Straight Roommate, Queer Problem

MM Contemporary Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Best Friends to Lovers, One Bed, Bisexual Awakening, Forced Proximity, Roommates to Lovers, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, Praise Kink, Touch Starved, Found Family, First Time MM

His straight best friend just moved in. One bed. One loft. Nine years of lies about to unravel.

Nico Sutton has been in love with his straight best friend for nine years. He’s made peace with it — mostly. He’s built a life around the lie, constructed careful walls, and learned to survive on the scraps of casual intimacy that Evan Cole hands out without thinking.

Then Evan’s girlfriend leaves him, his apartment floods, and he shows up at Nico’s door with two damp duffel bags and nowhere else to go.

The loft is tiny. There’s one bed. The air mattress deflates on night one.

For Evan, sharing a bed with Nico should be simple — they’ve shared hotel rooms a dozen times. But something is different now. Nico’s hands on clay. Nico’s laugh at midnight. The weight of Nico’s shoulder against his in the dark. Evan starts noticing things he’s never let himself notice, and the lies he’s been telling himself are even bigger than Nico’s.

What starts as three to four weeks becomes a slow unraveling of everything both men thought they knew about want, identity, and the difference between the life you planned and the one that’s been waiting for you all along.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Best friends to lovers with NINE YEARS of pining
✅ One bed + forced proximity + “oh no, he’s hot”
✅ Bisexual awakening that’s earned, messy, and beautiful
✅ A ceramics artist and a renovation PM (hands everywhere)
✅ Slow burn that detonates (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Found family, praise kink, and first-time MM heat
✅ Dual POV — you get BOTH sides of the pining
✅ HEA guaranteed

Buy Now

Get the Bonus Chapter →

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including first-time intimacy), strong language, depictions of anxiety around sexual identity, internalized bi-erasure, and an air mattress that is a war crime. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One

The thing about being in love with your straight best friend is that you get really, really good at lying to yourself.

Not big lies. I’m not delusional. I know Evan Cole is never going to pin me against a wall and tell me he’s been thinking about my mouth for the last nine years. I know this the way I know gravity works—it’s a law of the universe that I stopped arguing with a long time ago. But the small lies? Those are an art form. He touched my back because the kitchen is narrow. He fell asleep on my shoulder because we’d been drinking. He looked at me like that because I had clay on my face. Small, precise, load-bearing lies that hold up the entire architecture of our friendship.

I was in the middle of cleaning a kiln shelf when my phone rang. Seven forty-five on a Tuesday evening, the arts center emptying out around me, my advanced ceramics students gone and their half-finished bowls drying on the racks. Evan’s name on the screen. Not unusual—we talked most days, the way you talk to the person you’ve orbited for nearly a decade. Quick texts, stupid memes, the occasional call that started with a question about dinner and ended two hours later with one of us falling asleep.

But the timing was off. Evan didn’t call on weekday evenings unless something was wrong.

“Hey.” I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder, wiping calcium residue off the shelf. “What’s up?”

“So.” A pause. The kind of pause that has weather in it. “Talia and I broke up.”

My hand stilled on the kiln shelf. I made myself keep moving. “When?”

“Saturday.”

Four days. He’d waited four days to tell me. I filed that under the large, bolded folder of Things That Mean Nothing and said, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. It was—she ended it. But it was coming. We both knew.” His voice was stripped flat, the way it got when he was managing something too big to feel all at once. Evan could hold a collapsing renovation project together with duct tape and sheer organizational will, but emotional chaos made him go still and mechanical. I’d watched it happen a hundred times. “That’s not why I’m calling, though.”

“Okay.”

“A pipe burst in the unit above mine. Sunday morning. The whole ceiling came down in the bedroom and half the living room. Everything’s soaked—drywall, carpet, my mattress. Insurance is handling it but the building says three to four weeks minimum before the unit is livable.”

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

“Holiday Inn on Prospect. Been here since Sunday.” A breath. “Look, I hate asking, but—”

“Come stay with me.”

The words were out before my brain got a vote. My mouth, operating on nine years of muscle memory that said give Evan whatever he needs, had already committed me to the most spectacular act of self-destruction I’d ever attempted.

“Nico, your place is tiny. I’d be in your way.”

“You won’t be in my way.” You’ll be in my bed. Six feet three of broad, warm, sandy-haired straight man in my bed, and I will survive it because I have survived everything else. “I still have your spare key from when you watched my plants last summer.”

