Driftwood (24 page)

Epilogue

Tom walked on the edge of the sea, which had restored the world to him. He was working full-time in the Penzance casualty department now, and had less opportunity to wander the lonely Porth beach with Belle, but the journey home was shorter, only ten minutes or so, in the replacement Land Rover he had bought when his insurance company finally decided he had not flipped his last one off the road on purpose and paid up.

Wrestling a slimy stick from Belle's jaws so that he could throw it again, Tom cast an amused look up to the car park where the vehicle was parked. She was similar in all respects to the last, except that, to Flynn's bewilderment, he had chosen an older model still. Well, where was the point in knocking the crap out of new models on these roads, he had explained to him, and he had spent the rest of the payout on a custom-built rack for the Mazda to carry Flynn's surfboard.

Ten minutes home, to the house on the beachfront he shared with Flynn. Neither of them had lost their taste for world's-edge living, but this one was built on firm foundations, and although it stood in stern isolation near the dunes, was within sight and a short drive of friends. Of Victor Travers, whose business was once again Porth's main employer but did not keep Vic from his duties as volunteer helmsman on the lifeboat; of Florrie's frequent dinner invitations, to which Chris Poldue and Gavin Wilkes would turn up too, shy and formal with each other even in this friendly company, but together at least.

Tom came to a halt on the sand. A familiar ragged-edged thump was beginning on the edge of the wind, more a vibration than a sound, disturbing his eardrums and the marrow of his bones. He looked up, instinctively reaching for Belle. He would never get used to it, he knew. Never be able to see the Hawke Lake SAR chopper sweeping seaward without a pain like ice in his heart. All the fears in Tom's life now were rational and quite real. Flynn, restored to himself, was a force of nature, a fire that burned so brightly Tom could scarcely look. No storm daunted him, no winter night so bitter that he would not haul himself reluctantly out of Tom's arms to answer the call.

No. The cliffs here were steep and had bounced back the sound of the rotors from their grey flanks—Flynn was coming home. The Sea King appeared on the horizon, and he braced up, grinning, waving wildly. It was Flynn's great joy in life to buzz him if he saw him on the beach, to swing the great roaring craft as low as he dared over his head. Tom set off at a run for the car park, Belle bounding in silent delight at his heels. The roar of the engines got into Tom's blood. He and Flynn would race to intercept one another, at a mission's end, to be the first one home, the one who got to tear open the door for the other's arrival and tackle him onto the sofa, the carpet, the stairs, sometimes even the bed if they could wait.

Great breakers crashed on the Porth Bay shore. The only non-living thing Tom would have salvaged from the watchtower was the sea-glass wave. Their home had its other treasures now, but by tacit agreement they had not replaced it—it was a phenomenon that had belonged to its time. All things were so, Tom knew, and he no longer tried to hold on. All things could fall and be lost: David's cairn, a handful of quartz in an avalanche, scattered, unforgotten. Flynn was the tide of Tom's life now, the wave that surrounded him, that surged beneath him bringing ecstasy, that delivered him safely to shore. On lifeboat nights, search-and-rescue nights, nights of storm, when he was off duty, Tom went to the harbourside RNLI station and helped Florence make tea, talked quietly to the others waiting there.

You made the best of every second you could spend with them, and then…you let them fly.

About the Author

Harper Fox has spent most of her adult life laying siege to the ice castle of British paper publishing, and has only recently stumbled out into the warmth and light of the online world. She was delighted (and shocked) to have her first M/M submission accepted by Samhain.

Harper loves to weave M/M romances against the backcloth of her favourite locations in Britain, some of them picturesque, others picturesquely horrible. She is currently working on an archaeological mystery set in Salisbury, and plans as her next project a story of warrior monks battling it out with Viking raiders on the Northumbrian coast. She likes to think that she brings the discipline and elegance of her long ice-castle apprenticeship to her M/M stories. Her theory is that all that suffering can't have been for nothing. Her novels and novellas are powerfully sensual, with a dynamic of strongly developed characters finding love and a forever future—after the appropriate degree of turmoil. She loves to try and show the romance implicit in everyday life, but she writes a sharp action scene too, and can never resist a good helicopter.

