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RELEASE DAY – “Nine-Tenths”

RELEASE DAY – “Nine-Tenths”

It’s here! It’s finally here!

The book is available exclusively on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited for the summer. And then on September 30th 2025, I will be releasing the book in paperback and every other ebook format. Watch for more announcements about pre-orders in the next few months.

🐉Read the First Three Chapters for free

Read on Kindle

💙Read the Reviews Colin Levesque is at loose ends. He’s finished university, but has no career; he adores romance novels, but he’s crap at relationships; and his prickliness is a detriment at the cafe where he’s making ends meet. He also has a crush on his regular Dav, a homo draconis who comes in every morning to read his newspaper, sip his double-strong coffee, and stare longingly at Colin in return. So it figures that the day Colin gets up the courage to do something about the sexual tension simmering between them, he also learns that Dav has an embarrassing habit of hiccupping fire when he’s nervous. Which, in this case, destroys the fancy custom-made bean roaster. When Dav volunteers to take over the coffee roasting with his firebreath, being squished together in the hot, cramped kitchen leads to even hotter kisses. Everything’s finally happening for Colin—-until people start claiming the dragon-roasted coffee has cured their genetic ailments. As their budding relationship struggles under the scrutiny of scientists and media, the hype around the coffee leads the lovers to be inducted into a centuries-old conspiracy: dragon-roasted food has always healed humans. And the most powerful draconic nobles have been withholding this symbiotic advantage to keep themselves on top. Colin and Dav are determined to expose the truth, but if they’re not careful, their objections could goad power-mad monarchs into destroying everything. Including each other.

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JM FreyRELEASE DAY – “Nine-Tenths”
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Time and Tide: Book Preview

Chapter One: In Which Sam Falls

“If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”
— Jane Austen,
Northanger Abbey

 

Dahlia got out of the taxi without a suitcase.

I knew we were on the rocks. I’m not that emotionally constipated. But this trip was supposed to fix things. To show Dahl how freeing it could be to hold hands in public, how nice it could be to cuddle as we watched the sun set over the Sagrada Familia, and how romantic it could be to kiss in dark corners of cheap Spanish tapas restos. To give her the chance to get comfortable with being out. More importantly, to being out with me, before she told her mother.

“The fuck?” was all I said, standing outside Pearson International Airport like the victim of a TV prank show. That had to be the reason Dahl only had a purse. Because the alternative was…

She wouldn’t, I thought. But it was more like a prayer. To whom, I don’t know. Virginia Woolf, maybe. Marsha P. Johnston, definitely. Sheela Lambert, of course.

Dahlia wasn’t dressed to travel, either. She wore a cute knit dress with leggings, despite the warm October day, with those strappy  shoes I liked. The ones with the impractical heel and the ribbons that crisscrossed over her dusky ankles. The ones I liked to undo with my teeth.

The absolute bitch.

I was dressed for the air-conditioned plane, the most perfect stereotype of a bi girl imaginable—cuffed jeans, wavy bob, button-up collared shirt patterned with oranges and teal feathers, denim jacket with enamel pin-encrusted lapels. I was wearing a soft, purple Basque hat, because Barcelona. I’d bought Dahlia a matching matcha-green one as a surprise.

She’s really doing this to me. Shame prickled hot along my nape.

From her purse, Dahlia withdrew a wrapped gift.

It was book-shaped, wrapped in white-and-pink gingham fabric and held together with a sweet blue ribbon, because Dahlia didn’t believe in single-use papers.

I’d told her I have trouble sleeping on planes. That I usually read. She’d bought me a book. It was terribly thoughtful.

A peace offering. Or a desperate plea to absolve her cowardice.

I wanted neither.

Instead I crossed my arms over my backpack straps and scowled.

“I can’t do it,” she said.

“Clearly. What am I supposed to do about the hotels?”

“I won’t cancel the reservations that are on my card. Just pay me back when you can.”

“Are you kidding me? Dahl, we’re doing this for you.”

She rolled her eyes. “For you, Sam.”

It felt like a punch to the gut. It drove the air out of my body the same way. “I— wha— no… Dhal.

Dahlia’s dark hair billowed in the stinking breeze of car and airplane exhaust, with notes of rotting coffee and melting gum on the sun-warmed Toronto concrete. If I put my nose against it, I knew her hair would smell of strawberries-and-matcha shampoo.

I wanted to dig my fingers into it, to kiss her, beg her, tell her that it’s not too late. She could get back in the cab, go get her suitcase. I could go inside, pay to switch our tickets to a later flight. We could make it work. It had to work. Or what had two years of sneaking around, lying and hiding, been for?

