The Roommate's Weakness

*Rent goes up $150 starting June. Pay or vacate. Need answer by Monday.* Rain hammers the coffee shop's front window like someone trying to break in. Jasper Lee presses his phone flat against the sticky tabletop and watches the screen light up with his landlord's name for the fourth time in twenty minutes. He lets it ring until the phone goes still, then dark. Twelve days. Twelve days to find an extra hundred and fifty dollars he does not have, or twelve days to find a place he cannot afford either. He sets the phone down, picks up his cold Americano and drinks it anyway. Bitter and thin, the way he likes it. The advertisement he almost scrolls past is for a room in a house owned by a carpenter who does not smile in the photograph and who has written the listing like a set of specifications. Caleb has a workshop, a set of rules, and no interest whatsoever in a housemate who talks in the mornings. Maya thinks it is a trap Jasper built himself. Maya is on the phone about it before the first box is unpacked, and Maya has a point, because the last man Jasper defended lied to him for six months and Jasper kept making excuses right up until he could not. What follows: an advertisement almost scrolled past, a door sworn shut, a light he did not ask to have fixed, a friend who knows too much, a sink that brings two people into the same small space, an ex who still has his number, a lift he did not ask for, and a project that takes them both longer than either of them planned. *I'm a carpenter. I work with plans.* I kissed him, slow and deep, and when I pulled back I picked up the wildflowers. Contemporary MM romance, a rent increase with a Monday deadline, a quiet carpenter with a house and a rule list, a friend who says the hard thing first, explicit scenes, and a guaranteed happy ending.