Two’s Company, Three’s Coming

A Steamy MMM Roommates-to-Lovers Romance
by Jace Wilder

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: MMM (Why Choose Triad)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Roommates to Lovers, Bi Awakening, Best Friends to Lovers, Brother’s Best Friend, Mutual Pining, Forced Proximity, Praise Kink, Blue Collar, Renovation Romance, Closed Triad

Twelve years wanting one roommate through eighteen inches of plaster. He wasn’t going to make it a week wanting two.

Eli Hart has been in love with his best friend since he was nineteen. He cooks, he labels the leftovers, he keeps the house rules, and every night he lies on the other side of a bathroom wall listening to Gavin’s shower and saying nothing. He has it down to an art.

Gavin Price is a drummer, a bartender, and everybody’s good time. He has six months to turn his grandfather’s hardware store into a music venue, or his sister lists the building. He also decided ten years ago that Eli was straight, because the alternative was having to try.

Nate Bell is Gavin’s older brother’s best friend: thirty-eight, newly divorced, six foot three, and a contractor who turns up with one duffel bag to sleep in the spare room and build the venue for a bar tab. He has never looked at a man in his life. Then Gavin takes his shirt off to do the dishes.

One apartment. One bathroom, with eleven minutes of hot water. Walls you can hear a man think through. A deadline on the kitchen whiteboard in red.

Nobody in this house is an experiment. Nobody lies. And nobody finds out from a window.

Two’s Company, Three’s Coming is a high-heat MMM romance with roommates to lovers, a bi awakening at thirty-eight, twelve years of mutual pining, three first-person points of view, every pairing on the page, and a closed-triad HEA. No cheating. No choosing.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Twelve years of pining that ends in a darkroom with the words “you idiot”
✅ A bi awakening at thirty-eight, from a man who writes a list first
✅ His brother’s best friend: huge, quiet, and undone by one word of praise
✅ A bossy photographer who runs a bed like a kitchen
✅ Three men, one bathroom, eleven minutes of hot water
✅ Explicit MM and MMM scenes, every pairing, where everyone says what they want out loud
✅ A renovation deadline, a cranky neighbor, and a building official who misses nothing
✅ Printed agendas, a stop word, and a breakfast job walk: polyamory with minutes
✅ Why choose with no choosing: closed triad, no cheating, HEA
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat that starts in Chapter One

Buy Now

Get the Bonus Chapter →

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains extremely explicit sexual content (graphic MM and MMM scenes throughout, in every pairing) and strong language. It also contains two early scenes where a lead watches or listens to the other two without their knowledge, through a window and through a wall. Both are confessed, the book treats them as lines crossed, and everything after that is openly negotiated and enthusiastically consensual. Also includes a recent divorce, a late bi awakening, praise kink and light dominance, and a hurtful joke that leads to a brief third-act rift. Closed triad. No cheating. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Eli

The bottle was almost perfect.

Fourth Ward Rye, single barrel, lit from behind so the whiskey went from amber at the shoulder to molten gold at the base. I’d spent forty minutes dotting fake condensation onto the glass with glycerin and a toothpick, because real condensation runs and fake condensation holds still, and that’s the whole dirty secret of my profession. Nothing you want is ever as effortless as it looks.

I had my eye to the viewfinder and my finger on the shutter when a naked back walked through my frame.

Not entirely naked. There were jeans, slung low enough to show the twin dents at the base of his spine, and a cardboard box balanced on one shoulder like it weighed nothing. But the back was bare, broad, and gleaming with sweat, and it stopped dead center in front of my strip light, where it turned a four-hundred-dollar whiskey setup into a silhouette of the best shoulders in Garrison, Ohio.

“Gavin.”

“Mm?”

“You’re in my shot.”

He turned around. That was worse. Copper-brown hair stuck to his forehead, a flush across his chest, the little steel ring through his left nipple catching my key light as if a stylist had placed it there. Hazel eyes, laugh lines, a grin he’d been using to get out of trouble since before I met him.

“I improve your shot,” he said.

“The client asked for heritage.”

“I am heritage. My grandfather sold nails in this building for forty years.” He shifted the box. Things clinked. Somebody had written KITCHEN (NOT MUCH) on the side in block capitals. “Besides, it’s a whiskey ad. Sex sells whiskey.”

“Sweat doesn’t.”