“Obviously,” he said, and there it was—the first crack in the flat voice, something almost like a laugh. “You sure?”

“I’m sure. Come over tonight. I’ll order food.”

“Tomorrow? I need to grab some stuff from my place first. Whatever didn’t drown.”

“Tomorrow works. I’ll leave the key under the mat.”

He exhaled—a long, grateful sound that I felt in my sternum. “Thanks, Nics.”

Nics. He only called me that when he was scared or tender, and right now it was both, and if I didn’t get off this phone in the next ten seconds I was going to say something I’d been swallowing for nine years.

“That’s what I’m here for,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

I hung up. I put the phone on the worktable. I placed both palms flat on the surface and stood there, breathing, while the kiln ticked its cooling rhythm behind me and the overhead fluorescents hummed and the entire machinery of my carefully managed life lurched sideways.

Evan Cole was going to live with me.

In my one-bedroom loft.

Where I had one bed.

“Fuck,” I said, to no one.

I drove home running the mental math of damage control.

The loft was a converted warehouse unit in an arts-district building that had been trendy ten years ago and was now just comfortably worn. Open floor plan, tall windows, exposed brick, a galley kitchen that two bodies couldn’t occupy without contact. The bed—a platform I’d built myself from reclaimed wood—was tucked behind a half-wall that offered the suggestion of a bedroom without the reality of a door. There was no guest room. There was no real couch, either—I had a loveseat that was currently buried under bubble-wrapped ceramics for a weekend market and could not sleep a grown man even when visible.

I had an air mattress somewhere. Closet, probably. It had worked fine for Priya after her last birthday party, but Priya was five-four and Evan was six-three and built like someone who hauled lumber for a living, which, professionally speaking, he basically did.

The air mattress would have to work. The alternative was unthinkable.

I parked and took the stairs two at a time, unlocking the door to the loft I’d spent three years turning into a space that felt like mine. Bookshelves crammed with novels and art books. Candles on every flat surface that wasn’t actively dangerous. The pottery I’d kept for myself—the pieces too personal to sell—lining the windowsills. Heavy blankets on the bed, a good coffee setup, the cedar soap I bought in bulk because I liked the way the bathroom smelled after a shower. It was small and warm and deliberate and it was about to contain the man I’d been in love with since I was twenty-three years old.

I stripped the bed. Clean sheets—the good ones, the dark gray set that didn’t show clay stains. I caught myself fluffing the pillows and stopped. He is your friend. He just got dumped and flooded out. This is not an audition.

I excavated the loveseat, relocating the market inventory to the closet, and stared at the cleared surface. Narrow. Short. One decorative throw pillow that served no structural purpose. Even if I bought a real pillow and a blanket, Evan’s feet would hang off by a foot and his shoulders would overshoot both sides.

The air mattress. I found it in the closet behind a box of glazing supplies, still in its nylon carrying case. I unrolled it in the space between the bed and the kitchen island—the only floor area large enough—and plugged in the electric pump. It inflated. It held. It was a twin, which meant Evan would fit the way a Saint Bernard fits in a hatchback, but it was flat and it was not my bed and that was the only metric that mattered.

I stood in the middle of the loft and looked at my home through Evan’s eyes. The candles. The art. The single bathroom with its glass shower door that hid nothing. The bed, visible from every angle, where I slept in boxer briefs and nothing else because I lived alone and had earned the right.

I was going to have to start wearing a shirt to bed.

I was going to have to stop walking around in a towel.

I was going to have to hear him breathe twelve feet away every night and not think about what that breathing sounded like in the dark, in my sheets, on my pillow.

I can manage this. I’ve managed it for nine years.

I said it out loud, like a spell. Then I poured a glass of wine, ran a hand through my hair, and sat on the edge of the bed I was about to share with the only person who could ruin me.

Evan arrived at six the next evening with two damp duffel bags, a toolbox, and the particular exhaustion of a man whose life had quietly collapsed and who was holding the rubble together through sheer stubbornness.

He stood in my doorway and he was too big for it. He was always too big for things—doorframes, car seats, the narrow aisles at the bodega—and I’d spent nine years finding this charming instead of devastating, which was its own kind of athletic achievement. Sandy brown hair pushed back from his forehead. Blue-gray eyes that looked like they hadn’t slept in a week. The battered leather watch I’d given him for his thirtieth birthday still on his left wrist, because Evan never let go of anything, which was information I tried very hard not to read into.