“I know you’ll be happier if you just—”

“You’ll be happier, you mean!” She stomped her pretty little foot, adorably petulant.

“That’s not fair.”

This isn’t fair. This is about you dragging me from the closet whether I’m ready or not.”

“Baby—”

Her dark cheeks flushed an ugly mottled red, nothing at all like the sweet blush she got when I laid her back against my pillows and teased my hand up her frilly skirts. “Just because you knew exactly who you were since fourth grade, just because your culture and your family don’t care, doesn’t mean—”

“Dahlia, you know my folks love you too, you can—”

“I’m not going,” Dahlia said, like she’d been rehearsing it in the cab the whole way to the airport, “just so you can live your fantasy of playing house.”

“Hey, fuck you,” I sneered.

“And that’s my cue.” She jiggled the book, where it still hung in the air between us. “You’re going to miss your flight.”

“Yeah,” I snapped back. “Wouldn’t want that. How terrible, to miss going to Barcelona with my girlfriend for her dream vacation.”

“Hey, fuck you,” she riposted, but there was no heat in it. “You’re the one who wanted to drink all the wine.”

“Don’t need you to do that.” I laughed flatly, throwing my arms wide. “Don’t need you to do any of it, do I? Maybe I’ll find some girls there to kiss instead of you. Or boys, I’m not picky.”

“Christ, can’t you have one conversation without it being about how obnoxiously bi you are?”

“Not when there are still people terrified to be out. Oh, wait, hey look.” It was cruel, but I cut a gesture directly at her.

Her face flickered with hurt. The tiniest dart of regret stung me. “Oh, now we’re doing the thing where you have to get the last word. Awesome.”

I clamped my mouth shut, jutting out my chin spitefully.

She waggled the book again.

I did not reach for it.

“Just take the goddamn book, Sam!” It wasn’t the volume at which she yelled, but the tears suddenly spilling over her lashes in rivulets of mascara that shocked me into finally reaching for it.

The second it was in my hands, Dahlia turned on her heel and marched down the curb to the taxi rank. She was gone before I had the chance to call after her.

My phone pinged.

Fishing it from the inner pocket of my jacket, I thumbed it on. Beside the text messages from my mother admonishing me to remember my passport, and my father offering up an amusing fact about the statistical safety of air travel, there was just one from Dahlia: I’m sorry.

 

#

 

“No rush,” the counter agent said with the kind of saccharine patience that meant the opposite.

“Sorry.” I bent double to dig through my backpack for the beat-up leather travel folder that was a hand-me-down from my mother.

I could have sworn I put it in last. Or maybe I put it in first, so I wouldn’t forget it?

My headphone wires tangled with the velcro strap of my sandals. I didn’t even remember putting my headphones in that pocket. I should have invested in those packing cubes that Dahlia was obsessed with, it would have—stop it. At the very top of the bag was the matcha-green hat I’d picked specifically because it matched Dahl’s favorite scarf.

“Ah-ha!” I crowed, straightening. “It was at the bottom.”

“What joy,” the agent drawled.

Once my boarding pass was in hand, I made a detour to the nearest trash can. Throwing in the hat would have been far more satisfying if it had made a breaking noise. But leaving the felted wool there to soak up the garbage juice from sad, wet coffee cups felt close enough.

 

#

 

Ten minutes later, my day got even better when discovered that the metal detector hated the pins on my jacket, that I forgot to take my boarding pass and ID out of the pocket of my coat, and that I somehow ended up leaving my shoes in the scanning tray. I got ten steps away before it occurred to me that I was still in my socks, and I had to dash back for my purple chucks. I sat sheepishly by security to slip them on, then slumped to my gate. I was already exhausted and I hadn’t done anything yet. My ache for Dahl was like a screaming hamster in my brain, not just because my heart hadn’t caught up with what had happened yet, but because of how organized she always was. How organized she always made me.

Yeah, and how much of that is emotional labor you’ve dumped on her? I thought glumly, pretending the gift jammed into the side-pocket of my backpack wasn’t glaring at me.

I didn’t call my parents. If I called my parents, I would start crying in the middle of the airport. I was mortified enough without having strangers staring at me. Or worse, trying to comfort me.

I’ll call them from Barcelona.

Then it will be too late to be talked out of going on the trip. I will be in Spain, and there will be nothing to do but have my stupid little adventure without my stupid little girlfriend.

Ex-girlfriend.

Shit.

I yanked my tablet out of my backpack. Dahlia had never moved into my crappy student bachelor, no matter how many times I had invited her, so there wasn’t any furniture to divvy up. Dahl had never even filled the dresser drawer I’d emptied for her. The strawberry-matcha shampoo in my shower was a duplicate of her favorite which I’d bought. Our lives were already completely separate.

