Welcome to Hartwell

Come on up on the porch. Mind the step.

Let me introduce myself, since you’re going to be spending some time here. I’m Hartwell. Not a man. There was a Hartwell once, some dead nobody the city quit bragging about a hundred years back, and they hung his name on me and moved on. I’m Hartwell the street. Four and a half stubborn blocks of southwest Atlanta, down below the interstate where the map goes lazy and the money mostly forgets to turn.

I came up Black and broke. Working folks, church on Sunday, nobody’s idea of an investment. Then somewhere around ’89, ’90 the gays and the lesbians found me, on account of the rent being a joke and a body having to live somewhere, and I woke up one morning one of the queerer addresses in the whole city. Not the fancy kind. Let Midtown keep its valets and its eight-dollar coffee and its men who have never once lain awake over a light bill. I’m the affordable one. The last one standing, near about, and I am proud of it. You can still be gay and broke on me, and Lord knows that is getting rare in this town.

Now here is what you learn about a place packed this close, with the walls this thin and the fences this low. Things happen. Doors stay unlocked. People come and go and come back again, and more than a few go home to somebody they did not start the evening with. I don’t judge it, and I don’t keep it quiet either. I am, top to bottom, one big open house.

The men who live on me are grown. Funny, stubborn, filthy-minded, scared of the same things everybody’s scared of, and doing their level best to love each other out loud without lying about what they need. That is the whole of what happens in these books. No fade to black. No tidy people who learn a lesson. Just my people, all the way in, finding out the hard way that the truth is the only thing that ever holds.

So pull up a chair. Every book on me is one couple’s turn on the block.

Book One is Sam and Marcus, twenty years married and about to find out what honest really costs. It’s called Open House, and it’s coming soon.

Book Two is Fixer Upper, coming in the fall of 2026, and it is going to be a whole thing. I’ll tell you more when it’s closer. I always do.

Stay as long as you like. And if you want me to holler the minute there’s something new going on down here, get on the list. I don’t say a word unless it’s worth saying.

Come on in.

I’m Hartwell. Mind the step.

Open House

An Open-Marriage M/M Romance

Twenty years married, and Sam and Marcus have the kind of love the whole neighborhood points to. Sam’s the schoolteacher who loses his shoes while he’s wearing them. Marcus is the lawyer who can find anything in the house with his eyes shut. They finish each other’s sentences, split the work of one functional adult between them, and mean every I-love-you. The bedroom just went quiet somewhere along the way. And quiet, it turns out, is a thing a man can learn to drive across town to fix.

What Sam doesn’t know is that Marcus has been handing a stranger the hunger he never brings home. What Marcus doesn’t know is that Sam’s been doing the exact same thing, on their own good couch, most mornings before the first school bell. It all comes down on one ordinary Friday, and the blowup that should end a marriage becomes the truest conversation they’ve had in years. They still want each other. They never stopped. They just forgot that the one person they were allowed to ask for anything was the one they married. So they make a deal nobody on the block sees coming. They don’t close the door. They open it.

What follows is filthy, funny, tender, and wide open: two grown men rewriting the rules of their marriage in real time, and finding out the hard way that the danger was never the other men in the bed. It was forgetting how to reach for each other in the middle of all that plenty.

Open House is a high-heat, unapologetically explicit contemporary romance about wanting your husband and a stranger both, about a working-class, historically Black and gay corner of southwest Atlanta that takes care of its own, and about the kind of happily-ever-after you only reach by telling the whole truth first.

Welcome to Hartwell. Come on in. The marriage is open.

Coming soon.

Tropes

  • Established / long-married couple

  • Interracial (Black/white)

  • Mature 40-something leads

  • Both partners cheating, caught, mutual confession

  • Second chance within the marriage

  • Opening the marriage / ethical non-monogamy (stays open)

  • Compersion

  • “The grass was home all along”

  • Emotional-infidelity conflict

  • Hurt/comfort

  • Angry-sex reconciliation

  • Aftercare

  • Dominance/submission

  • Praise kink

  • Size kink

  • Degradation kink

  • Versatile / switch / power exchange / role reversal

  • Found-family queer neighborhood

  • Anonymous sex / cruising / bathhouse

  • Fan meets the porn star

  • Exhibitionism awakening

  • Lawyer-saves-the-block / anti-gentrification subplot

  • Personified-narrator framing device

  • Domestic slice-of-life

Content warnings

Open House is an explicit, high-heat MM romance with a non-monogamous happily-ever-after. Here are the full content notes, so you know exactly what you’re walking into.