“Hey.” He set the duffel bags down and looked around the loft with the assessing gaze of a man who calculated square footage for a living. “This is smaller than I remembered.”

“It’s the same size it’s always been. You’re the one who keeps growing.”

That got a half-smile. The first one, I suspected, in days. “I brought my toolbox. Your kitchen faucet was dripping last time I was here.”

“It’s still dripping.”

“Not for long.”

This was Evan. The world crumbled and he fixed a faucet. His girlfriend left him, his apartment flooded, and he showed up at my door ready to be useful because being useful was the only emotional regulation strategy he’d ever trusted. I watched him crouch by the kitchen sink, broad shoulders shifting under his flannel, and I felt the familiar, terrible tenderness that was the hallmark of loving someone who didn’t know you loved them.

“I ordered Thai,” I said. “Massaman curry, extra rice. Your usual.”

He looked up from under the sink. “You remember my usual?”

“Evan, you’ve ordered the same thing from Siam Corner for six years. A goldfish would remember your usual.”

He smiled—a real one this time—and something in my chest did the thing it always did, which was crack a little further along a fault line that had been widening since the day we met.

We ate on the floor. Not because we had to—there was a small table by the window—but because this was what we did. Takeout containers spread between us, backs against the bed frame, legs stretched out, shoulders touching. We’d done this a hundred times: at my place, at his, on hotel room floors during group trips, at music festivals where we’d split a blanket and passed food back and forth until our fingers brushed over the last spring roll and neither pulled away.

The casual physical ease of us was the thing that kept me sane and the thing that kept me sick. Other friends didn’t sit this close. Other friends didn’t share food off the same fork or sleep in the same hotel bed because “it’s a king, there’s plenty of room” or send each other shirtless gym selfies with the caption leg day was a mistake. But Evan had always been like this with me—tactile, close, unthinking—and I’d always been too hungry for it to set a boundary.

“So,” I said, chasing a chunk of potato through the curry. “You want to talk about it?”

“The apartment or the breakup?”

“Either. Both. Whichever weighs more.”

He leaned his head back against the mattress and stared at the ceiling. “Talia said I was present but never vulnerable.” He chewed on the word. “She said she could feel me holding something back and she was tired of reaching for it.”

The irony of this nearly killed me. “Were you?”

“Probably. I don’t know.” He turned his head to look at me, and from this angle—six inches away, lamplight catching the stubble on his jaw—his face was an exercise in unfair geometry. “I liked her. I cared about her. But I don’t feel… destroyed. That’s bad, right? Two years and I’m not destroyed.”

“It’s not bad. It’s honest.”

“It feels like evidence that she was right.” He went quiet for a moment. Then: “The apartment’s worse, honestly. All my stuff just—sitting in water. My books. My dad’s records. The mattress is garbage. The walls are peeling.” He rubbed his face. “I keep thinking about what I can salvage and the answer keeps being ‘not much.'”

I wanted to touch him. I wanted to put my hand on the back of his neck and say you can salvage everything that matters because you’re here and you’re okay. Instead I passed him the container of sticky rice and said, “We’ll go over this weekend and pull out anything worth saving. I’ve got a dehumidifier at the studio.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know.”

His shoulder pressed harder into mine. Not a lean—a settling. The way you settle into something that has always held your weight. “Thanks for this, Nico. Seriously. I don’t know what I’d do without—” He gestured vaguely at the loft, the food, me.

“You’d sleep in a Holiday Inn and fix their faucets out of compulsive need.”

He laughed, low and tired, and the sound moved through me like a current.

We cleaned up. We brushed our teeth in the small bathroom, bumping elbows, and I caught his eye in the mirror and looked away first because I always looked away first—it was a survival skill, not cowardice, and I’d been practicing since before he knew I needed to.

“The air mattress is all yours,” I said, gesturing to the inflated twin wedged between the bed and the kitchen island. “There are extra blankets in the closet. Pillows on the—”

“Nico.” He looked at the air mattress. He looked at me. “I’m going to fall off that thing in twenty minutes.”

“You’ll be fine. It held Priya after her birthday party.”

“Priya weighs a hundred and ten pounds.”

“Gravity is a universal force. It doesn’t discriminate by body mass.”

“That is literally the opposite of how gravity works.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. “Just take the air mattress, Evan.”

He held up both hands in surrender. “Fine. Your house, your rules.”

