The Straight Man’s Rulebook
MM Bisexual Awakening Romance
by Chase Power
Available at all major retailers
Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bisexual Awakening, Neighbors to Lovers, Age Gap, Friends with Benefits, Forced Proximity, Praise Kink, Slow Burn, Touch Starved, Coming Out, Hurt/Comfort
My newly divorced neighbor asked me to help him figure out if he likes men. I gave him rules. He broke the first one by looking at me like I was the answer.
Ethan Cole has spent forty-two years doing everything expected of him: marrying young, building a successful contracting business, raising a daughter, and ignoring the fact that his attraction to men never went away. When his marriage ends amicably, he buys the crumbling duplex next door to Nico Alvarez and makes a private list in a spiral notebook: Things I Need to Know Before I Make a Fool of Myself.
Nico Alvarez is openly gay, sharp-tongued, and still bruised from an ex who kept him hidden. He finds the notebook after a windstorm and agrees to help Ethan figure things out. Strictly as a friend. With rules.
No secrets. No pretending. No sleepovers. No falling in love with the man next door.
Then a storm strands them in one house. Their businesses collide on the same high-stakes project. And every rule Ethan breaks brings him closer to the one man he never expected to want — or deserve.
Because figuring out who he is might be the easy part. The hard part is asking Nico to stay.
You’ll love this book if you enjoy:
✅ Bisexual awakening with a mature, divorced hero
✅ Neighbors to lovers with forced proximity
✅ Age gap (42/31) with emotional depth
✅ “Teach me” premise that becomes real love
✅ Slow burn that EXPLODES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Touch-starved competence and praise kink
✅ Queer found family and a small-town community
✅ A hero who learns to ask for what he wants
✅ HEA guaranteed
⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit MM sexual content (graphic oral, penetrative sex, praise kink), strong language, homophobia from a parent, themes of divorce, identity exploration, and coming out as an adult. Intended for readers 18+.
📖 Read Chapter One Free
Not sure yet? Read the full first chapter right here.
Chapter One
The divorce papers were in a manila envelope on the passenger seat, and the house looked worse than the listing photos.
Ethan Cole sat in the cab of his truck with the U-Haul hitched behind him and studied the place he’d bought with the emotional clarity of a man who’d just signed away nineteen years of marriage for the price of a mediator and two notarized signatures. The duplex was an 1890s brick row house on Elm Street in Maple Landing, New York, and it had been described by the realtor as “a charming fixer-upper with original character and tremendous upside potential,” which Ethan now understood to be real estate for actively decomposing.
The porch sagged at its center like a swayback horse. Two of the front windows were boarded from inside. The brick was sound — he could see that even from the truck — but the mortar joints had gone to powder in places, and the front steps listed hard to the right in a way that suggested the footer had cracked years ago and nobody had bothered to dig it up. The roof was patched in three places with mismatched shingles. The gutters were hanging on by faith.
He loved it immediately.
That was the problem with Ethan. He’d always loved the things that needed the most work.
He clipped it with the edge of the bookcase.
Three sections of fence went over like dominoes, crashing flat into the neighboring yard and scattering across what turned out to be a meticulously maintained herb garden. Basil. Rosemary. Something purple that might have been lavender. All of it now wearing a fence like a blanket.
“Shit.”
Movement from the neighboring back door.
The man who stepped out was — Ethan’s brain went offline for a second. Restarted. Tried again.
He was maybe five ten, lean, with warm brown skin and dark curly hair that looked like he’d been running his hands through it. Barefoot. Wearing a faded vintage T-shirt with the collar stretched wide enough to show one collarbone and paint-stained joggers slung low on his hips. Tattoo — linework vines, delicate — running along one forearm. Holding iced coffee in a glass, not a plastic cup, because he was apparently the kind of person who drank iced coffee from real glassware on a Tuesday afternoon. His nails were painted dark green.
He looked at the fence. He looked at his herb garden. He looked at Ethan.
“You know,” he said, “some men bring wine when they move in next door.”
“I can fix that,” Ethan said.
The man sipped his iced coffee. “The fence or the wine situation?”
Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.
🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?
The Door Between — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon
Ethan installs a door through the shared wall between their houses. What starts as a renovation becomes a christening. Nico takes charge. Ethan surrenders. The most intimate, explicit, and joyful scene in the series — and it didn’t make it into the book.
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