Straight Roommate, Bent Rules

MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder

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Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Roommates to Lovers, Bi Awakening, Friends to Lovers, Praise Kink, Hurt/Comfort, Dirty Talk, Slow Burn, Friends with Benefits

Miles keeps his life meticulously neat — work, meals, sleep, and absolutely no messy hookups. Dylan blows into his apartment with guitars, one-night stands, and zero shame. When the “straight” roommate decides to turn his teasing into an offer, Miles discovers how fast his rules bend — and how hard Dylan plans to keep him.

Miles Hart is a marketing analyst who alphabetizes his spice rack and hasn’t had sex in longer than he’ll admit. His life is quiet, tidy, and achingly predictable — exactly the way he likes it. Or so he tells himself.

Dylan Cross is a tattooed guitarist with shoulder-length hair, zero savings, and a reputation as the most fun hookup in the local music scene. When his roommate bails and leaves him on a curb with a duffel bag and a Les Paul, there’s only one person he calls.

Miles says yes. Sets rules. Expects six quiet weeks. Instead he gets shirtless cooking, late-night guitar, flirting that lands like a lit match — and the slow, devastating realization that his “straight” best friend has been looking at him differently.

What starts as one reckless kiss turns into roommate-perks sex neither of them can stop. But Dylan’s still calling it casual, and Miles has been hurt enough to know that “just having fun” always ends the same way. When Miles demands honesty and Dylan panics, everything they’ve built — the sex, the friendship, the domestic life they didn’t plan — teeters on the edge.

Dylan has to decide: keep pretending he’s the guy who doesn’t stay, or admit that the rule-follower in the next room is the only person who’s ever made him want to.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Roommates to lovers with maximum domestic tension
✅ Bi-awakening that’s raw, honest, and scorching hot
✅ “He’s straight… wait, why is he looking at me like that?”
✅ Praise kink and dirty talk that escalates every chapter
✅ A rule-follower who finally lets go and a chaos gremlin who finally stays
✅ Explicit, graphic MM scenes (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — this book earns every pepper)
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes), strong language, and depictions of anxiety and self-doubt. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One

The alarm went off at six. I was already awake.

That was the thing about living alone — there was nobody to blame for the 4 AM ceiling-staring except your own brain, and my brain had been pulling this shit for months. Lying there in the dark, cataloging every surface in the apartment I already knew was clean, running through tomorrow’s calendar I’d already memorized, occasionally drifting toward the dating apps on my phone before veering away like a car correcting on black ice.

I didn’t reach for the phone. I reached for the alarm, silenced it on the first tone, and sat up.

Bed made by 6:02. Hospital corners, duvet smoothed flat, pillows arranged the way I liked them — which was symmetrically, because I was exactly the kind of person who had an opinion about pillow symmetry. The bedroom looked like a catalog spread. Not because I was trying. Because this was just how things ended up when one person lived in a space and that person was me.

Running shoes on by 6:12. Out the door by 6:15. Same route — east on Birch to the park, two loops around the reservoir, back up Birch, total distance 4.3 miles, total time thirty-six to thirty-eight minutes depending on whether the crosswalk at Ninth cooperated. I ran to the same playlist I’d been running to since March, which I recognized was a metaphor for something I didn’t want to examine.

Shower. Shave. Black coffee in the white ceramic mug I’d had since grad school — a plain, sturdy thing I’d picked up at a HomeGoods in a strip mall outside Chapel Hill, and which had somehow become the most constant relationship in my life.

Not that I was thinking about it that way.

I stood in the kitchen and drank my coffee and looked at my apartment. The counters were clear. The sink was empty. My spice rack was alphabetized, which Tessa had once called “either serial killer behavior or deeply sexy, and honestly, Miles, I can’t tell which.” The throw pillows on the couch were positioned at opposing forty-five-degree angles because —

Because I needed to get out of this apartment and go to work before I started measuring angles with a protractor.

Linden & Pace occupied the seventh floor of a glass building downtown that tried very hard to look like a tech startup and mostly succeeded in looking like a dentist’s office with better lighting. I’d been there four years — campaign analyst, which meant I spent my days turning consumer behavior into spreadsheets and my spreadsheets into decks that account managers presented to clients as if they’d done the work themselves.

I was good at it. The way a dishwasher is good at cleaning plates. Efficiently, consistently, without any particular feeling about the plates.

“Miles.” Tessa appeared at the edge of my desk holding two coffees, which meant she wanted something. Tessa only brought two coffees when she planned to sit down and interrogate me. One coffee was a drive-by greeting. Two coffees was a hostage negotiation.

“Morning,” I said.

She set the second coffee on my desk and dropped into the chair across from me with the boneless grace of someone who’d already decided this conversation was going to take a while.

“Question,” she said.

“I’m terrified.”

“When’s the last time you had sex?”

I looked at her over the rim of the coffee she’d brought me. It was a latte. She knew I drank black coffee. She brought me lattes anyway because she said black coffee was “a personality flaw masquerading as a preference.”

“That’s an HR violation.”

“We’re friends. Friends ask about sex. I’m asking about sex. When.”

“I’m not answering that.”

“Which means it’s been long enough that the answer is embarrassing.” She tilted her head. “More than a month?” I didn’t respond. “More than two months?” Nothing. “Miles.”

“Can we talk about literally anything else?”

“We can talk about why you come to work every day looking like a man who irons his grief.” She said it lightly, but her eyes were doing the thing — the Tessa thing where she was funny on the surface and laser-accurate underneath. “When’s the last time you did something that wasn’t on a spreadsheet?”