“Tell that to my tip jar.”

I straightened up from the tripod and pushed my glasses into my hair, which is what I do when I need half a second to arrange my face. Twelve years of practice. I could look at Gavin Price half-dressed and dripping and produce an expression of mild domestic irritation on command. It was the most technically accomplished thing I did, and nobody was ever going to give me an award for it.

“Why are you shirtless? It’s the first of March.”

“Because the radiators in this building have two settings, off and Havana, and I’ve been up those stairs four times.” He nodded toward the front windows. “He’s parking the truck. Be nice.”

“I’m always nice.”

“You’re always polite. It’s different. You get this look, like you’re deciding where to put somebody on a shelf.”

“I don’t have a shelf for a six-month houseguest.”

“So build one.” He bumped my shoulder with his on the way past, warm and damp, smelling like cedar deodorant and exertion, and my whole left side lit up the way it had been lighting up since I was nineteen. “It’s Nate. You’ll like Nate. Everybody likes Nate. He’s a golden retriever that can frame a house.”

He carried the box down the hall. I watched him go for exactly two seconds, which was my limit, and then I took my glasses out of my hair and looked at the back of the camera instead.

I’d fired the shutter by accident. There he was on the screen: blown-out rim light, the long groove of his spine, a bottle of rye glowing between his ribs and his elbow like something he’d swallowed.

Best frame of the day. I didn’t delete it.

Boots on the stairs. Slow, heavy, unhurried, the tread of a man who had carried a lot of things up a lot of flights and saw no reason to rush this one.

Then the doorway was full.

I’d met Nate Bell once, nine years ago, at Gavin’s brother’s wedding. I remembered a big quiet guy in a rented tux holding a champagne flute like a live grenade, with a pretty wife on his arm and a face that said he’d rather be holding a nail gun. He’d been Dean Price’s best friend since they were fourteen, which meant he’d been part of the furniture in that house for the back half of Gavin’s childhood: the older kid who was always around, eating their cereal, fixing their mother’s porch steps.

The furniture had aged well.

He was six-three at least, and built on a different scale than the rest of us. Shoulders that had to angle a little to clear the frame, a chest like a door, thick dark hair going iron at the temples and a short beard shot through with silver. Canvas work jacket, flannel, a duffel bag hanging from one fist. Brown eyes that took in the room the way I’d take in a location, corners first, then the light.

They landed on the softboxes, the tripod, the glowing bottle, and me.

“Eli,” he said. “We met at Dean’s wedding.”

“You were holding a champagne flute like it was going to go off.”

One corner of his mouth moved. “Still don’t know what you do with those.”

“You drink them.”

“Tried that. Tasted like a wedding.”

He put out his hand. I took it, and I noticed it, because noticing hands is half of how I pay rent. Enormous. Dry and warm, callused across the pads, a white nick through one knuckle. When his sleeve rode up there was a scar on his left forearm, a long pale seam running through the dark hair from wrist to mid-arm, the kind of thing a table saw leaves behind as a warning. On his ring finger there was a band of skin a shade lighter than the rest.

Fifteen years, if I had the math right. It had left a mark like a watch strap.

He caught me looking and didn’t hide it. Just let go, slow, and flexed the hand once at his side.

“Truck’s on the street,” he said. “That okay till Monday?”

“Till Monday. After that the city tickets.”

“Noted.”

“There he is.” Gavin came back up the hall, still shirtless, wiping his palms on his jeans, and I watched Nate Bell’s eyes go to him and then go, very deliberately, to a point about six inches above his head. “Did you two do the thing? The handshake? Eli has a great handshake. Very firm. Lots of eye contact. It’s unsettling.”

“He’s fine,” Nate said.

“High praise.” Gavin grabbed him by the back of the neck and hauled him into a hug, the loud, slapping, full-body kind he gave everybody. Nate took it like a wall takes weather. One big hand came up and rested between Gavin’s bare shoulder blades for about a second and a half, then lifted away, fingers spread, as if the skin had been hotter than he expected.

I filed that. I didn’t know yet what drawer it went in.

“This guy,” Gavin told me, an arm still slung around those shoulders, having to reach up to do it, “taught me to drive stick. Taught me to shotgun a beer. Taught me to throw a punch.”

“Dean taught you to throw a punch,” Nate said.

“Dean taught me to take a punch. Different curriculum.” He let go. “Come on. Grand tour. It’s short.”

