Read Me Filthy

MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Famous/Fan with Power Flip, Voice Kink, Praise Kink, Celebrity Romance, Stalker Protector, Only One Bed, Hurt/Comfort, Forced Proximity, Closeted/Out, Age Gap (light)

He reviewed the voice. The voice had been watching him back.

Jax Harlan is BookTok’s horniest MM-romance reviewer. For fourteen months he’s been pointing a ring light at his face and telling four hundred and eighty-seven thousand followers, in embarrassing detail, exactly what he’d do if the audiobook narrator Silas Reed ever read to him in person. It was a bit. It was a brand. It was supposed to stay on his phone.

Silas Reed is the most listened-to voice in MM romance. Closeted, controlled, and professionally untouchable. He has, for those same fourteen months, been watching every one of Jax’s videos from an anonymous account — never liking, never commenting, never admitting it, even to himself. Until the convention where he finally walks up to Jax at a coffee cart and tells him, out loud, that he’s known his name all along.

What starts as a whispered-headphones scene in a signing booth becomes a home-studio collaboration, a recorded session their stalker-obsessed enemy weaponizes, a black moment in a hotel suite, and a studio-floor reunion where the power flips in every direction that matters. This is a romance about being heard. By the right voice. For the first time in both of their lives.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Audio-kink MM where voice is the signature fetish
✅ Praise-kink saturation (“good boy” across every register)
✅ Famous/fan romance with the power balance flipped on its head
✅ Stalker-protector external conflict with a clean villain arc
✅ Dual first-person POV that gives you both men’s interior life
✅ A control-freak narrator meeting the one reader who actually sees him
✅ Found family: managers, best friends, audiobook colleagues, and one fat orange cat named Beans
✅ HEA guaranteed — plus a one-year anniversary epilogue

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes, praise kink, mild restraint, recorded-sex-as-intimacy), strong language, on-page depiction of stalking and a non-physical assault by a third party, discussion of a past bottle-throwing incident, media harassment and doxxing, and one act of vandalism (brick through a window). Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One: The Voice I Know

The blazer is a mistake.

I’m standing in front of the greenroom mirror at Romanceville Audio Con, trying to decide if I look like a serious critic or a horny BookTok gremlin in costume as a serious critic, and the vote is coming in eleven to one for gremlin. The blazer is too tight in the shoulders because I bought it at sixteen for my aunt’s funeral and have technically grown since. My AirPods are in because my AirPods are always in. Reyna is behind me on the greenroom couch, doing something competent with her phone.

“You’re going to be fine,” she says, without looking up.

“I’m going to ask Silas Reed a question on a live panel.”

“You ask him questions on TikTok every week.”

“He doesn’t answer on TikTok.”

“He’s never heard you.”

I meet my own eyes in the mirror. Exhale. “Reyna.”

“Mm.”

“He has a subscription to my channel.”

Her head comes up. “He has a what.”

“Anonymous. I’m ninety percent sure. There’s an account that’s watched every single video. It never comments. It never likes anything except one specific clip.”

“Which clip.”

“The one where I said I’d die for his voice.”

Reyna sets her phone down very gently, the way you set down a wine glass you’re already picturing shattered on the floor.

“Baby.”

“I know.”

“Don’t say that on the panel.”

“I’m not going to say that on the panel.”

“Jax.”

“I’m not.”

The con volunteer with the clipboard sticks her head through the door. She has purple hair and a lanyard so loaded with pins she clinks when she moves. “Five minutes, Mr. Harlan.”

Mister. I almost laugh. I’m twenty-seven and wearing a funeral blazer and about to share a stage with the man whose voice I have listened to, conservatively, nine thousand times.

“Thanks.” My voice comes out an octave too high. I clear my throat. “Thanks, yeah. I’ll be right there.”

She clinks away.

I tap the AirPods out of my ears one at a time and drop them in the blazer pocket. It feels like taking off a suit of armor in a weather report. My ears are suddenly too naked. The greenroom has that specific con-hotel hum — HVAC, distant PA system, a coffee urn burbling apologetically in the corner — and without the buffer I can hear all of it at once.