“I ran this morning.”

“You run every morning. That’s not doing something, that’s maintaining a system. I mean something unscheduled. Unplanned. Something where you don’t know the outcome before you start.”

I spun the latte cup on my desk. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

Tessa watched me for a beat too long, then picked up her coffee and stood. “You know what I think?”

“You’re going to tell me regardless.”

“I think you’ve built a very nice life that doesn’t actually have you in it.” She knocked her knuckle against my desk twice — her version of a period at the end of a sentence — and walked back to her side of the office.

I stared at my monitor. Opened the Q4 engagement deck. Adjusted a cell margin by one pixel.

Her words sat in the back of my skull like a splinter I couldn’t reach.

The thing about a quiet life is that it’s only quiet until it isn’t. The disruption doesn’t knock. It calls you at 7 PM on a Tuesday while you’re eating reheated chicken and broccoli at your kitchen table with a podcast about economic policy playing at reasonable volume.

I looked at my phone. The screen said DYLAN with a guitar emoji I didn’t remember adding, which meant Dylan had added it himself at some point while holding my phone, because Dylan treated other people’s devices the way he treated other people’s boundaries — with cheerful, oblivious disregard.

I picked up on the second ring because I always picked up for Dylan. That was a fact about myself I’d stopped questioning years ago.

“Miles. Buddy. My guy. My favorite person with a label maker.”

“What happened?”

“Why does something have to have happened? Maybe I’m calling to chat. Maybe I miss the soothing sound of your disapproval.”

“You’re using your fun voice, which means something bad happened and you’re trying to make it sound like an adventure. What happened?”

A beat of silence. In the background I could hear traffic, the tinny rattle of something metallic — an amp, maybe, or a music stand — and the particular quality of air that meant he was outside.

“So Kevin moved out.”

I set my fork down. “Your roommate Kevin?”

“Well, he was my roommate. Now he’s just Kevin. Kevin who packed all his shit while I was at a gig, left a note on the counter that said ‘sorry bro,’ and took off to Portland with his girlfriend. Which, honestly, I respect the spontaneity, but he was on the lease, Miles. Both our names. And the landlord says I’ve got till Friday to either cover the full rent or get out, and I cannot cover the full rent. I can barely cover half the rent. I can cover, like, thirty-seven percent of the rent and a heartfelt promise.”

I closed my eyes. “Where are you right now?”

“Technically? Sitting on the curb outside my building with a duffel bag and my Les Paul.”

“You’re on the street.”

“I’m on a curb. It’s different. Curbs are intentional seating.”

“Dylan.”

“I’ve been crashing with Raf for a couple days, but his place is a one-bedroom and his cat hates me. Like, actively. I think she’s plotting something.” A pause. The fun voice slipped, just a fraction, and underneath it was the thing Dylan never let anyone hear unless he forgot to cover it — the edge. The sound of a man who treated chaos like a lifestyle so nobody would notice when it actually scared him. “Theo’s got a sublet opening up November first. Six weeks from now. I just need somewhere to land until then.”

I opened my eyes and looked at my apartment. My clean, quiet, perfectly organized one-bedroom apartment where every surface was labeled and every pillow was at forty-five degrees and the silence was so complete you could hear the refrigerator cycling from the bedroom.

“Okay,” I said.

The word left my mouth before my brain approved it. I could feel the approval process happening belatedly — synapses firing objections in a conference room my mouth had already walked out of.

“Okay? Like, okay-okay? Like, I-can-stay-okay?”

“Like, you can stay. Temporarily. Six weeks. Until the sublet opens.”

“Miles.” His voice changed — the bravado dropped and what came through was warm and real and the specific frequency of Dylan Cross that had been dismantling my defenses since college. “Seriously. Thank you. I’ll be — I’ll keep it clean, I’ll follow whatever rules you want, I’ll —”

“There will be rules.”

“I assumed there would be rules. I welcome the rules. I am pro-rules.”

“You have never been pro-rules in your life.”

“I’m evolving.” I could hear his grin through the phone. “I’ll be there tomorrow night? I just need to grab the rest of my stuff from the apartment.”

“How much stuff?”

“Barely anything. Guitar, clothes, a couple amps. My pedal board. Some cables. My backup guitar —”

“Dylan.”

“It’s going to be great. We’re going to have the best time. This is going to be the most fun you’ve had in years, I guarantee it.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He laughed — that full, reckless laugh that sounded like somebody kicking open a door — and said he’d text me when he was on his way and hung up before I could set any of the ground rules I was already composing in my head.

I put the phone down on the table. Looked at the remains of my chicken and broccoli. Looked at my apartment — the labeled pantry, the alphabetized spices, the throw pillows, the silence.

I think you’ve built a very nice life that doesn’t actually have you in it.

Dylan Cross was going to move into my apartment. My clean, controlled, perfectly calibrated apartment. For six weeks.

I stood up, washed my plate, dried it, and put it away.

Then I opened the hall closet, stared at the shelf where the guest towels lived, and wondered what the hell I’d just agreed to.

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Christening the New Place — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Miles and Dylan move into their first apartment together. Two bedrooms, an actual hallway, and a granite kitchen counter. The second the last box hits the floor, Dylan decides every room needs to be properly christened — starting with the kitchen. Counter sex, mirror sex, and the filthiest, funniest housewarming in the building’s history.

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