It was short. The second floor of the Price Building was one long apartment strung along a hallway: my studio in the front room where the light was, the kitchen behind it, then three bedrooms and a bathroom in a row like train compartments. High ceilings. Original floors that complained under Nate’s boots. Radiators hissing.

“Eli,” Gavin said, slapping doors as he went. “Bathroom. Me. And you.”

The spare room had a bed I’d made up that morning with clean sheets and a folded towel on the end, a dresser, a window onto the alley, and a treadmill.

Nate looked at the treadmill.

“That work?”

“It holds laundry like a champ,” Gavin said.

“I can move it up to the third floor,” I offered.

“Leave it.” Nate set his duffel on the bed. One bag. Four boxes in the hall. Two decades together and a whole house he’d built with his own hands, and what he’d kept fit in the bed of a pickup with room left over for the tools. “It’s a good room. Thank you.”

He said it to me, not to Gavin. Somehow he’d already worked out who’d put the towel there.

“Now the bad news,” Gavin said, and opened the bathroom door.

One sink. One toilet. One claw-foot tub with a shower ring and a curtain, and a showerhead that Gavin’s grandfather had installed for men of his grandfather’s generation.

Nate stepped in and stood under it. It pointed at his sternum.

“Huh,” he said.

“It’s about nipple height on you,” Gavin said cheerfully.

The tips of Nate’s ears went red. I watched it happen, a slow tide up from the beard. He was thirty-eight years old, he had presumably heard the word nipple before, and he was blushing at a bathroom fixture.

“I’ll crouch,” he said.

“House rules,” I said, because someone had to. “Hot water lasts eleven minutes. Gavin uses ten of them, usually around midnight, or three when he closes. Top shelf is mine, the middle’s his, I cleared the bottom for you. And the lock’s been broken since last winter, so we knock.”

“I can fix the lock.”

“People keep saying that.”

“I’m not people.” He rapped the wall beside the mirror with one knuckle, twice, head tilted like a doctor with a stethoscope. “Plaster’s letting go of the lath back here. You could hear a man think through that.”

“You can hear a man sneeze through that,” Gavin said. “We bless each other from three rooms away. It’s very intimate. You’ll get used to it.”

I looked at the wall. On the other side of it was my bed.

I’d been used to it for three years, and I wouldn’t have called it getting easier.

I made the chicken with the olives, because it was the dish I could do without thinking and I wanted my thinking free.

The kitchen was the one room in the apartment that was entirely mine. Knives on a magnetic strip in order of length. Spices alphabetized. A whiteboard by the fridge with a chore grid ruled in my handwriting, two columns, ELI and GAVIN, three years of dry-erase ghosts underneath. Before dinner I’d uncapped a marker and added a third. NATE. It looked strange up there. Too many letters for the space I’d left.

He ate like a man who’d been living on gas-station sandwiches. Not sloppy. Neat, steady, total. Two helpings, then a piece of bread dragged through what was left on the plate. Gavin talked through the whole meal, hands going, telling a story about a bachelorette party at Lowell’s and a bridesmaid who’d tried to tip him with a scratch-off ticket. Nate listened to him the way you’d sit near a fire.

“It’s good,” Nate said to me, when the plate was clean. “Haven’t had anybody cook for me since—” He stopped. Regrouped. “It’s real good.”

“There’s more.”

“I’ll hurt myself.”

“That’s what it’s for.”

That got the mouth-corner again. I was annoyed to find I’d wanted it.

Gavin’s phone buzzed its way across the table. He looked at the screen, winced, and propped it against the salt.

“Tess! You’re on speaker. Say hi to the room.”

“Hi, room.” Gavin’s sister, three states west, wind noise behind her. “Is that Nate? Is he there? Hi, Nate. Sorry about your marriage.”

“Thanks, Tess.”

“Carla okay?”

“Carla’s good. We’re good.”

“Great. Love that for you both. Gav, I’m not calling to be a bitch.”

“Nobody thought that.”

“You thought that. I can hear your face. I just need you to say the date back to me so I know it went in.”

Gavin’s grin stayed exactly where it was and went out behind the eyes. I knew that trick too. “September first.”

“September first. The buy-in on the practice is due in the fall, and I can’t do it while I own half of a building in Ohio that costs me money every month. If your venue’s open, the bank refinances, you buy me out, I throw you a party. If it’s not open—”

“We list it.”

