Hookup Pact

MM Friends-to-Lovers Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM

Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno

Tropes: Friends to Lovers, Friends with Benefits, Roommates to Lovers, Kink Exploration, Praise Kink, Light BDSM, He Falls First

The softest fantasies belong to the quietest guy in the room. His best friend is about to read every single one.

Beck Hale is the careful one. Graphic designer, planner, the guy with a 401(k), a skincare routine, and a password-protected folder of fantasies he has never once acted on. Ten years of theory. Zero practice. At his twenty-eighth birthday party, his best friend calls him the last boring man alive — and something in Beck finally snaps.

Theo Marsh is the loud one. Bartender, charmer, a decade of hookups he can barely remember and not one thing he ever did on purpose. He proposes it as a joke: a bucket list. Sixteen filthy items. Two best friends, one apartment, and a pact to work through every box together before they turn thirty. Just practice. No stakes. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything. Gloriously, filthily, catastrophically everything. Because somewhere between the first experiment and the rope, the rules stop being about the list — and two men who swore the friendship was the load-bearing wall discover they have been building something else entirely, one checked box at a time.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Friends to lovers with a filthy checklist premise
✅ Roommates, one bed energy, and migrating hoodies
✅ A cocky bartender who practices rope knots in secret
✅ Praise kink, power exchange, and toe-curling firsts (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ He falls first AND he falls harder
✅ Found family, a meddling coworker, and a rope teacher named Grace
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including light bondage, power exchange, and toy play — all enthusiastically consensual with on-page negotiation), strong language, and depictions of anxiety. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.

Chapter One: Twenty-Eight

There are exactly four people at my twenty-eighth birthday party, and one of them is trying to light the candles on my cake with a Zippo he definitely stole from work.

“Theo. There are smoke detectors.”

“There are dreams, Beckett.” He flicks the lighter again, tongue caught between his teeth in concentration, and I do the thing I have gotten world-class at over six years of friendship: I look at his mouth for exactly one second, file it away in a folder I will never open in public, and look at the cake instead. “You only turn twenty-eight once.”

“That’s true of literally every age.”

“God, you’re fun.” The last candle catches. He straightens up, holds the cake out toward me across my own kitchen counter like he’s presenting a crown, and the light does something criminal to his face — catches the gold in his brown eyes, the crooked line of his grin, the little scar on his chin from a bar fight he swears he won. “Make a wish, birthday boy.”

Priya starts singing. Marcus from my office joins in half a key lower. Theo doesn’t sing — he just watches me over the candles with that look he gets, the one that says he knows something about me I haven’t told him, which is impossible, because the things I haven’t told him are in a password-protected folder on a laptop with a screen-lock timer of thirty seconds.

I close my eyes.

I wish—

Yeah. I don’t even finish the sentence in my own head. That’s how good I am at this.

I blow out the candles to scattered applause, and Theo whoops loud enough that Mrs. Kowalski downstairs bangs her ceiling, which is our floor, which is tradition at this point.

Here’s the thing about my birthday parties: they’re not parties. They’re four people, my apartment — our apartment, technically, mine and Theo’s, four years of split rent and shared groceries and his records colonizing every flat surface — a homemade cake because Theo insists on baking it himself even though he bakes exactly once a year and it shows, and everyone gone by eleven because we’re all pushing thirty and one of us has a 7 a.m. spin class she won’t shut up about.

By ten-forty, Priya’s hugging me at the door, smelling like the wine she brought and mostly drank. “Happy birthday, Beck. Don’t let him talk you into anything stupid tonight.”

“He’s never talked me into anything stupid in his life.”

“That’s the saddest thing you’ve ever said.” She pats my cheek and points at Theo over my shoulder. “Marsh. Thursday. You’re closing.”

“I’m aware of my own schedule, Priya.”

“You are not.” And she’s gone, and Marcus is gone two minutes after, and then it’s just us and the wreckage — beer bottles, a cake with a crater in it, and Theo sprawled across our couch like he pays for all of it instead of half.

I start collecting bottles because my hands need a job.