“If I die up there,” I tell Reyna, “please narrate my obituary.”

“Absolutely not. I’ll get Silas Reed to do it.”

She says it as a joke.

The ballroom is a standard hotel configuration — four hundred folding chairs, a low stage, a long table draped in black, four mics set on booms — and it is, against all reason, completely full. People are standing at the back. There is a small but vocal contingent of cosplayers dressed as characters from MM romance novels that Silas Reed has narrated. Two women are in coordinating firefighter gear from Firehouse Heat. There is one brave soul in a full hockey jersey and a leather harness.

I love my people. I love them so much. I love them from a place of such total, slightly panicked kinship that I almost turn around and go home.

Instead I walk up the side stairs to the stage, shake the tech’s hand, get clipped into a lav mic, and take my seat behind the card that says MODERATOR in Helvetica.

I set my note cards down. My hands are shaking. This is fine. This is normal. You are a professional. You review audiobooks on the internet for a living. You have a Patreon that pays your rent. You have four hundred and eighty-seven thousand followers. You have a dedicated hater account on Twitter that calls you JAXXXPOT in all caps. This is fine.

The three narrators file in from stage right.

Marcus Ng is first. Marcus narrates space opera and male-female contemporaries and is famously, aggressively straight in a way that reads as a bit when he’s on panel and as honesty when he’s sober. He’s wearing a Henley. He gives me a little salute.

Theo Mak is second. Theo narrates horror and is six-three and wears all black and has the unsmiling face of a man who has spent a decade being paid to whisper into a microphone about spiders. I’ve interviewed him twice. I like him. He gives me nothing in return, which is also a kindness.

Silas Reed is third.

I’ve been preparing for this for six weeks. I’ve written three versions of my opening question. I’ve watched every public interview he’s ever given, which is five. I’ve rehearsed the sound of his name in my mouth so it won’t come out like a prayer.

None of it helps.

He’s wearing a black crewneck sweater and dark jeans and the kind of watch that costs more than my car and he’s — taller than I thought. That’s the first thing my brain offers me. Taller than you thought, it says, helpfully, like it’s a weather report. His hair is longer than in his publicity photos, curling just at his collar. His jaw has a day and a half of stubble on it. He’s forty feet away and I can already tell his eyes are going to be a problem.

He sits. He adjusts his mic with the tiny, practiced movement of a man who has spent ten thousand hours three inches from a microphone. He doesn’t look at me.

“Afternoon, everyone.” My voice, miked, sounds like someone else’s. Good. Use it. “Welcome to The Voice Behind the Kink: Audio Romance Narrators. I’m Jax Harlan. I run @JaxReadsFilth. Before we start — a little housekeeping —”

I do the housekeeping. Fire exits. No flash photography. Q&A at the end. I hit all my beats. I even get a small laugh about the cosplayers. My tongue works. The blazer is too hot. I have sweat running down my spine in a single determined line like a hiker who has read a map.

“All right. Introducing our panel.”

I do the intros. Marcus waves. Theo nods once. I get to Silas last.

“And — you already know him. Silas Reed. The voice behind more MM romance heat maps than any of us can count. We’re very happy to have you.”

The crowd goes absolutely feral. Screaming. A woman in the third row yells I LOVE YOU and immediately puts both hands over her mouth.

Silas lifts one hand in a small, dry wave and says, into the microphone, “Hello.”

The word is one syllable. It contains violence. The room exhales in one long collective groan, like someone has tapped a church bell with a hammer. I feel the sound go down my spine and settle somewhere I cannot write about on a tax return.

Professional, I tell myself. You are a professional.

I ask my first question. Something soft, a warmup about the shift in audiobook consumption post-pandemic. Marcus answers. Theo answers with three words. Silas answers with one beautifully constructed sentence, using his normal talking voice, which is still roughly equivalent to listening to a cello section tune up in a velvet-lined room.

