Next Door to Trouble

MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Neighbors to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Grumpy/Sunshine, Opposites Attract, Only One Bed, Slow Burn, Praise Kink, Touch Starved, He Falls First

He built his life around silence. His neighbor is the loudest man alive. The wall between them is about to become a door.

Micah Lawson is a freelance editor who lives by a strict schedule, a color-coded fridge, and zero surprise noise. His apartment is his sanctuary. His routine is sacred. And his walls are thin enough to hear his new neighbor breathing — which means he can definitely hear the music. The parties. The laughter. The chaos.

Riley Sharp is a graphic designer who works in explosive creative bursts and fills every room he enters with noise and light and people. He’s magnetic, social, and the kind of man everyone wants at their party. Underneath the performance, he’s terrified of being alone.

When a burst pipe floods Micah’s apartment at 2 a.m., Riley does the only decent thing: he opens his door. One apartment. One bed. One week of forced proximity that turns “you’re the worst neighbor” into “you’re the person who finally makes me feel alive.”

But the week has an expiration date. The apartment will be fixed. The wall will go back up. And two men who’ve spent their whole lives building defenses — one with order, one with noise — will have to decide whether to retreat behind them or knock through them for good.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Neighbors to lovers with forced proximity and only one bed
✅ Grumpy/sunshine with opposites attract energy
✅ “He falls first” and “I’m not doing this” to “I’m never stopping”
✅ Slow burn that IGNITES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Praise kink, domestic intimacy, and touch-starved men learning to be held
✅ Dual POV with deep emotional arcs and real vulnerability
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, themes of parental neglect and abandonment, anxiety, and emotional vulnerability. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One: Micah

Micah Lawson’s alarm went off at 5:45 a.m., same as every other morning, and he was already awake.

He’d been awake since 5:32, lying perfectly still in sheets he’d washed two days ago, staring at the ceiling he’d painted himself because the building’s maintenance crew couldn’t be trusted with a straight edge. The alarm was a formality. A confirmation. His body didn’t need it, but his brain liked the structure — the clean beep that said this is when the day begins, and everything before it doesn’t count.

He silenced it on the first tone, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and put his feet on the floor in the exact spot where the hardwood didn’t creak.

The hallway of Building 4, Unit 7B was quiet. Dolores had moved to Florida in March. Her replacement had moved in six weeks ago.

Micah didn’t look at the door to 7A as he passed it. He could feel the chaos emanating through the wood like a low-grade radiation — the faint smell of oil paint and Thai food, the doormat that said COME BACK WITH TACOS in a font that made Micah’s left eye twitch.

By 8:00 a.m., he was editing. The manuscript was a contemporary romance — second in a series, decent prose, a plot that needed structural work in the third act.

Until 10:14 a.m. That was when the bass started.

It came through the wall like a second heartbeat — low, thudding, rhythmic, and completely unnecessary at ten o’clock on a goddamn Tuesday.

The bass cut through his noise-canceling headphones like they were decorative.

He grabbed his keys, walked out of his apartment, and stood in front of 7A. The COME BACK WITH TACOS mat was crooked. Of course it was.

The door swung open on the third knock, and Micah’s prepared speech evaporated.

Riley Sharp was shirtless.

Not shirtless in a casual, just-woke-up way. Shirtless in a way that suggested he had never considered putting on a shirt in the first place. His chest was broad and tan and splattered with teal paint. His sweatpants hung low on his hips, paint-stained. His eyes were brown and sharp and immediately, annoyingly amused.

“Oh,” Riley said. “You’re the wall-banger.”

“It wasn’t passive-aggressive. It was a request. For you to turn your music down.”

Riley leaned against the doorframe. “What volume would you prefer?”

“Off.”

Riley laughed. “Silence is where ideas go to die.”

“I’m an editor. Silence is where ideas become coherent.”

“Okay. I’ll turn it down. One notch.”

“I’m Riley, by the way. Since we’re apparently going to keep having doorway conversations about our feelings.”

“Micah. And this wasn’t about feelings.”

“Everything’s about feelings, Micah.”

He said Micah’s name like he was tasting it. Holding it in his mouth a half-second longer than necessary, letting the syllables land with a warmth that was entirely unearned and completely deliberate.

Micah turned and walked back to his apartment. Behind him, the music resumed. One notch quieter. Still too loud.

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The Door Between — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

The contractor just finished installing a door in the shared wall. Two apartments are now one. And the christening begins — doorframe sex, engineering specs as dirty talk, and the filthiest, funniest, most joyful scene in the book.

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