“We list it. I’m sorry. I love you. I loved Pop. I’m not going to be forty with my whole life parked in his hardware store.”

“I know, Tessie.”

“Eli, make him write it on the whiteboard.”

“It’s on the whiteboard,” I said. It was. Top corner, in red, where I’d see it every time I opened the fridge.

“This is why you’re my favorite. Bye, room.”

The screen went dark. For a second there was just the radiator.

“Six months,” Gavin said lightly. “Plenty of time. Rome was built in, what.”

“Longer,” I said.

Nate had turned his beer bottle a quarter turn on the table. “What’s downstairs need?”

“Short version? Everything. Electrical. A bar. A stage. Bathrooms that aren’t a crime. Permits for all of the above, and a hearing in April I’m pretending isn’t happening.”

“Who’s your GC?”

“I’m looking at him.”

“Gav.”

“I’ll pay you. Eventually. In drinks and exposure.”

Nate breathed out through his nose, which I was beginning to understand was him laughing. “My closing was Tuesday. House is gone. I’ve got till about September to figure out where I live.” He shrugged, a small landslide. “Might as well be useful. I’ll look at it Monday.”

“I could kiss you,” Gavin said.

The bottle stopped turning.

It was nothing. It was what Gavin said to bar-backs who covered his shift and to me when I remembered to buy coffee filters. He was already up and stacking plates, already on to the next thing, and he didn’t see it land.

I saw it land.

House rule: I cook, he washes. He ran the tap hot, squirted in too much soap the way he always did, and lasted one plate before he’d soaked the front of his T-shirt and peeled it off over his head with a muttered fuck it. He dropped it on the counter and went back in up to the elbows, humming, hips knocking time against the cabinet.

I was wiping down the stove. Nate was still at the table, turned a little in his chair, the beer forgotten in his fist.

He was looking at Gavin’s back.

I want to be exact about this, since exactness is the only thing I’m good for. It wasn’t a leer. There was nothing sly in it. It was how you’d look at a sentence in a language you’d never studied and discover you could read it. His eyes went across the shoulders, down the channel of the spine, to the place where damp skin disappeared into denim, and stayed. His lips had parted. He didn’t seem to know that they had.

Then his thumb moved, on its own, and rubbed across the pale stripe on his ring finger. Back and forth, checking whether something was still there.

Something old and ugly sat up in my chest and bared its teeth.

I knew that look. I had invented that look. I’d been wearing it for twelve years and had it refined to an art: never longer than two seconds, never where he could see, never with my mouth open. And this man had walked in off the street with one duffel bag and was doing it in my kitchen, badly, in full light, like an amateur.

He felt me. People do. His head came around and his eyes hit mine, and for one long beat, with the tap running and Gavin humming and soap sliding down a wrist, neither of us pretended anything.

He looked caught. He looked, under that, completely lost.

I should have felt sorry for him. I’m not proud that what I felt was mine.

Nate set the bottle down very carefully. “I should turn in,” he said, to the table. “Long day.”

“Night, big man,” Gavin said over his shoulder, not turning. “Welcome home.”

The chair scraped. The floorboards took his weight down the hall. A door closed, quiet, the way a considerate person closes a door in a house that isn’t his.

Gavin flicked suds at me. “See? Told you you’d like him.”

“He’s fine,” I said.

Midnight. The pipes knocked twice in the wall behind my head, and the water came on.

I have told myself for three years that I didn’t put the bed on that wall on purpose. The room’s narrow. The window’s on the other side. There were sound practical reasons, and I’m a practical man.

I lay there in the dark with my hands flat on the sheet and listened to my best friend shower eighteen inches from my skull.

I knew the whole sequence by heart. The rattle of curtain rings. The low oh when the heat hit his shoulders. Then the humming, tuneless and happy, and under it the drumming, because he couldn’t stand still even wet: fingertips rapping out some pattern on the tile, quick doubles, a roll, a stop. The clack of the shampoo cap. A long quiet where the water changed pitch because he’d tipped his head back into it.

I was hard before the cap clacked. I always was. It was Pavlovian and pathetic, and at some point in my late twenties I’d stopped fighting it and started thinking of it as a tax.

I shoved the waistband of my shorts down and took myself in hand.

