somebody sold your truck.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re doing the neck thing.”

Dennis realized he was rubbing the back of his neck. He stopped.

“There’s no neck thing.”

“There’s a hundred percent a neck thing.” Marc tipped his cup toward Dennis’s hand, still hovering near his collar. “You do it when you’re trying to figure out whether something’s a warranty repair.”

“That’s —” Dennis started, and then stopped, because it was accurate, and because nobody had ever noticed that. Carla hadn’t noticed it in fifteen years of marriage. Or maybe she had and never said. Either way.

“See, I’m observant,” Marc said, pleased. “It’s a hospitality thing. I read a room.”

“What’s the room say?”

Marc opened his mouth to answer, and then the tall man in the quarter-zip came over holding two squares of cake on one paper plate, the chocolate half and the vanilla half, and said, “I didn’t know which you’d want, so,” and held it out to Marc with a smile that was genuinely nice. That was the worst thing about it. The guy seemed nice.

“Nolan, this is Dennis,” Marc said. “Birthday boy. Dennis, Nolan.”

“Happy birthday.” Nolan shook his hand. Warm, dry grip. Architect hands, Dennis thought — clean nails, no scars, a drafting-pencil callus on the middle finger. “Marc says you’re the guy who fixed the ball return with a pocketknife.”

“It was just a jam.”

“He’s being modest,” Marc said. “It was a whole thing. Ball return was eating people’s balls — “

Somebody at the next table choked on their beer.

” — bowling balls, grow up, Kenny — and Rita was about to shut down lanes five through ten, and this man walks over, doesn’t say a word, takes out a Leatherman, lies down on the floor in front of God and the entire Wednesday league, and fifteen minutes later it’s running better than it has since 1985.”

“It was a sheared pin,” Dennis said. “Anybody could’ve.”

“Nobody else did, though,” Nolan said, friendly, and smiled at Marc. Marc smiled back. It wasn’t the same smile Marc gave Dennis. It was quieter, easier. Dennis didn’t know what to do with the fact that he’d catalogued the difference.

He drank a third of his beer in one swallow.

Rita Copeland stood on a chair at nine-forty and tapped a mic that hadn’t worked since 2019, then gave up and put two fingers in her mouth and whistled.

Bluebird went quiet. Rita had that effect. She was sixty-three, five-foot-nothing, gray hair in a clip, and she’d quit smoking a year and a half ago and replaced it with nicotine gum she chewed like it had personally wronged her. Her father had built Bluebird in 1971. There was a photo of him behind the shoe counter, cutting a ribbon, with the neon bluebird sign behind him in its full glory, both wings lit. One wing had been dead for six years now.

“Okay,” Rita said. “Everybody put your beer down, I got news, and it’s not the good kind.”

Nobody put their beer down.

“Pinsetters,” Rita said. “You all know. Twelve’s been down twice this month. Nineteen and twenty are held together with zip ties and my good wishes. The machines in the back are older than half of you, and the guy who used to service them retired to Myrtle Beach and won’t answer my calls, and I don’t blame him.” She chewed. “I talked to the bank. The bank wants numbers. They want to see this place can pull traffic before they’ll loan me what it takes to fix twenty-four machines, and right now league enrollment’s down thirty percent from where it was when my dad was alive, and the walk-in business is kids on their phones one Saturday a month.”

The room was very still now.

“There’s a guy,” Rita said. “From a storage-unit company out of Rochester. He wants the lot. He’s offered me a number. It’s not a great number, but it’s a number, and I’m sixty-three and I’d like to retire before I’m dead.” She looked around. At the carpet with its orange and blue starbursts, the ball racks, the shoe counter, her father’s photo. “I’m not saying yes. I’m saying I might have to. By spring. So. That’s the news. Enjoy your cake.”

She climbed down off the chair. The silence held for a second longer, and then everybody started talking at once.