“Leave it,” Theo says.

“It’ll smell.”

“It smells like a party. Sit down. It’s still your birthday for—” he checks his phone “—an hour and eleven minutes, and you’ve spent the whole night making sure everyone else’s cup was full. Sit.”

I sit. Not next to him — in the armchair, safe distance, standard formation. He stretches his legs out until his socked feet land on the coffee table an inch from my knee, and I pretend I don’t track them there.

He’s still in his work clothes because he came straight from a day shift — black T-shirt gone soft from a hundred washes, forearms out, that leather cord he wears around his wrist that some girl gave him in Barcelona in 2019. He looks like he always looks, which is like the reason I stopped bringing dates home around year two, because sitting anyone next to Theo Marsh is a comparison no one survives.

“So,” he says. “Twenty-eight.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Two years to thirty.”

“You’re two months to thirty, so I don’t know why you’re saying it like a threat to me.”

“Because it’s not a threat to me. I have lived, Beckett.” He spreads his arms across the back of the couch, expansive, king of a kingdom made of IKEA. “I have stories. I have regrets. Good ones. The kind you earn.” He tips his head, and here it comes, I can feel it coming the way you feel weather. “What do you have?”

“A 401(k).”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Renter’s insurance. A skincare routine—”

“You’re doing bits so I can’t get in.” He says it lightly, but his eyes have gone sharp under the lazy lids, and this is the thing nobody at the bar knows about Theo, the thing you only learn at close range: underneath four layers of charm there’s a person who pays attention. “Real answer. It’s your birthday, you get one free existential crisis, no judgment. What do you have?”

The honest answer is: a folder.

The honest answer is a folder on my laptop labeled INVOICES_2019 because nothing on earth is less clickable than that, and inside it are years of — I don’t even know what to call it. Research. Bookmarked essays about power exchange written by people who’ve actually lived it. Saved threads about rope safety, about subspace, about the difference between a scene and a relationship. Lists I’ve made and remade. Careful, thorough, alphabetized fantasies belonging to a man who has had, in his entire life, six sexual partners, all of them nice, all of them polite, all of it so vanilla you could bake with it.

I know the theory of everything I want and the practice of none of it. I’m a man who’s read every book about swimming and never gotten in past his ankles, and every year that goes by the water looks colder, and this year I turned twenty-eight and my best friend is looking at me with his sharp eyes asking what I have.

“I have a great apartment,” I say, “with a guy who eats my leftovers.”

Theo holds my gaze for one more second — that horrible, X-ray second — then lets me off the hook, because he always lets me off the hook, which is one of the hundred small mercies that made falling for him so easy I didn’t notice it happening.

Not that I’ve — okay. Moving on.

“You know what your problem is?” he says.

“I have a feeling I’m going to find out.”

“You’re the last boring man alive.” He says it with so much affection it takes me a second to feel the knife go in. “It’s actually impressive. Everyone else our age either got married or got weird. You did neither. You just—” he gestures at me, all of me, the button-down I wore to my own birthday party in my own home “—maintain. You’re the most maintained man in America.”

“Wow.”

“It’s a compliment.”

“It is not a compliment.”

“It’s half a compliment.” He grins, and then the grin fades a little at whatever he sees on my face, because I’m about a beer and a half past being able to keep the folder off it. “Hey. I’m kidding. Mostly. It’s just—” He drags a hand through his hair, and for a second he looks tired in a way I don’t associate with him. “Honestly? I’ve been feeling it too, lately.”

“Feeling what? Boring? You slept with a bachelorette party.”

“One member of a bachelorette party, and that was two years ago, and I’m saying —” he sits forward, elbows on knees, and now we’re closer than standard formation allows and I hold very still “— it’s all the same, man. I go to work, I flirt for tips, sometimes I take someone home, and it’s fine, and it’s nothing, and in the morning I can’t remember what was supposed to be the good part. I used to think you were the predictable one and I was the interesting one.” He huffs a laugh at the floor. “Lately I think I’m just predictable at a louder volume.”

I don’t say anything. This is more real than Theo goes, usually, and moving feels like it might scare it off.