No finesse at first. Just a slow, tight pull from root to head and the relief of it, my hips lifting off the mattress, my breath going out through my teeth. I was already slick at the tip. I dragged my thumb through it and smeared it down the shaft and did it again, slower, because the water had eleven minutes in it and I’d learned to make them last.

Behind the wall he’d be soaping up now. I’d had twelve years to assemble this from parts — beach trips, locker rooms, a thousand shirtless mornings — and I could build him in the dark better than I could build a lighting setup. Suds sliding through the hair on his chest. Water running off that little steel ring. His hand moving down the flat of his stomach, lazy, lower, wrapping around a cock I had seen exactly three times by accident and thought about on roughly every day since: thick, heavy even soft, a shade darker than the rest of him.

In my head the door didn’t lock. That part was true. In my head I just opened it.

He never looked surprised. He’d shove the curtain back and say took you long enough, E, and I’d climb in with my clothes on and go to my knees in two inches of water. My fist tightened. I could feel the porcelain under my kneecaps and his fingers threading into my hair. I’d get my mouth on him and he’d be loud, he was loud about everything, he’d swear and laugh and tell me how good it was. Fuck, look at you. You could’ve been doing that for twelve years. He’d swell against my tongue. I’d take him as deep as I could and hold him there, hot water pounding my shoulders, his thighs shaking under my palms.

I was stroking fast now, twisting on the upstroke, my other hand down between my legs cupping my balls. Sweat at my hairline. The bedframe ticked against the wall and I planted my heel on the mattress to stop it. On the other side Gavin was drumming again. I fucked my fist to his rhythm and bit the inside of my cheek.

That’s when the hands showed up.

Not mine. Not Gavin’s. A third pair, sliding around his waist from behind. Huge, weathered, callused. A white nick through one knuckle. A pale seam of scar running up the left forearm through dark, wet hair. A stripe of lighter skin on one finger where a ring had been.

I stopped breathing.

No. I pushed it out. I rebuilt the shot: Gavin, tile, steam, me.

The hands came back. They spread across Gavin’s stomach, the fingers so long they nearly met, and pulled him flush against all that chest. A silver-shot beard dragged up the side of his neck. Gavin’s head dropped back onto a shoulder that was higher than his own, and the noise I imagined him making was one I’d never once heard out of him, cracked and helpless, the sound of a man who looks after everybody finally getting held up.

And one of those hands let go of him and came down, slow, and closed around the back of my neck.

Just held it. Heavy. Warm. Thumb pressing behind my ear. The way you’d steady something you didn’t want to drop.

That’s it, said a low voice that used six words where other people used twenty. Take him. All the way.

My cock jerked in my grip so hard it hurt.

I didn’t want this. I had spent the entire evening hating the man for looking at what was mine, and now he was in my head with his enormous scarred hands and I was leaking all over my own knuckles, fucking up into my fist with my teeth sunk into my lip, picturing him pushing my mouth down onto Gavin’s cock while Gavin moaned against his throat. Picturing looking up. Picturing those brown eyes looking down at me, not lost at all.

The orgasm came up from the soles of my feet. I got my free hand over my mouth just in time and came in long, wrenching pulses across my stomach and chest, hips off the bed, every muscle locked, silent except for the air whistling through my nose. It went on and on. It wrung me out. When it finally let go I dropped back to the mattress with stars popping behind my eyelids and come cooling in the hollow of my throat.

The water shut off.

Curtain rings. A towel snapping. Bare feet in the hall, and then two knuckles on my door, tap-tap, the same as every night for three years.

“Night, E.”

I took my hand off my mouth. “Night.”

His door closed. And then, farther down the hall, I heard the other one: a bedspring taking a great deal of weight, a long breath let out in the dark, and a wall that kept nothing from anybody.

I lay there sticky and wide awake, staring at the ceiling, as angry as I had ever been in my life.

Twelve years I’d lasted, wanting one man through eighteen inches of plaster.

I wasn’t going to make it a week wanting two.

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

Buy Two’s Company, Three’s Coming

🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?

Item One — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

The Sunday after the anniversary. There are three lines on Eli’s printed agenda, Nate is wearing the brown sport coat, and there are three stainless washers in his shirt pocket. Then Eli tables the water heater and asks for something he has never once allowed on his kitchen table, and Gavin finally gets the middle.

Get the Bonus Chapter →