Relationship / structure

  • Infidelity: both spouses secretly cheat before the marriage opens; an affair is discovered on the page

  • Opens into a consensual open marriage / ethical non-monogamy, and it stays open (not a monogamous HEA)

  • On-page sex with multiple outside partners; anonymous app hookups; a bathhouse; cruising

  • Some outside partners are closeted married men cheating on their wives (one has an infant at home)

  • Emotional-infidelity anxiety (nearly catching feelings for a metamour); a serious marital fight and near-breakup

Sex (explicit, on the page)

  • Frequent, graphic sex throughout; bareback / condomless is the norm, with internal ejaculation (“creampie”) and breeding talk

  • Anal; oral; deep-throating, throat-use and gagging; rimming (“eating ass”); fingering; handjobs; frotting

  • Cum play: cum as lube, cum-eating, licking a partner clean, cum on the body/face, a cum-kiss; cleaning a partner fresh from another man

  • Group sex / threesome / spit-roasting; sex furniture (sling, bench, St. Andrew’s cross, swinging bed)

  • A filmed professional pornography scene; sexting / explicit photos

  • Public and semi-public sex; voyeurism and exhibitionism (a being-watched / filmed kink)

  • Musk / unwashed-body kink; taste and smell of stale urine on an unwashed partner (not full watersports); tasting a wife’s fluids on a partner (het residue)

  • Multiple orgasms; overstimulation; orgasm denial / edging; a hands-free orgasm

Kink / power

  • Dominance and submission; rough sex; manhandling, pinning, hair-pulling, biting, light spanking

  • Consensual degradation and humiliation with harsh name-calling (“whore,” “hole,” “nothing,” “cockless”); emasculation and cuckold-adjacent talk

  • Praise kink; size kink; possessive / claiming talk; heavy dirty talk

  • All rough and kink play is between consenting adults, shown with aftercare and check-ins

  • (Not present: bondage, impact play with implements, breath play / choking, formal BDSM protocol)

Themes some readers may want flagged

  • Sex work / pornography and the real career risk it poses to a public-school teacher

  • Racism and gentrification: a historically Black neighborhood targeted by white newcomers via code enforcement and taxes; racial fetishization of a Black character (explicitly refused on the page)

  • Grief and death (a spouse; a parent); elder financial exploitation by adult children (averted)

  • Religion / Black church; family pressure; a not-fully-accepting in-law

  • Alcohol use throughout; a brief mention of teen vaping

  • Mid-life bodies and aging (handled body-positive)

Fixer Upper

A Younger-Dom, Older-Sub M/M Romance

The grandest house on Hartwell has stood dark for nineteen years, and the man who finally bought it is the rudest, best-looking bastard on the block.

Everaldo Vieira has money, a chip on his shoulder the size of the derelict landmark he just paid cash for, and no interest whatsoever in being liked. He wants the old Pace house saved. He wants it done his way. And he will complain about every last nail until he gets it.

Simon Yoo is the structural engineer sent to save the place: twenty-four, patient as a saint, with the whole rest of his career riding on one impossible client. Managing a difficult man is the job. Nobody warned him the difficult man would be gorgeous, or that underneath all that granite was something that turned up at his door with a bottle of whiskey and a bad excuse on the worst night of his year.

One old house. One year of dust and permits and a whole nosy street watching. One grumpy Brazilian and one sunshine engineer who are absolutely, definitely not going to fall for each other.

They are going to fall for each other.

Fixer Upper is a high-heat, age-gap, grumpy-sunshine romance.

Coming to Hartwell in autumn 2026.

Tropes

  • Grumpy / sunshine

  • Age gap (forty and twenty-four)

  • Enemies to lovers

  • Forced proximity (a whole year on one house)

  • Workplace, contractor and difficult client

  • The grump who softens for exactly one person

  • Found family, the whole nosy block

  • Interracial romance (Afro-Brazilian and Korean American)

  • Renovation / fixer-upper romance

  • Touch-him-and-thaw, hurt-comfort

  • Dominance and submission (a Dom in bed, a caretaker after)

  • Dual POV, high heat, guaranteed HEA

Content warnings

The book is still being written, so this is the planned list. It gets locked against the finished pages.

  • Explicit sexual content, on the page

  • Dominance / submission and rough play (always with aftercare)

  • Bareback sex (the characters are on PrEP)

  • Grief and pet death (a cat)

  • Gentrification and displacement; elderly neighbors at risk of losing a longtime home

  • Racism and xenophobia; an immigrant treated as an outsider; the house’s history touches medical segregation and slavery

  • Class disparity and a career-on-the-line power imbalance

  • A verbally abrasive love interest (the “grumpy” is real before it turns sweet)