“Thirty’s coming for me first,” he says. “And I keep doing this thing at like two a.m. where I inventory. You know? Like — what have I actually done. Not stories for the bar. Actually done.” He looks up at me. “You ever do that?”

Every night, I don’t say. There’s a folder, I don’t say.

“Sometimes,” I say.

“And?”

And here is where twenty-eight-year-old Beckett Hale, emboldened by three beers and the specific looseness of a birthday that’s almost over, gets closer to the water than he has ever gotten in front of another human being:

“And there’s… stuff I always figured I’d get to. And I’m starting to think you don’t get to things. I think you either do them or you’re a person who didn’t.”

Theo goes still. Not big-still — bartender-still, the quality of attention he gives someone who’s finally telling him the real story at last call.

“What stuff?” he says.

The folder sits behind my eyes with its stupid decoy name.

“You know,” I say. “Stuff. Travel. Skills. Experiences.” Coward. Coward. “Like in the movies where they make the list.”

“A bucket list.”

“Sure.”

“You want a bucket list.”

“I didn’t say—”

“No, hang on, this is the most interesting thing you’ve said all year.” He’s grinning again, but it’s a different grin — lit up from underneath, the one he gets when a bad idea walks into the bar and orders a drink. “The maintained man wants a list. What’s on it? Skydiving? You’d hate skydiving. You got dizzy on the Ferris wheel—”

“I have a thing about restraint systems designed by carnival employees, it’s called survival instinct—”

“—so not skydiving. What, then?” He’s studying me now, openly, and I’m suddenly extremely aware that I’m a bad liar and he’s a professional reader of drunk men’s faces. “Beck. What’s on the list?”

“There is no list.”

“There’s absolutely a list.”

“It’s hypothetical.”

“Uh-huh.” He leans back slowly, satisfied about something, and checks his phone. “Eleven fifty-two. Your birthday’s almost dead.” He looks at me sideways, and something about the low light and the hour makes it land like a hand on the back of my neck. “You know what we should do sometime? Get drunk and actually write it. Both of us. Full honesty. See who’s actually the boring one.”

Every alarm I own goes off at once. Full honesty is the one thing I can’t do within a hundred yards of this man, because my hypothetical list has his voice all over it and I’ve spent six years making sure he never finds that out.

“Sure,” my mouth says. “Sometime.”

“Sometime,” he agrees, in the tone of a man setting an appointment.

He gets up, ruffles my hair on the way past like I’m a nephew — his hand is warm and I hate how long the warmth stays — and collects exactly two bottles as a gesture before abandoning the effort. At his bedroom door he stops.

“Hey, Beck.”

“Yeah.”

“Happy birthday.” A beat. “For the record, you’re not boring. You’re just waiting.” He shrugs, like he didn’t just take the top of my skull off. “I don’t know what for. But it’s not the same thing.”

The door shuts behind him.

I sit in the armchair in my own dark living room for a long time.

Here’s what a smarter man does: goes to bed. Drinks a glass of water, takes off the button-down, goes to sleep, and lets the birthday and the beer and the conversation dissolve into Tuesday.

I take my laptop to bed.

The apartment’s gone quiet — Theo’s water running and stopping, his mattress creaking once through the wall, then nothing. I sit against my headboard in the dark with the screen’s glow on my face like a degenerate, and I type the password, and I open INVOICES_2019, and there it all is. Years of it. The bookmarked essays. The saved threads. The document, the actual document, the one I add to at two in the morning and never read sober, and I read it now, not sober, and my whole body goes hot and heavy at once.

Full honesty, he said. See who’s actually the boring one.

He has no idea. That’s the joke of it. Theo thinks he knows me down to the ground — knows my coffee order and my tells at poker and the exact face I make when a client says “make it pop” — and he has no idea that his boring roommate has a taxonomy. That I know the difference between a spreader bar and a — that I have opinions about aftercare, strong ones, formed entirely in theory, like a war historian who’s never heard a gun.

I scroll. I shouldn’t. I’m doing it anyway.