Dennis stood by the ball return with his half-drunk beer and felt it like a bad bearing in his chest. He’d bowled here with his dad. Frank Varga had brought him to Bluebird the Saturday after Dennis turned eight, rented him a pair of red-and-blue shoes two sizes too big, and shown him how to hold a ball with his fingers the way you’d hold a part you didn’t want to drop. His dad had been dead eleven years. His name was still painted on the side of Dennis’s shop out on Route 9, VARGA APPLIANCE SERVICE, EST. 1978. And now Bluebird was going to be a storage unit.

“It’s messed up,” Omar said beside him, quietly.

“Yeah.”

“You could look at the machines.”

“I’m an appliance guy.”

“A pinsetter’s an appliance. It’s a big, mean appliance that throws bowling pins.” Omar nudged him. “Talk to Rita.”

“Maybe.”

Across the room, Marc had his phone out and a crease between his brows that Dennis had never seen on him before. Not a flirting face. A business face. Marc was looking at Rita, and at the dead wing on the neon sign, and at the league crowd, like he was doing math.

Then Nolan touched Marc’s elbow and said something, and Marc blinked and put the phone away and smiled, and a few minutes later they were getting their jackets.

Marc stopped by the ball return on the way out. “Hey. Happy birthday. For real.”

“Thanks.”

“Get home safe. Don’t bowl anymore. It’s bad for your heart.”

“Funny.”

“I’m hilarious. It’s documented.” Marc bumped his shoulder against Dennis’s arm, cold knuckles skimming his wrist for half a second, and then he was walking toward the door with Nolan, and Nolan held it open for him, and Marc ducked under Nolan’s arm and out into the September dark.

Dennis watched through the glass doors as they crossed the parking lot. He watched Marc unlock his truck, a green Tacoma with a Second Shift decal on the tailgate. Watched Nolan get in the passenger side. Watched the taillights swing out onto Canal Street and head toward downtown and go.

He stood there with his beer long after there was nothing to watch.

His apartment smelled like cardboard.

Six months since the divorce was final, eight since he’d moved out, and the boxes were still stacked against the living-room wall in a neat row, labeled in his own block capitals: KITCHEN — MISC. BOOKS. GARAGE STUFF. DENNIS — WINTER. He kept meaning to unpack them. He’d unpacked Sadie’s room the first week — bed made, band posters up, the drum practice pad on her desk, the little dish for her earrings — because she was sixteen and deserved to walk into a room that looked like hers. His own half of the place had a recliner, a TV, a toolbox that cost more than the recliner and the TV combined, and nothing on the walls.

He dropped his keys in the bowl and stood in the kitchen and checked his phone.

Happy birthday sweetheart. Did you eat? Love Mom.

40 BUDDY!!!!! OLD!!!!! call me this wknd — G

Happy birthday, Den. Hope it’s a good one. Sadie’s making you something, act surprised. — C

That last one from Carla, careful and kind, the way everything between them had been careful and kind since the lawyers. And under it, from his daughter, no words at all — just a GIF of a skeleton sitting on a park bench, cobwebs growing on it, fading slowly to dust.

He laughed out loud in his empty kitchen. Then he typed thanks kid, very touching and sent it and set the phone face-down on the counter and stood there.

Sadie was at Carla’s this week. Their schedule was week on, week off, with Wednesdays flexible for band. The apartment was quiet in a way the house on Birch Street had never been quiet, even at the end, when he and Carla had passed each other in the kitchen like two tenants who shared a fridge. He’d been on call so much those last years. Freezer down at a restaurant, emergency, Saturday night. Commercial dishwasher at the hospital, emergency, Christmas Eve. He’d told himself it was the business, that the business was his dad’s name, that a man took care of things.

And he had. He’d taken care of every broken thing in Ridgeway except the one he lived in.

Dennis went and stood under the shower.

He meant it to be quick. Rinse off the Bluebird smell — lane conditioner and fryer oil and the particular dusty warmth of old carpet. Go to bed. Get up at five-forty, which was when his body got up whether he liked it or not, and go fix something.