Harper lives with her Significant Other in beautiful rural Northumberland, where she receives broadband when there are no trees on the cable. During this launch period of her writing career, she is also holding down a nine-to-five as a television subtitler. Many ideas for stories come to her during the hallucinations caused by lack of sleep. When not writing, she enjoys worrying about it, and hoping she will soon start again.

Damn it, a man shouldn't always have to be afraid…

Shining in the Sun

© 2010 Alex Beecroft

Alec Goodchilde has everything a man could want—except the freedom to be himself. Once a year, he motors down to an exclusive yacht club on the Cornish coast and takes the summer off from the trap that is his life.

When his car breaks down, leaving him stranded on the beach, he's transfixed by the sight of a surfer dancing on the waves. The man is summer made flesh. Freedom wrapped up in one lithe package, dripping wet from the sea.

Once a year, Darren Stokes takes a break from his life of grinding overwork and appalling relatives, financing his holiday by picking up the first rich man to show an interest. This year, though, he's cautious—last summer's meal ticket turned out to be more pain than pleasure.

Even though Alex is so deep in the closet he doesn't even admit he's gay, Darren finds himself falling hard—until their idyllic night together is shattered by the blinding light of reality…

Warning: One explicit m/m sex scene and a great deal of swearing.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Shining in the Sun:

“You must think I'm mad.”

Well, yeah.
Darren took a step back, gauged the best angle to run.
But I kind of hoped you were harmless with it.
“Why?”

“‘Don't go past, I think I'll die'?” Alec's laugh too had expanded, grown warm and wry. It sounded genuine, honest, likeable. But then, so had Max's honey-coated charm. “Dear God. It was a bit…stalkerish, wasn't it? I'm not like that.” He turned away from the sea as it retreated before them both in its long, gentle afternoon withdrawal. His smile was that sweet, closed-lipped affair, all warm eyes and head-tilt that Darren felt had to be trained in. Nothing that heart-stopping could have come about without years of practice, surely?

“I'm not
normally
like that,” Alec corrected himself. “It's the combination—it's you and the summer. They made me brave. For a moment, at least.”

The hairs stood up on Darren's arms, and the skin down his spine prickled, as it did when he felt the perfect wave build beneath him and knew it was now or never to catch it. Make the wrong move and it would drill him into the ocean bed, gone for good.
What the…?
“Yeah.” He tried to swallow and couldn't quite manage it. “It does that to me too. The summer, I mean. You gotta ride the wave while it's there, because the rest of the year's gonna be shit no matter what.”

Alec's mouth fell slightly, and if it was possible the intensity of his gaze picked up, blue laser bright. “Oh God, you too? It's as though this is the only month I'm alive. I spend all the rest of the year being what other people want me to be. I'm not normally like this, because this is really me.” He took a step forward, hand out.

Darren's heart drummed against his throat. The crawling sensation up his back intensified as all over his body his skin decided it had to be awake for this. He could feel it building like static electricity, streaming off him into the sky. Clouds should be boiling right now. If he let that outstretched hand touch him, lightning would follow the circuit, arcing down through them both, coring him out and leaving him gutted and smouldering, changed beyond all recognition.

He flinched away, dodged round the back of the board. “Hell, yeah. We must've been separated at birth, 'cause I know exactly what you mean.”

Alec took his hand back, looked at the palm and rubbed it slowly across the hollow of his hip. The moment passed, and in the undertow Darren cursed himself for missing it. Before last year he would have flung himself recklessly into that wave. Not any longer. “Come over here. Are you right-handed or left?”

The sun, low on the horizon, shone orange as a streetlamp as he positioned Alec's feet on the board. Alec's hand braced on his shoulder as he felt the cling of the wax and the tilt of the board beneath him, not at all balanced on its three stubby fins. “You have to…get…”

Darren pulled ankles farther apart, pushed down on corded thighs in lieu of explanations, manhandling Alec into position. The threat of lightning crackled in his finger ends, his face so close to Alec's thigh he could feel the heat of it, welcome now that the day's warmth was draining away. He ducked his head and pressed his cheek to the soft cotton shorts. Waited for the hand on his head, the low-voiced, anxious command to “suck me”.

