Straight Label, Crooked Line
MM Rockstar Romance
by Jace Wilder
Free with Kindle Unlimited
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bi Awakening, Rockstar Romance, Forced Proximity, Secret Relationship, Praise Kink, Coming Out, Grumpy/Sunshine, He Falls First, Slow Burn, Touch Starved, Found Family
He wrote love songs about women. Then Eli Zhao picked up the drumsticks.
Mason Ward built his career on heartbreak songs about women. Every lyric, every music video, every interview — the straight sad boy bleeding on his guitar. It made Dead Flowers famous. It also buried the part of him that once jerked off thinking about his best friend at sixteen and never told a soul.
Eli Zhao is the new drummer. Openly bi, devastatingly steady, and carrying the scars of a closeted frontman who used him and threw him away. He swore he’d never do “closeted rockstar mess” again. But Mason’s talent and vulnerability hook him hard.
When late-night writing sessions and tour-bus proximity ignite into an affair neither can stop, Mason’s carefully constructed identity starts cracking. The songs get more honest. The pronouns get less ambiguous. And the label that built a brand on Mason’s straight heartbreak isn’t happy about the direction.
Now Mason has to choose: the label that made him, or the man who’s remaking him. The brand that sells, or the truth that sets him free. The straight line he drew, or the crooked one that leads to Eli.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Broody rockstar x steady drummer MM romance
✅ Bi awakening with a genuine coming-out arc
✅ Tour-bus forced proximity and secret hotel-room hookups
✅ Praise kink, touch-starved hero, “mine” energy
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Found family band with the best supporting cast
✅ A hero who earns his truth and a love interest who refuses to be invisible
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, alcohol use, depictions of internalized homophobia and coming-out anxiety, and references to past emotional manipulation. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One: Audition
The thing about playing your biggest hit for the ten-thousandth time was that it stopped being a song and started being a commute.
Mason Ward stood alone in the rehearsal space, guitar slung low on his hip, fingers moving through the chord progression of “Burning Daylight” with the same mindless precision most people reserved for brushing their teeth.
He felt nothing.
“Fuck,” he said to nobody.
The door banged open.
“You look like someone pissed in your coffee.” Pete Navarro dropped his bass case on the couch. “Please tell me you weren’t in here playing ‘Burning Daylight’ alone again. That’s serial killer behavior.”
“It’s called sad boy theater and you need to stop.”
Eli Zhao walked in like he’d been walking into rooms his whole life and none of them had ever intimidated him. Compact build—not tall, but solid. Broad shoulders, black hair tied back in a half-knot that was already coming loose.
He sat behind the kit, launched into “Burning Daylight,” and shifted the groove. A displaced snare hit, a ghost note on the kick, a hi-hat pattern that breathed where the original had marched. The same song, but looser. More alive.
Mason’s fingers itched. Not the mechanical itch of routine. The itch of wanting to respond.
“You changed the arrangement.”
“I changed the feel.” No apology.
“You didn’t ask me to play it boring, either.”
At the bar after, Eli slid onto the stool next to Mason and ordered a bourbon, neat.
“I don’t scare easily. Throw whatever you want. I’ll duck.”
“I don’t throw things at drummers. Drummers are replaceable.”
“Not this one.” Eli said it without arrogance—just fact. The settled certainty of a person who knew exactly what he was worth.
Mason sat on the bedroom floor at midnight with a Martin D-28 across his lap and his notebook open to a blank page. The bourbon was half gone.
He closed his eyes and played without thinking, and what came out sounded like the way Eli Zhao had played “Burning Daylight.”
He opened his notebook. Wrote three lines.
I drew a straight line and called it my life / but something shifted, something pulled it sideways / and I can’t get back to where it was before
Crossed them out. Poured another whiskey. Didn’t sleep.
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
Frequency — The Studio Session — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Mason and Eli alone in the Berry Hill studio after the band leaves. The drum throne, the cymbals, and the kind of sex that happens when two musicians stop playing instruments and start playing each other.
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