Being told what to do, the document says, near the top, because I organized it and this is item one, this has always been item one. Not hurt. Just — handled. Someone confident enough to take the wheel. Kneeling. Being told I’m doing well.

My hand slides down over the front of my sweatpants before I’ve made any decision about it, and I’m already hard, have been hard since somewhere around you’re just waiting, and I press my palm flat against myself and my breath goes ragged in the dark.

I set the laptop aside. I don’t need it. That’s the pathetic part — I’ve never needed it, the folder is a formality, a decoy for the decoy, because when I close my eyes and let the fantasy run it doesn’t come from any document.

It comes with a voice.

Sit down, the voice says, low and sure and horribly familiar, warm gravel with a smile in it. It’s your birthday. You’ve spent the whole night taking care of everyone else. Let someone take care of you for once.

I shove my sweatpants down my hips and wrap my hand around my cock and exhale through my teeth, slow, quiet — the walls in this apartment are old but they’re not that old — and in my head there’s a hand on the back of my neck, big and warm, the exact warmth that stayed in my hair too long an hour ago.

Good, the voice says, when I start to stroke. Slow. I didn’t say fast. There you go.

I bite down on the inside of my cheek. My hips are already moving, pushing up into my fist in the dark, slow because he said slow — because the fantasy said slow, because the voice, the completely anonymous voice with the Barcelona bracelet and the scar on its chin —

God. I’m not even pretending tonight. Usually I pretend. Usually the man in these is a silhouette, broad-shouldered and faceless, some plausible-deniability construction my brain assembles so I can live with myself at breakfast. Tonight the beer or the birthday or you’re just waiting has burned the disguise off, and it’s just him, it’s Theo, it’s Theo’s hands and Theo’s voice telling me kneel and my whole body clenches around the word like it’s been waiting years for permission.

In my head I’m on the floor of our living room and he’s in the armchair — my armchair, he took my chair, of course he took my chair — sprawled and easy the way he owns every room, watching me with the sharp eyes, and he says, Hands behind your back. You don’t touch until I say. You’ve been so patient, haven’t you. Six years, Beck. So patient.

My fist tightens and speeds up and I let it, I let it, screw the pacing, and the fantasy skips like a scratched record through every filthy frame I’ve ever refused to develop — his hand fisted in my hair, guiding; his voice cracking rough saying my name, my actual name, not buddy, not man, Beckett; the weight of him pressing me down into a mattress that smells like his sheets, which I know the smell of, because I do his laundry when he forgets, which is its own separate humiliation —

Good boy, the voice says, and that’s it, that’s the tripwire, it’s always been the tripwire.

I come so hard my vision whites out at the edges, spilling hot over my own knuckles, hips jerking, his name jammed behind my teeth where I keep it, where I’ve always kept it, and for about eight perfect seconds my brain is finally, blessedly empty.

Then the ceiling comes back. The dark. The laptop glowing patiently beside me with the folder still open, item one highlighted where my thumb dragged across the trackpad at some point, apparently. My heart slamming. Our apartment, silent. Him, fifteen feet and one wall away, asleep and oblivious, the way he’s been oblivious for six years, the way I need him to stay.

I clean up with yesterday’s T-shirt, feeling every one of my twenty-eight years.

And here’s what a smarter man does next: deletes the folder. Right now, tonight, while the shame is fresh enough to fuel it — drags INVOICES_2019 to the trash, empties it, and wakes up tomorrow a maintained man with a 401(k) and a manageable life and a best friend he can look in the eye.

I look at the folder for a long minute.

I don’t delete anything.

I close the laptop, set it on the nightstand, and lie there in the dark listening to the radiator tick, and the last thing I think before I fall asleep is the worst thing, the true thing, the thing that’s going to ruin my whole year:

He said sometime like he meant it.

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Experiment #23 — The Last Box — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Six months after the epilogue, one item on the original list is still unchecked. Theo finally cashes it in at a private play party — and shows a whole room exactly who Beck belongs to. Possessive, filthy, and joyful, with one more round in the parked car because they couldn’t wait.

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