Two Divorces and a Dare

A Double Bi-Awakening MM Romance
by Jace Wilder

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Pairing: MM
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Double Bi Awakening, Friends to Lovers, Divorced Dads, Dare / Bet Romance, Praise Kink, Touch Starved, Body Worship, Secret Relationship, Found Family

Thirty days to experiment. Twenty years of wanting.

For twenty years, Dominic Mercer and Rafael Torres have been each other’s designated escape route.

They met because their wives were close friends. They raised their children together, shared vacations, repaired one another’s homes, and became the people each called when marriage, fatherhood, or life felt impossible.

Then both marriages ended within the same year.

At their joint divorce party, Dom draws a dare card: Kiss the person in this room you trust most. Everyone expects him to kiss one of his kids. Instead, he crosses the room and kisses Rafe. The room goes silent. Then Rafe kisses him back.

After the guests leave, the men agree the kiss felt too good to ignore. Rafe proposes a controlled experiment: thirty days, one new dare at a time, no shame, no assumptions, and no promise that attraction automatically means a relationship.

The rules sound sensible. The dares do not remain sensible for long.

What begins with dancing at a queer bar and admitting long-buried fantasies progresses into nights spent learning one another’s bodies, experimenting with praise and control, and discovering how much desire can grow from decades of trust.

Dom wants the freedom to explore without assigning the experience a permanent identity. Rafe wants the truth, even if it destroys the safest friendship he has ever had.

As the thirty-day deadline approaches, both men must decide whether they are recovering from divorce together — or finally becoming the partners everyone else quietly understood them to be.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Two mature heroes over 40 with gray hair and dad bodies
✅ Double bi awakening with twenty years of emotional foreplay
✅ Divorced dads, joint divorce party, dare-kiss inciting incident
✅ Thirty-day dare structure that gets progressively filthier
✅ Praise kink, switching, body worship, and touch-starved heroes
✅ Graphic, explicit, emotional heat (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️)
✅ Supportive ex-wives, adult children, found family
✅ No cheating, no “gay for you,” firm HEA

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic MM scenes including switching, anal sex, praise kink, possessive dynamics, and body worship), strong language, divorce themes, identity exploration, mature heroes over 40, temporary breakup, and family conflict. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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Chapter One: Final Decrees

His hand didn’t shake.

Dominic Mercer had expected it to. He’d expected something—a tremor, a hesitation, maybe a dramatic pause where his entire adult life flashed before his eyes like the closing credits of a film nobody stayed to watch. Twenty-two years of marriage. Two children. A house he’d rebuilt with his own hands, room by room, until even the bones of it knew his fingerprints.

All of it reduced to a signature on a line marked with a yellow tab.

He signed. The pen was a cheap ballpoint, the kind that skips if you press too hard. He pressed too hard. It skipped. He signed again, cleaner this time, and the attorney—a brisk woman in her fifties who’d handled enough divorces to stop pretending each one was tragic—flipped to the next page and pointed to another yellow tab.

“And here.”

He signed.

“And here.”

Again.

“Initial here, please.”

He initialed. DPM. Same three letters he’d carved into the corner of the workbench in his shop when he was twenty-six and drunk on cheap beer and the certainty that life was going to be exactly what he’d planned.

The attorney squared the papers, slid them into a manila envelope, and stood. “That’s everything, Mr. Mercer. The decree will be filed with the county by end of business today. You’ll receive a certified copy in the mail within ten days.”

“Thank you.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

There was nothing else. That was the whole point.

He stood, shook her hand, and walked out of the office into a hallway that smelled like carpet cleaner and someone’s reheated lunch. The fluorescent lights buzzed. A water cooler gurgled. Somewhere down the hall, a phone rang three times and stopped.

The most anticlimactic moment of his life, and the building didn’t even have the decency to be quiet about it.

Anne was waiting in the parking lot.

Not waiting, exactly. She was leaning against her car with her arms crossed and her sunglasses pushed up into her hair, the way she always stood when she was trying to look casual and wasn’t. She’d cut her hair shorter since she moved out. It suited her. She looked lighter. He didn’t know if that was the haircut or the divorce.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“Done?”