We had talked about getting a place together while we worked a final season at the part-time jobs that had gotten us through school. Me at the cell phone kiosk at the mall, her as an usher at the cinema, figuring out how to twine our lives together as we both searched for the perfect first step into our chosen careers. I hadn’t been planning to job hunt so soon after graduation.

I had no reason to wait now.

My plans for the rest of the autumn—the rest of my life—were shot to hell.

“Shot through the heart,” my stupid traitorous brain sang.

Shut up, stupid traitorous brain, I told it.

Work in Public Policy seemed a good place to wriggle my way into some good old-fashioned Queer Activist organizations down the road, so I distracted myself by filling out tedious, fiddly job application after tedious, fiddly job application. After which I uploaded a resume with the exact same information. Because welcome to the hellscape that is late-stage capitalism.

When the gate agent called for my row to start boarding, I scrambled to collect all my stuff, which had somehow spread onto the chairs on either side of me.

I gave half a thought to leaving Dahl’s gift behind. While I was hurt and feeling terribly petty, I wasn’t that petty. This book was the last thing Dahlia had ever given me. Sentimental future-me I would hate present-me if I purposefully abandoned it.

I waited until I was buckled in and the airplane was taxiing from the jetway before opening the gift. The ribbon slid away smoothly, and I forced myself not to think about how, just yesterday, I would have braided it into Dahl’s hair. The gingham fluttered open. The book was an emerald green, cloth-bound hardback with deeply embossed gold lettering—one of those collector’s editions made to look antique.

The Welshman’s Daughters by Margaret Goodenough.

Dahlia’s favorite.

I could damn near recite the television adaptation, for as often as Dahl comfort-watched it and therefore I, as a kind and giving girlfriend, had watched it with her. (How on earth did her mother still think Dahl was straight when she’d spent her teenage years rewatching that kiss?)

I’m not sure what Dahl’s message with this gift was supposed to be, but it felt pointed all the same.

The flight crew went through the safety demonstration. We took off. Snacks and wine were delivered. I asked for two glasses. The cabin lights dimmed. I turned on the reading light, and flipped open the cover. There was an introduction written by the screenwriter of Dahl’s beloved adaptation.

 

kiss heard ‘round the world. The kiss that changed the landscape of historical fiction and queer representation. The kiss that, in the way drag queens have adopted Cher for their own, and gay men are Friends of Dorothy, created of its authoress the Patron Saint of Lesbians.

In its context upon publication by Pickering and Sons in 1807, in the years leading up to the Regency Era, the kiss between Mariana and Jane is as platonic as a hand-shake. By the admission of Goodenough’s own pen, the participants in “the kiss” had only been “very firm, very bosom companions.” They had kissed one another on the pretense of practicing for their respective fiancés, soon to be returning home from war with France. It is only in later generations, with later readings, do we see the relationship transform from one of perfectly normal physical intimacy for female friends into something romantic, even sexual.

 Once the repressed Victorian era arrived, people started paying attention to “that kiss.” And in the ensuing decades, while corsets and morals loosened, queer folks of all stripes were shipping off to The Great War. They sent their left-behind lovers “practice kisses” from hospital beds and trenches. Among the Bright Young Things of the twenties and thirties, “pulling practice” became covert slang for necking in places where homosexuality was illegal. Then the academics  for the first time, gave credence to a book previously thought of as just cult-classic high-gothic romance schlock.

 By the time I took my turn with adapting the novel in 1993, Margaret Goodenough’s legacy had solidified as the writer who had snuck an extremely queer book under the noses of her publishers, and the authoress of the First Sapphic Kiss in British Literature. While perhaps not as influential on the form and prevalence of the modern novel as her contemporary Austen, Goodenough’s oeuvre nonetheless echoes in the work and hearts of thousands of writers who have taken their own turn with a quill since.

And yet, the greatest achievement of Goodenough’s eight novels wasn’t her ability to pack so much emotional resonance into every phrase, or her witty, cutting understanding of the perils and pleasures of Regency era upper-middle class Britain, or even “that kiss.” It’s that, in an age where marriage and motherhood stripped would-be artists of their ability to focus on their craft, Margaret Goodenough somehow managed to carve out the hours and physical space to put pencil to paper.

And so when speaking of Goodenough, we must always remember The Wealthy Widow, who was instrumental in midwifing Goodenough’s work. History knows so little about her, and yet it is to her that the queer community of today owes so much. Without her support, patronage, and (ahem) company, Margaret Goodenough would have likely been forced into a financial arrangement of a marriage, thus robbing herself of the time to write, and the world of her eight beautiful novels.