I climbed into my bed. He lowered himself onto the air mattress with the careful precision of a man defusing a bomb. The mattress wheezed but held. I turned off the lamp.

Darkness. The glow of the streetlight through the tall windows, casting long amber bars across the ceiling. The radiator ticking and groaning in its nightly performance. Evan breathing, twelve feet away, in my home, surrounded by everything that smelled like me.

“Hey, Nico?”

“Yeah.”

“This isn’t weird, right?”

“What isn’t weird?”

“Living together. Temporarily. I just—I don’t want to make things strange.”

Things have been strange for nine years, Evan. You just don’t know it. “We’ve shared hotel rooms a dozen times. This is the same thing with better water pressure.”

“Okay. Good.” A pause. “Good night, Nics.”

“Good night.”

I stared at the ceiling. I listened to his breathing slow and deepen. I thought about the way he’d said Nics twice in two days and what that meant—which was nothing, it meant nothing, it was a nickname he’d given me in the first year of our friendship and he used it when he was tired or grateful or scared and it did not mean what I wanted it to mean.

I closed my eyes and did what I always did: built the wall back up, brick by brick, in the dark.

I was almost asleep when the air mattress started hissing.

It wasn’t dramatic—no sudden pop, no explosion of vinyl. Just a slow, steady leak, the sound of pressurized air finding a seam it didn’t like. I heard Evan shift, felt the floorboards register his weight redistributing, and then a muttered “You have got to be kidding me” as the mattress deflated beneath him with the leisurely cruelty of a tire going flat on a highway.

I lay very still.

The floor creaked. Footsteps. The mattress sagged on my left side as two hundred and ten pounds of recently dumped, recently flooded, aggressively straight man climbed into my bed.

“Sorry,” Evan muttered. He was already half-asleep, running on fumes and gratitude, and he arranged himself on the far edge of the mattress with the rigid politeness of a man sharing an elevator with a stranger. Six inches of cold sheet between us. “I’ll buy a new one tomorrow.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

My voice sounded normal. My pulse was not normal. My pulse was doing something that would concern a cardiologist.

Evan was in my bed. Not a hotel king where we could each claim a hemisphere and pretend the middle didn’t exist. My bed. My full-size platform bed that I’d built for one person because I was one person and I had made peace with that, and now there were two of us and the mattress wasn’t big enough to pretend we weren’t close enough to touch.

I could feel his warmth. Not body heat in the abstract—his warmth, the specific thermal signature of Evan Cole, which I had memorized over nine years of shoulder-to-shoulder proximity and pretended I hadn’t. He smelled like rain and hotel soap and, underneath that, the sawdust-and-cotton scent that was just him. His breathing evened out within minutes because Evan could sleep anywhere—he’d once fallen asleep standing up at a concert—and the utter ease with which he dropped off next to me was both comforting and insulting.

He wasn’t awake. He wasn’t tormented. He wasn’t lying rigid in the dark calculating the distance between his hip and mine.

That was my job.

I stared at the ceiling and listened to him breathe and thought: Three to four weeks. You can survive three to four weeks.

I thought about the way he’d sat on my floor and leaned into me and said I don’t feel destroyed. I thought about what Talia said—present but never vulnerable—and how it described every relationship Evan had ever had, including ours. I thought about the spare key on my kitchen counter and how it had been sitting in my junk drawer for a year, a small piece of evidence that I was always the one he called when the structure failed.

I thought about the fact that I was thirty-two years old and still in love with a man who had never once considered the possibility that I might be, and I was about to share a bed with him for a month, and this was either the bravest or the stupidest thing I’d ever done.

Probably both. Most things were, with Evan.

He shifted in his sleep. His arm drifted across the six-inch gulf and his knuckles brushed my hip. I held my breath. He didn’t wake. His hand settled, warm and heavy, against my side.

I didn’t move it.

I lay there in the dark, with his hand on me and his breathing in my ear and the radiator groaning and the streetlight painting amber stripes across the ceiling of the apartment that was about to become the most dangerous place I’d ever lived.

I can manage this.

I closed my eyes.

I did not sleep.

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.

Buy Straight Roommate, Queer Problem

🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?

Hands On — A scene TOO HOT for retailers

Three weeks after their happily ever after, Evan shows up at Nico’s ceramics studio for a private lesson. What starts at the pottery wheel ends on the worktable — clay-smeared, desperate, and hotter than the kiln. The filthiest, most tender scene in the series.

Get the Bonus Chapter →