“Done.”

She nodded. He nodded. Two people who’d shared a bed for twenty-two years, standing eight feet apart in a parking lot, nodding at each other like acquaintances at a school function.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He put his hands in his pockets. Took them out. “You?”

“Yeah.” She smiled—small, real, tired. “I thought I’d cry. I had tissues in my purse and everything.”

“Did you?”

“No. I think I used up all my crying in February.”

February. The month they’d finally said it out loud, sitting at the kitchen table—the oak table he’d built their first year, the one she’d taken when she moved because she said it was hers and he hadn’t argued because she was right, it was hers, everything soft in that house had been hers—and admitting that love and marriage were not, as it turned out, the same thing. That you could love someone thoroughly and sincerely and still feel the life draining out of your partnership one polite evening at a time.

“Are you going tonight?” Anne asked.

“To the party?”

“To the party.”

He exhaled. “I’d rather rebuild a collapsed porch.”

“Dom.”

“I’m serious. There’s a Queen Anne on Maple that’s been sitting there with a rotted—”

“Dominic.”

He stopped. She only used his full name when she meant business, and twenty-two years of marriage had trained him to recognize the tone even if the marriage was now, technically, a manila envelope in his truck.

“Rafe put the whole thing together,” she said. “He rented glassware. He made a cake. He printed invitations on actual cardstock.”

“I know.”

“If you don’t go, he’ll show up at your door with a bottle of whiskey and guilt you into it anyway, and then he’ll be hurt that you made him do the work. You know how he gets.”

Dom knew how he got. He’d known how Rafe got for twenty years—the particular way Rafe’s jaw tightened when he was pretending not to be hurt, the way his humor sharpened into something with edges, the way he’d pour you a drink and sit beside you and wait, patient as stone, until you said whatever you needed to say. Rafe was the most patient impatient person Dom had ever met.

“I’ll think about it,” Dom said.

Anne studied him for a moment. Then she stepped forward, kissed him on the cheek—quick, warm, familiar, final—and said, “Go to the party, Dom. You survived the marriage. You can survive the celebration.”

She got in her car. He watched her drive away. The sun was low and gold through the windshield, and she was already reaching for the radio before she’d cleared the lot.

He stood there for another minute. Then he got in his truck and went home.

The house was too quiet.

It had been too quiet for three months—since Anne moved into the apartment on Birch Street, since Sophie went back to school, since Caleb started spending half his weeks at his mother’s—but Dom hadn’t gotten used to it. He kept expecting sounds that didn’t come. The dishwasher running. The TV in the other room. Anne’s voice calling from upstairs about something he’d forgotten to fix, which was ironic because fixing things was the one skill his marriage had never required him to improve.

He dropped his keys on the counter. The counter where the oak table used to sit. He hadn’t replaced it. He ate standing up now, or sitting on the porch, or in the truck between job sites. He’d been meaning to build something new—he owned a goddamn carpentry shop, he could build anything—but every time he thought about it, he couldn’t decide what shape the table should be.

A table for one felt pathetic. A table for four felt like a lie.

He opened the fridge. Stared at its contents. Closed it. Opened it again, as if something might have materialized in the intervening three seconds. Nothing had. He grabbed a beer and drank it standing at the counter, looking at the rectangle of lighter flooring where the table had been.

Twenty-two years. Two kids. A house. A business. A life that had looked, from every observable angle, like exactly the life he was supposed to build.

And the whole time—the entire goddamn time—something had been missing, and he’d been too busy fixing other people’s houses to figure out what it was.

Footsteps on the stairs. Caleb appeared in the kitchen doorway—seventeen, lanky, dark-haired, wearing basketball shorts and a T-shirt from a band Dom had never heard of. He had Anne’s eyes and Dom’s shoulders and a talent for reading a room that made Dom feel transparent in a way he didn’t entirely enjoy.

Caleb looked at the beer. Looked at Dom’s face. Didn’t ask about the signing.

“Rafe called,” he said instead.

“Yeah?”