The water was hot. He braced his hands on the tile and let it hit the back of his neck, and his mind, like a dog let off a leash, went directly to lane seven.

Marc’s hand on the small of Nolan’s back.

Marc’s head tipped back, laughing, the long line of his throat above his collar.

Marc’s cold fingers on his wrist. You’re doing the neck thing.

Dennis looked down and he was hard.

He was forty years old and it had been a while, and his body didn’t need a lot of reason, and that was all this was. It was a physical thing. A pressure thing. He’d been married fifteen years; he knew how this went. He wrapped a hand around himself, soap-slick, and closed his eyes, and went looking for something to think about.

The woman from that heist movie Sadie had made him watch. The one with the short dark hair and the red dress. Fine. Good. He pictured her in the red dress. He pictured the zipper going down her back, pictured her turning around.

He stroked himself slow. It was fine. It was working.

The woman in the red dress turned around and she had a beard.

Dennis’s eyes snapped open. He stared at the grout. His hand had stopped moving.

He closed his eyes again, firmly, like shutting a panel on a machine that wasn’t his problem. Red dress. Dark hair. Her mouth. He thought about her mouth, and her mouth was saying happy birthday, Mr. Fix-It in a voice that was low and amused and absolutely not hers, and his cock jerked in his fist so hard it was almost painful.

“Christ,” he said to the shower wall.

He stood there breathing. Water running into his eyes. His heart going.

He could turn the water to cold. He could get out, dry off, go to bed, get up at five-forty and go fix somebody’s freezer and never think about this again. He’d done that before. He’d done that — he realized with the slow, sinking clarity of finding the actual fault three hours into a service call — his whole life.

He didn’t turn the water to cold.

He let his hand start moving again. And this time, he didn’t go looking for anybody else.

He let it be Marc.

Marc on the approach of lane seven after closing, the lights half down, the whole alley empty and humming. Marc looking at him down the length of the lane with that narrow, warm look, like he was reading the fine print. Marc walking toward him slowly in those jeans, four smooth strides, the same way he bowled. Stopping close. Close enough that Dennis could smell him — something citrusy, and malt, and a little peppermint, like he’d been chewing gum. Close enough to feel the cold coming off his hands.

Look at you, Marc said in his head. Look at you, big man. You’ve been watching me all night.

Dennis’s breath came out ragged. He braced his free forearm on the tile and dropped his forehead against it and fucked his own fist harder.

In his head Marc put a cold hand flat on his chest. Right over his heart. And then slid it down. Over his stomach — the soft solid gut Dennis was always a little self-conscious about, that Carla had used to pat affectionately and that he mostly tried to keep covered — and Marc didn’t pat it, Marc spread his fingers over it like he liked it, like he wanted more of it, and kept going down. And wrapped those cold fingers around Dennis’s cock.

The shock of it — even imagined, even in the hot water with his own warm hand — made Dennis’s thighs lock.

There you are, Marc said. God, look at that. You’re so fucking hard for me.

“Yeah,” Dennis heard himself say out loud, hoarse, to nobody.

He’d never talked during this. Not alone. Not like this. But the fantasy wouldn’t let him not; Marc in his head kept asking, and Dennis kept answering. You want me on my knees, Mr. Fix-It? You want my mouth? Yes. Say it. I want your mouth. Where? On me. On my cock. Please.

And in his head Marc went down onto the lane-seven approach on his knees, right there on that shining wood, and looked up at him with those blue-gray eyes, auburn beard and freckles and his mouth open, and took him in.

Dennis had had his cock sucked before. Plenty. He’d been married. He’d been nineteen. But he had never pictured this — the rasp of a beard on the insides of his thighs, the width of a man’s shoulders between his knees, a man’s big square hand gripping the back of his leg, a man’s throat working around him. He’d never let himself picture it all the way through.

He pictured it all the way through now. Marc’s cheeks hollowing. Marc’s eyes watering and not stopping. Marc pulling off, spit on his lips and chin, grinning up at him. You gonna come for me? Come on. Give it to me. I want it.