I’m fine. I’m doing this. I tick the first question off my card.

Second question is aimed at Silas specifically. I take a breath I don’t need and let it out through my nose.

“Silas. You’ve been vocal — sorry — you’ve been public about the fact that you won’t narrate anything with non-consent. You’ve turned down big contracts over it. Can you talk a little about where that line is for you, and whether you think the industry is moving in the right direction?”

He looks at me.

For the first time.

It’s not a glance. He turns his whole head and he looks at me, and I feel something go unpleasantly loose in my knees. His eyes are hazel. Not green, not brown, some ugly-beautiful in-between the color of whiskey in a glass. He has the most ridiculous eyelashes I have ever seen on a grown man. And he is looking at me like he is reading something he has read before.

“Thank you for asking that.” A pause. “Not a lot of people do.”

I almost say you’re welcome like an idiot, catch myself, smile instead. “Take your time.”

He takes his time. He gives an answer that is thoughtful and long and threaded with craft, and I listen to maybe a third of it because the other two-thirds of my brain is screaming. He uses the word listener three times. He uses the phrase performed consent once, with a precision that makes my face hot. He leans forward on his elbows at one point and I look at his forearms — the sweater shoved up, the vein that runs along the inside of his wrist, the watch, the way his hand cups the mic like it’s something he’s whispering to — and I have to look down at my card and re-read my third question because I have forgotten what words are.

He finishes. Marcus adds a thought. Theo says, “What he said,” and gets a laugh.

I ask my third question.

I ask my fourth.

By question five I am holding myself together with the adhesive strength of a lifetime of being too much in public and making it my job. Silas answers another of my questions. He uses my name this time. “To Jax’s point earlier —” and my name in his mouth, at that volume, through that specific equipment — I literally have to grip the table under the cloth.

Stop it, I tell my body. Stop it immediately.

My body, a lifelong collaborator, does not stop it.

Q&A saves me. Audience questions are unpredictable and loud and require me to do the moderator job, which is crowd control, which is something I can do. We get the expected question about voice care. We get the expected question about favorite tropes (Theo: “Body horror.” Crowd: delighted screaming.). We get the less expected question from a small woman in the front row with tears already in her eyes who asks Silas if he would say her husband’s name because her husband just passed and he loved Silas’s voice and it was what he listened to at the end. Silas says the husband’s name into the microphone, slowly, twice, the way you’d say it to the man himself if you were holding his hand. The room cries. I almost cry. I look down at my cards until I can stop.

Then the tech gives me the one-minute wave.

“All right.” My voice is remarkably steady. “We’re at time. Please join me in thanking Marcus Ng, Theo Mak, and Silas Reed —”

The ovation lasts almost two full minutes.

I stay at the table while the panelists file off. I keep my hands on the card stack so I don’t do anything stupid with them. Marcus high-fives me on his way past. Theo pats my shoulder once, which for Theo is a marriage proposal. Silas is last off the stage. He pauses at my chair. He is close enough that I can smell his cologne — something green, something woody, and underneath it the faint warm scent of clean skin and steam.

“Nicely moderated,” he says, quietly, off-mic, straight down at me.

“Thank you,” I hear myself say.

Then he’s gone down the stairs, and I’m alone at the table under four hundred watts of stage light, and my hands are still shaking, and I think, that’s that, I survived it, I can go home and die now.

The hotel lobby has one of those giant pan-asian water features in the center and three competing coffee carts arranged around it in a feng shui that reads as a ceasefire. I am standing at the one nearest the elevators because the other two have lines full of people who were in my panel. I have my blazer over my arm. I have my AirPods back in. I have a cold brew in my hand and I am in the process of remembering how to swallow.

Reyna is by the big window texting her girlfriend. I can see her reflection in the glass from here.

“Jax Harlan.”

The voice is behind me.

Not on the panel. Not on a microphone. Two feet behind me, in an empty-at-three-pm hotel lobby, with nothing between him and my hearing except air.