“Twice. Said if you don’t show up tonight, he’s sending Isabel with a dolly to wheel you there.”

Dom almost smiled. “He would, too.”

“He definitely would. Isabel’s been texting Sophie about the dare jar all day. Apparently they wrote, like, fifty cards.”

“Dare jar?”

“It’s a thing. For the party. You draw a card, you do the dare. Sophie says some of them are savage.”

“Great.”

“You should go, Dad.”

Dom looked at his son. Caleb was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed—the same pose as Anne in the parking lot, the same studied casualness. The resemblance was so sharp it ached.

“I’ll think about it,” Dom said.

Caleb shrugged. “Cool. But you’ve been thinking about stuff for like three months and mostly that means you sit here and drink one beer and stare at where the table used to be. So.”

He turned and went back upstairs. His bedroom door closed. Music started—something low and bass-heavy that vibrated through the ceiling.

Dom stood in the kitchen. Drank his beer. Stared at where the table used to be.

Then he pulled out his phone and called Rafe.

The phone rang once.

“Tell me you’re coming,” Rafe said, instead of hello.

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Dom.”

“I said I’m thinking.”

“You’ve been thinking since March. Your thinking face has a thinking face. Come to the party.”

“I don’t want to make a thing of it.”

“It’s already a thing. The cake is two tiers. Elena dropped off decorations that look like a very chic funeral. There is a cocktail called Separate Property that contains gin and regret and a tiny paper shredder on the rim.”

Dom’s mouth twitched. “A paper shredder.”

“On the rim. Like a garnish. Tasha made them. She’s been in a mood.”

A beat of silence. The comfortable kind—the kind that sat between them like a third person in the room, familiar and unhurried. Dom listened to the ambient sound of Foundry House through the phone: glasses clinking, Rafe’s shoes on the old hardwood, the low murmur of prep in the kitchen. The sounds of Rafe’s world.

“How are you?” Dom asked.

“Divorced.”

“Yeah.”

“Officially, completely, legally divorced.” A pause. “Elena brought a box of old photographs. The four of us, through the years. There’s one from that camping trip where you and I built the dock wrong and it sank.”

“That dock didn’t sink. It listed.”

“Dominic, it sank. You were standing on it. You went in up to your chest.”

“It listed aggressively.”

Rafe laughed—short, warm, surprised—and something in Dom’s chest loosened the way it always did when he pulled that sound out of Rafe. He’d never examined why. Making Rafe laugh had been one of the small reliable pleasures of his adult life, like the first sip of coffee in a cold shop or the smell of fresh-cut oak, and he’d filed it in the same category: things that made a hard day bearable.

“Come tonight,” Rafe said. Quieter now. “I’m not asking you to celebrate. I’m asking you to not be alone.”

“I’m not alone. Caleb’s here.”

“Caleb is seventeen. He’s upstairs with his headphones on pretending you don’t exist. That doesn’t count.”

Dom exhaled. Rafe knew him. That was the thing about Rafe—he always knew, and he never made a production of knowing. He just showed up. For twenty years, through moves and renovations and parent-teacher conferences and the slow gray Wednesday of Dom’s father’s funeral, Rafe had shown up. Not with advice. Not with answers. Just with his presence and his patience and his refusal to let Dom disappear into work.

“Fine,” Dom said.

“Fine you’ll come?”

“Fine I’ll come.”

“Wear the suit.”

Dom frowned. “Which suit?”

“The suit, Dominic.”

“I own two suits.”

“You own one suit. The other is a costume you wore to Caleb’s eighth-grade graduation that should be burned. Wear the charcoal one.”

The charcoal one. The suit Rafe had picked out two years ago for Marcus and Diane’s wedding—dragged Dom into a store in Kingston, argued with the tailor about the shoulder seam, stood in the fitting room doorway with his arms crossed and his head tilted and said, That one. That’s the one. Dom had worn it three times since. Every time, Rafe had looked at him and nodded once, a small satisfied motion, like something had been confirmed.

“The charcoal one,” Dom repeated.

“Eight o’clock. Don’t be late.”

“I’m never late.”

