A Novel of Love & Two Wheels
Amsterdam. A bikeshop. Three hearts that found each other on the canal paths.
Be the First to Read →The Book
Nestled between a crooked bakery and a canal that smells faintly of coffee and rain, Fender's Fix & Frame is the kind of bikeshop that people drive past but never truly see — until something inside them catches.
A Bicycle Built for You is a collection of vignettes and romances that trace the tangled, joyful, aching threads of queer love in the city of canals. At the center is Fender, the shy, brilliant bikeshop owner whose hands know the language of chains and spokes better than words — until the people rolling into their shop teach them otherwise.
Through sun-drenched afternoons and rain-lashed canal walks, through polyamorous entanglements and tender confessions whispered over cup of coffee at the counter, this book is a love letter to the kind of family you build — the kind that comes in threes, fours, and every shape in between.
Inside the Book
Fender & the first one who stayed
The bell above the shop door rings for the first time, and everything shifts. A stranger walks in with a broken chain and a smile that doesn't match their guarded eyes. Fender doesn't know it yet, but this is the beginning of the end of their solitude.
Jim Rob — the elder who knew first
Jim Rob has been riding through this city since before it was kind, and they carry that history like a well-worn saddle — comfortable, scarred, deeply loved. They come to the shop for a tune-up and leave with a story that changes everything Fender thought they knew about love.
The trio's first evening together
Canal water laps at brick. Three bicycles lean against a bridge. And in the amber light of a Dutch summer evening, the shape of something impossible starts to look like something beautiful.
When one person's heart affects all
A missed connection. A rainstorm. A phone call that arrives at the wrong time and the right moment. Because in a love like theirs — wide and braided like a good chain — every gear matters.
Fender's hands, Fender's heart
Every bike Fender builds is a piece of their soul welded to steel. But when someone asks them to build something that doesn't exist yet — a frame for a life they haven't dared imagine — the wrench feels heavy in their hand.
Learning to ride together
"On my count," they say. But there is no count that prepares you for the moment you realize you're no longer pedaling alone — and you never want to be.
When fear shifts to the wrong gear
Not every love story is smooth. Sometimes you slip. Sometimes you jump the chain at the worst possible moment. The question is whether you stop riding — or whether you kneel in the dirt together and fix it.
Where the path ends and begins
The final vignette. The shop is quiet. The canal glints. And Fender understands, at last, that a bicycle built for one was never the point — it was always the invitation.
The People
The bikeshop owner
Brilliant hands, quiet heart. Builds bikes like other people write love letters — with everything they've been too afraid to say out loud.
The elder queer
Has loved and lost and loved again in this city since the seventies. Their wisdom is a gift; their stubbornness, a force of nature.
The one who rode in with a broken heart
Arrives with a cracked frame and a guarded smile. Turns out they were carrying both — and neither was as broken as they seemed.
The canal-side bookshop owner
Reads poetry aloud to anyone who'll listen. Falls in love the way Amsterdam falls to tourists — slowly, inevitably, and all at once.
A Taste
The bell above the door didn't just ring — it sang, the way only old things can, with a voice full of every person who walked through it before.— Ring My Bell
Jim Rob lit a cigarette with the certainty of someone who had earned the right to take up space in a world that had tried, repeatedly, to make them smaller.— Rim Job
Three people on three bikes, each one a different color, each one a different story, all of them riding toward the same bridge at the same golden hour — and Fender thought, impossibly, that this was what home felt like.— Spoke by Night
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