I don’t turn around right away, because if I turn around right away I will die. I take one more sip of cold brew to put it in my body as ballast. I take the AirPods out. I turn around.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.” He’s put on a dark jacket. His hair is pushed back off his forehead like he’s been running his hand through it. His eyes, up close, in hotel lobby light, are absolutely unmanageable. “Do you have a minute?”

“I — yeah. Yes. I have many minutes. I’m on vacation. I mean I’m working, but I’m — yes.”

He lets me flounder. He doesn’t smile, exactly. There’s a small thing happening at the corner of his mouth that is smile-adjacent.

“I’d like to say something,” he says, “and I need you to not repeat it.”

“Okay.”

“Publicly or privately.”

“Okay.”

He steps in. Not close. Close enough that I can’t pretend we’re doing a business transaction. Close enough that when he lowers his voice — and he does — I feel the pitch of it down the center of my chest.

“I know who you are,” he says. “I’ve known for fourteen months.”

The cold brew in my hand becomes a prop. It is no longer a drink.

“Okay,” I say, because that is the only word my mouth is making.

“I subscribed to your channel in September of last year. Your review of Boss’s Perfect Assistant was the first one I watched. You called my voice, specifically — ” he thinks for a second, and I realize with horror that he is about to quote me to me, “‘the sound of being politely fucked against a library wall.’ I believe you followed that with a face-palm and an apology to my mother.”

I make a small, wounded noise.

“I’ve watched every video since. I know your cadence when you’re reading a draft versus when you’re ad-libbing. I know your ring-light angle changed in February. I know you switched microphones in June and the new one has a slightly worse proximity handling that you don’t seem to care about.” His eyes don’t leave mine. “I know you have a recurring bit where you look directly at the camera and say oh, Silas, in a voice that I have thought about more than I would like to admit in writing.”

I cannot feel my hands.

“I have not commented. I have not liked. Except for one clip.”

“Don’t,” I whisper.

“I think you know which clip.”

“Please don’t.”

“‘I would die for Silas Reed’s voice.’” He says it the way I said it, exactly — same cadence, same slight laugh at the end, same breath — because of course he can, because that is literally his job. He pauses. “I have watched that clip, Jax, a truly embarrassing number of times.”

I make the wounded noise again. I put the cold brew down on a side table because I am going to drop it.

“I’m telling you this,” he says, “because I’m about to ask you something, and I need the playing field to be clear. I don’t want to ask it from a position of power. I don’t have any. You had it first.”

“Okay.”

“Come to my suite tonight. Nine o’clock. Suite twenty-two oh-four. Bring the fanfic.”

My brain takes an extra half second to process. “What fanfic.”

“The one on your phone. The one you’ve been writing for seven months. The one that is, by your own account on video, pinned post March sixth, ‘the single horniest thing I have ever produced in my life, and also, I think, the best sentence I have ever written, which is upsetting.’”

I stare at him.

“It’s — that’s — okay, that was a bit —”

“I watched it four times.”

“Silas.”

“I’d like you to read me a paragraph of it.”

“In —” I swallow. “Is that a euphemism.”

“No.” He lets a beat sit between us. “If I want a euphemism, Jax, I promise you will know.”

The lobby is not spinning but the air quality inside my head has declined significantly.

“Nothing has to happen,” he says, lower still, and he is standing close enough now that I can feel it more than hear it, my own body picking up his voice like an antenna. “If you come to the suite and we drink tea and talk about books and I send you back to your room at midnight, that is a perfectly good evening for me. Better than most I’ve had.”

“Okay.”

“If you don’t come at all, that is also fine, and this conversation does not travel past this coffee cart, and on Monday you go back to writing the best reviews in the industry and I go back to reading other people’s books. We’ve never spoken. I made it up. You imagined it. It will be as if this never happened.”

“Okay.”

“If you come, we’ll see what the evening asks of us.”