“You’re never on time either. You arrive exactly when you’ve decided the situation requires you, which is its own form of arrogance.”

“Goodbye, Rafe.”

“Tonight we celebrate surviving, Dom. That’s all. Just surviving.”

He hung up. Dom stood in his kitchen holding the phone against his chest like it had a pulse.

The shower was too hot, the way he liked it. Steam filled the bathroom until the mirror fogged and he couldn’t see his own reflection, which was fine. He wasn’t in the mood for his own reflection.

He shaved his neck, trimmed his beard close, ran his fingers through hair that was more gray than brown now and had been for two years. He’d stopped noticing the gray the same way he’d stopped noticing most things about his appearance—somewhere around forty, the mirror had become a tool for checking that his shirt was buttoned and his beard was even, not a surface that told him anything he wanted to know.

He dressed. The charcoal suit.

It still fit, though differently than it had two years ago. Tighter through the chest—he’d been working harder since the separation, longer hours in the shop, more demolition work than detail work—and a little looser in the waist because he kept forgetting to eat real meals. He buttoned the jacket, then unbuttoned it. Rolled the sleeves of the white shirt underneath to the forearms because the cuffs were too tight and because Rafe had once told him that rolled sleeves made him look less like a man attending his own tribunal.

He looked in the mirror.

A forty-eight-year-old man looked back. Blue-gray eyes with lines at the corners. A jaw that was still strong but softer than it used to be. Broad shoulders. Large hands with old scars across the knuckles—wood and metal and one memorable table saw incident in 2014 that had earned him nine stitches and Rafe sitting in the ER waiting room for four hours because Dom had called him before he’d called Anne.

He didn’t think about whether he looked good. That question had stopped occurring to him around the time his marriage had stopped requiring it—somewhere in the long middle years when Anne’s gaze had shifted from appreciative to familiar to something that wasn’t disinterest exactly but wasn’t hunger either. Just—recognition. The way you look at a house you’ve lived in so long you stop seeing the architecture.

He straightened his collar. Turned off the bathroom light. Went downstairs.

Caleb was in the kitchen again, eating cereal out of the box.

“You look nice,” Caleb said.

“Thanks.”

“Is that the suit Rafe picked?”

Dom paused. “How do you know Rafe picked it?”

“Because the other one makes you look like a geometry teacher and Rafe would never let you leave the house in it.” Caleb ate another handful of cereal. “Have fun. Don’t drink too much. Don’t let Rafe make you do karaoke.”

“There’s no karaoke.”

“There’s a dare jar. There could be karaoke.”

Dom kissed the top of his son’s head—Caleb allowed it with the resigned tolerance of a teenager whose father was having A Day—and walked out to his truck.

The drive to Foundry House took twelve minutes.

Twelve minutes through the center of Briar Glen—past the brick storefronts and the independent bookshop and the wine bar that used to be a hardware store and the coffee place that used to be a different coffee place. Past the river, high and dark with late-spring runoff. Past the turn to Anne’s apartment, which he took by muscle memory and corrected without comment. Past the elementary school where he and Rafe had coached the worst Little League team in county history—fourteen losses, one win, and a pizza party that ended with Rafe standing on a picnic table giving a speech about the nobility of failure while eight-year-olds threw pepperoni at each other.

Twenty years. He’d known Rafe for twenty years.

He’d met him because Anne had befriended Elena at a neighborhood thing—a block party or a potluck or one of those community events that Dom attended under protest and left early from whenever possible. Anne had said, You’ll like Rafe, he’s not boring, which was her highest compliment and a direct commentary on most of Dom’s existing friendships.

She was right. Rafe wasn’t boring.

Rafe was—

Dom didn’t finish the thought. He’d never been good at describing Rafe, even to himself. The man was too many things at once. Charming and sincere. Loud and perceptive. Generous to a fault and occasionally, quietly, devastatingly lonely. He threw parties for two hundred people and then sat on the roof terrace afterward in the dark, and Dom had found him up there enough times to know that the silence after the crowd left was the part Rafe never knew what to do with.