It didn't come. Alec wobbled and laughed, spread out his arms like a child pretending to fly, and for a long poised moment, muscles working beneath Darren's exploring fingers, he was balanced on the nose and a single fin. “Shit!” said Darren, tension wiped out of him by admiration. “You know you might just be okay.”

After that performance he had no hesitation over getting the board in the water and Alec with it. He zipped his wetsuit closed once more as insulation against more than cold and pushed out to waist height. Swell tugged and nudged him. The lips of the waves curled over, all golden and crinkly as toffee paper. Above, a dozen seagulls flamed like phoenixes in sunset's fire. Alec yelped and hopped. “Oh, oh God, you didn't tell me it was this cold.”

Darren laughed, forgetting money and tricks and broken bones. He shoved Alec in the chest while he hopped and watched him go over in a flume of flying topaz spray. Alec emerged with his well-cut hair looking thick and slick as an otter's pelt, the new T-shirt clinging to cold-peaked nipples, and a sputtering laugh that hovered somewhere between play and accusation. He scrambled, streaming, to his feet and launched himself at Darren in a rugby tackle that took Darren's knees out from beneath him.

The sky streaked overhead—a brief blurred image of cliffs and cloth of gold—and the sea came up to meet him. Grey underwater light, lances of sunset glitter through the ripples, and that first breathtaking chill of his dry wetsuit soaking up water. Then he emerged to find Alec laughing in glee and—bless the man—holding on to the board so it wouldn't float away.

This laugh suited the new, private Alec, whose existence he'd only just begun to suspect—unaffected, unashamed. Darren liked it. Lunging back he got an armful of Alec's narrow waist, his head jammed up against Alec's breastbone. They went tumbling together, Alec's heartbeat racing beneath his ear like the throb and hiss of the sea. Arms about him and long entangling legs between his. They wrestled, slippery in the surf, tumbling and laughing, breathing in the gold and flames of the sunset.

He let Alec win, lay under him, surrendered, while the froth of ripples tickled up him and teased his hair. Moving his hands he placed them carefully on Alec's back. It seemed a moment for care, a moment suspended between two futures. The body above his was warm. Goose bumps stood out under his fingertips, but beneath the sea-chilled surface the core of Alec's heat welled out in a delicious tide over his belly and groin. Closing his eyes, he waited for the expected kiss. And waited again. Alec's interest wilted against his hip. Looking up, puzzled, Darren smiled. “You got me.”

“But what am I to do with you now?” Alec rolled off, sat hugging his knees, the leash of the board still in one hand. He watched the waves as though they worried him.

“You really don't know?” Darren scrambled up onto his knees, leaned over and took the leash out of Alec's hand. The fingers opened reluctantly, as if Alec clung to more than a board. What was going on here?

Sun, deep red as a flaring ember, touched the sea. He expected to hear the thunderous hiss and boil as it quenched itself, but only a chill, wilderness-scented wind came from it. Sand hollowed beneath his knees. What
was
going on? Could it really be that Alec didn't know the score? They both had the same board but were trying to play different games?

“I think I've said before that I'm not really like this.” The goose bumps Darren had read like Braille beneath his fingers now stood out visible on the smooth white skin of Alec's biceps, swept down the length of his arm. Silver-steel droplets of water splashed off the ends of his hair, darkening his T-shirt as fast as it dried. Closer to the town a ghost of sunlight still toasted determined sunbathers, but here beneath the shaggy brown cliffs, night came early.

Rising, Darren pulled at Alec's arm, hauled him to his feet. “C'mon, it's getting too cold. How about we get some tea, and you can tell me what you're really like.”

Watch that first step. It could turn your life upside down.

Life, Over Easy

© 2010 K.A. Mitchell

Fragments, Book 1

Until a fall ended his Olympic diving career, John Andrews lived for the seconds he spent in the air. Now he's adrift on a college campus, grounded by paralyzing vertigo and double vision. Worse, he sees shimmering colors over everyone's heads.