He reaches into his jacket. He pulls out a hotel keycard. He sets it, gently, on the little side table next to my abandoned cold brew. The keycard is plain white. Standard Peachtree Regency. There’s a handwritten 2204 on the folder.

“Nine o’clock,” he says. “I won’t text. I don’t want it to feel like — ” he considers his phrasing, “an obligation.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve said ‘okay’ six times.”

“Seven.”

The mouth-corner thing happens again. “Seven,” he agrees. “I’ll be going. You have a book signing in —” he checks the watch “— twenty-six minutes.”

“How do you know I have a book signing.”

“You posted the schedule. You said, and I quote, ‘come get your book signed by your favorite BookTok gremlin, this is the only thing keeping me alive at this con.’”

“I’m going to deactivate my account.”

“Don’t.”

He turns. He walks toward the elevators.

He gets four steps away and stops. A con volunteer — a different one, college-aged, nervous, a stack of envelopes in his hand — has intercepted him. I can’t hear what’s said. I see the kid offer him an envelope. Plain white. Sil’s back is to me, but I see the moment his shoulders change. It’s the smallest possible movement. He takes the envelope, slides it into the inside pocket of his jacket without opening it, says something brief to the kid, and walks on.

He doesn’t look back.

I stand at the side table and I look at the keycard for what feels like a full minute.

“Jax.” Reyna is at my elbow. I don’t know when she arrived. “Jax, honey, hi. What is happening on your face.”

“I.”

“Jax.”

“I need to sign books now.”

“Whose keycard.”

“I need to go sign books, Reyna, I’m late, I’m so late —”

She plucks the keycard off the table, reads 2204 in unapologetic handwriting, and slowly turns to look at me with the face of a woman who has watched her best friend make bad decisions on three continents.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, honey. Oh, honey, no.”

“Oh, honey, yes,” I whisper.

“Oh, honey, ABSOLUTELY no.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“You’ve decided. You decided when you left the house this morning. You decided when you bought that blazer at sixteen. Jax.”

“I know.”

“Jax.”

“I know.”

She hands me the keycard, very deliberately, like it is evidence.

“For the record,” she says, “as your best friend, as the person who is going to have to narrate this to your mother, I am advising against.”

“Noted.”

“You are absolutely going.”

“Noted.”

She sighs. She adjusts my collar. She picks up my cold brew and puts it back in my hand. “Go sign your books, gremlin. Drink some water. Maybe eat a protein. I’ll pick out something to wear. I’ll be in your room at seven. We are going to talk about boundaries.”

“You don’t have boundaries.”

“We are going to invent boundaries, Jax. Tonight. Together. For you.”

I laugh. It comes out a little too loud, a little too high. A few heads in the lobby turn.

I put the keycard in the inside pocket of my blazer. The pocket is right over my heart, which is the kind of detail I would roast a romance novel for, and which, right now, I am helpless to reorganize.

I walk to the signing table. I sit down. I uncap my pen. I smile at the first person in line — a girl in a Booked Solid T-shirt, who is already crying — and I sign her book All my love, Jax Harlan, @JaxReadsFilth, and I don’t think about the keycard for the entire thirty-seven minutes of the signing.

That’s a lie.

I think about the keycard for every single second of the thirty-seven minutes of the signing.

By the time the last person has walked away and I cap my pen and push my chair back, I have already decided, and I’ve decided the thing I decided before I walked into this con, and before I recorded the video that made him watch it four times, and probably before I knew his name.

I’m going.

Nine o’clock.

God help me.

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Live Session — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

One year into marriage. First week of the Marginalia audiobook recording at SoundStage Manhattan. Silas has to narrate the sex scene Jax wrote imagining Silas narrating it — with Jax in the control room as producer, the commercial tape running, and one hour booked before the engineer comes back from lunch. A sustained hour of voice-only direction through talkback and glass. Silas never leaves the booth. Jax never enters it. Nobody touches anyone. And it is the hottest thing either of them has ever put on a recording. Reader-list exclusive. Free.

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