They’d fallen into each other the way men do—through proximity and utility and the slow accumulation of shared time. They helped each other move. They coached together. They built a deck, badly, and then rebuilt it, competently. They sat in hospital waiting rooms. They assembled furniture. They drank on porches. They drove each other’s kids to practice when schedules collided. They argued about construction methods and sports teams and the correct way to grill a steak. They didn’t talk about feelings because they didn’t need to. They showed up. That was the language.

And now both their marriages were over, and Dom was driving to a divorce party in a suit his best friend had chosen for him, and the inside of his chest felt like a room with the furniture removed—not empty, exactly, but rearranged in a way he couldn’t navigate in the dark.

He turned onto River Street. Foundry House rose ahead of him—the old metalworks building that Rafe had spent three years renovating into something beautiful. Exposed brick and steel beams and enormous windows and a rooftop terrace that overlooked the Hudson. Dom had consulted on the restoration. Had built the bar by hand—reclaimed walnut, hand-forged brackets, a surface smooth enough to slide a glass across. He’d charged Rafe half his usual rate and Rafe had argued about it for a week and then stopped arguing and made Dom dinner instead, and they’d eaten at the bar Dom had built and Rafe had said, This is the best thing in my building, and Dom had said, It’s just a bar, and Rafe had looked at him with an expression Dom couldn’t read and said, That’s not what I meant.

String lights glowed along the entrance. Cars lined the street. Music bled through the old brick walls—something with a beat, something that sounded like the beginning of a night that expected you to stay.

Dom parked. Cut the engine. Sat for a moment with his hands on the steering wheel, breathing.

He could still leave. He could text Rafe some excuse—stomach thing, headache, emergency at the shop. Rafe would know he was lying but would let him lie, because that was another thing about Rafe: he always let Dom retreat. Never forced it. Just left the door open and waited.

Dom got out of the truck.

The evening air was warm and green-smelling—river water and cut grass and the faint sweet rot of apple blossoms from the orchard up the hill. He straightened his jacket. Checked his phone. No new messages. He put the phone in his pocket and walked toward the entrance.

Rafe was standing outside.

Leaning against the brick wall beside the door, one foot propped up, arms crossed. He’d changed since the phone call—dark fitted shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, tailored trousers, the leather boots he wore when he wanted to look like he hadn’t tried. Silver at his temples catching the light from the strings above. The scar through his left eyebrow, pale against his skin. His jaw. His hands. The rings he wore on his right hand—two, always two, silver bands that caught the light when he gestured, which was constantly, because Rafe talked with his entire body.

He looked up when Dom approached. His eyes moved from Dom’s face to the suit and back again, and his expression did something that Dom didn’t have a word for.

Not surprise. He’d told Dom to wear the suit.

Not approval. It was more than approval.

Something shifted behind his eyes—quick, unguarded, there and gone before Dom could catalog it—and then Rafe smiled, and the smile was the same smile he’d been giving Dom for twenty years, and Dom told himself the moment hadn’t happened.

“You wore the suit,” Rafe said.

“You told me to.”

“I tell you lots of things. You never listen.”

“I listen. I just don’t comply.”

Rafe pushed off the wall. Stepped closer. Reached out and adjusted Dom’s collar—a gesture so casual, so automatic, that neither of them registered it as unusual. His fingers brushed the side of Dom’s neck. Warm. Brief.

“You look good, Dom.”

“I look old.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” Rafe held his gaze for a beat longer than necessary. Then he clapped Dom on the shoulder and turned toward the door. “Come on. There’s a black cake in there with both our names on it, and Tasha made something with mezcal that might actually kill us.”

Dom followed him inside.

The music got louder. The lights got warmer. And somewhere in the back of his mind—quiet, formless, easy to ignore—a thought surfaced that he’d been pushing down for longer than he wanted to admit.

He said I look good.

Why does that matter?

He didn’t answer himself. He walked into the party instead.

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The lake cabin dock. The moonlight. The moment Dom stopped thinking and started taking. What happened between the midnight swim and the morning — the scene that didn’t make it into the book because even retailers have limits.

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