The orgasm didn’t build so much as break loose. It came up his spine like a pressure valve blowing, and his knees nearly went; he caught himself on the tile with a slap that stung his palm and came so hard his vision whited out at the edges, pulse after pulse onto the shower wall, Marc’s name coming out of him on a sound he’d never made in his life. Not a word. Just the shape of it. Marc. Twice. Three times.

Then it was over, and he was standing under the water with his forehead on his arm, breathing like he’d carried a chest freezer up three flights of stairs, and the only sound was the shower and his own heart knocking.

He stayed there a long time.

Afterward he sat on the edge of his bed in a towel with his elbows on his knees and stared at the carpet.

It wasn’t the first time, was the thing. That was what he kept circling back to, the way you’d keep putting your tongue against a cracked tooth. It wasn’t the first time a man had gotten into his head.

There’d been Kyle Brandt, the lifeguard at the Heights pool the summer Dennis was fifteen. Tan, lean, a whistle on a cord, a sunburn across his nose. Dennis had gone to the pool every single day that summer. He’d told himself it was because he liked swimming. He did not like swimming.

There’d been Tony Russo, at the trade school in Syracuse. Tony had a laugh like a car starting and a way of leaning on Dennis’s shoulder to look at his work, and once, at a party, drunk, Tony had fallen asleep on the couch with his head on Dennis’s thigh, and Dennis had sat without moving for two hours so as not to wake him. He’d told himself it was because he was a good friend.

There’d been the neighbor on Birch Street, the one with the motorcycle, Glenn something, who worked on the bike in his driveway in a white undershirt every Saturday of the summer of 2016. Dennis had spent a lot of time that summer mowing a lawn that didn’t need it.

Didn’t count. That was the phrase he’d always used. Silently, never out loud. Kyle didn’t count; he was fifteen, everybody was confused at fifteen. Tony didn’t count; that was just friendship. Glenn didn’t count; he was married, Dennis was married, it was nothing, it was a guy with a nice bike.

Didn’t count, didn’t count, didn’t count. For twenty-five years.

Dennis sat on his bed in the quiet apartment with his dead father’s name on his shop and his daughter’s skeleton GIF on his phone and understood with total, awful, mechanical clarity that when you have to keep telling yourself something doesn’t count, that is usually because it counts.

He picked up his phone. He opened the browser. He typed, slowly, with one big thumb:

bisexual at 40

He looked at the words sitting there in the little bar. His thumb hovered over search.

Then he closed the browser before the results could load, and put the phone face-down on the bed beside him, and rubbed the back of his neck with both hands.

It buzzed.

He turned it over.

Happy birthday, Mr. Fix-It, Marc had written. That 7-10 split in the fifth frame deserved better. It was a beautiful split. Truly one of the great splits. I’ll name a beer after it.

Dennis read it three times.

He started typing. How was your date

He looked at it. Deleted it.

Thanks for the beer

Deleted it.

You looked good tonight

He deleted that one so fast he nearly dropped the phone.

In the end, he sent a thumbs-up. One small yellow thumb, alone in the blue. It sat there on the screen under Marc’s message, and it was the most cowardly thing he had ever done in his life, including the time he let Carla call the plumber instead of admitting he didn’t know how to fix a tankless water heater.

Dennis lay back on the bed in his towel and put the phone on his chest and looked at the ceiling.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

A thumbs-up, Marc wrote. On your birthday. You’re a poet, Varga.

And then, a second later:

Night, Dennis.

Not Mr. Fix-It. Not birthday boy. Just his name.

Dennis lay there in the dark for a long time with the phone warm on his chest, and did not sleep, and at five-forty his body got up anyway.

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February. A cabin on Seneca Lake, a wood stove, a hot tub with broken jets, and one rule on an index card: FIX NOTHING. Dennis lasts nineteen hours. Marc has a penalty in mind — and a pair of cuffs he’s never let anyone use on him. The filthiest, most tender scene in the book.

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