(“Greening a gown”, the famous phrase from Goodenough’s final, posthumously published novel, for those not in the know, has nothing to do with picnicking. It refers to the kind of stains a woman could achieve while lying back on the verge for a different kind of feast.)

For those of us who desperately wish to believe in them, Goodenough and the Widow’s companionship was a wonderful Happily Ever After. Especially when so much of queer history is filled with tragic endings and separated lovers. Oscar Wilde was romantic, fine, but as a young reader who slid around the Kinsey Scale, his story didn’t fill me with hope for my own chances at finding safe relationships.

It is no wonder, then, that the overriding theme of Goodenough’s canon is this: devotion to one’s own heart, the loyalty of true friendship, the kindness of unwavering determination, and the slow patience of revelation lead to the most satisfying and fulfilling loves. She was a woman who refused to do what society expected of her, who refused marriage in order to keep a pen in her hand, and who’d not only loved where she wanted, but by all accounts, loved well.

Margaret Goodenough was not, by modern standards, what we would consider “out.” The labels we’d use for her today—sapphic, lesbian, queer—weren’t in widespread use, if they even existed within the context of women-loving-women at all. And yet she and her lifelong companion were unashamedly

 

I snapped the cover closed. When the flight attendant arrived with a garbage bag to collect the split pretzel packets, wine-dotted napkins, and empty plastic cups, I tipped The Welshman’s Daughters in with them.

 

#

 

For the first time in my life, I managed to fall asleep on an airplane, and it had everything to do with the two additional glasses of wine and the Gravol I’d popped as soon as dinner had been cleared away. So of course, the minute I began to doze, everything went wrong.

First, the cabin shook. It was a bone-deep rumble.. The drugs and booze tried to drag me back down into slumber. But then it happened again. When I sat up, I wasn’t the only one meerkating.

“Seat-belts!” the flight attendant snarled at some big yikes on legs who was all up in her face a few rows away. “Now!”

Fun fact, my Dad had once told me at dinner. He was a big fan of bar trivia and useless facts, and had a stockpile of them for any situation. Airlines install seatbelts on planes not to protect people while in the air, but to keep corpses attached to their seats so they can identify who’s who in the event of a tragedy.

“This is your c-captain speaking,” the pilot said over the tannoy. Though it was meant to be reassuring, her shivering voice was anything but. I screwed my eyes shut, felt my heart rising against the back of my throat, tasted fear—tangy and coppery, bile-sour. She had been so warm and reassuring when we’d taken off. Now, I could barely understand what she was saying—oh, it was clear enough, but my brain didn’t want to register it.

I caught the words “turbulence” and “unexpected” and “just off Gibraltar.”

For a moment, everything stopped.

The shaking vanished.

The shouting quieted.

There was a soft, gentle woosh, like an anticipatory inhale.

Fun fact, Dad had also once said, that in moments of extreme emergency, humans can experience time in slow motion. It’s a neurological trick our ancestors developed to help in times of disaster.

From the galley up ahead, a streak of intense light flared between the curtains.

It was emerald green.

And gold.

No, yellow.

No, gold, shimmering like glitter and—

Christ, no, just yellow and orange, flames crawling up the curtains toward the cabin ceiling. The fire alarm shrilled, masks dropped from the overheads, and I had just one thought as I scrambled into mine: Thank God Dahl’s not here.

The plane lurched, driving my seatbelt hard enough against my lower ribs that one of them popped.

The flames reached the bulkhead.

There was the bright blue flare of an oxygen tank bursting open.

That’s when people started screaming.

Another bone-rattling shake. I bit my lip between my teeth and prayed to taste blood. It would be a distraction, at least.

The plane heaved, snapping us up into the air like damp dish rags. The seatbelt dug into my hips.

I just wanted to live, to experience Spain, to let myself mourn Dahl, and celebrate the next chapter of my life. I just wanted to live.

Please. Just let me live.

The plane snapped hard against the sky.

I finally tasted blood.

It wasn’t half the distraction I’d hoped for.

 

#

 

Coldness in my mouth. Too salty. I coughed, tried to suck in air, and got seawater instead.

Crashed!

I pawed at my waist, but I wasn’t strapped to my seat, it wasn’t dragging me down. Had I already released myself? Don’t remember. Thankful, anyway. Groped next for the pull-cord of my life vest. Gone. Not wearing it.

No!

I flailed. My fingers brushed dry air, but maybe it was my feet. Maybe it was a trick. Which way was up? I hung suspended in the water, ballooned out my cheeks. I used to do this as a kid; front flip into the community swimming pool, crash through the chlorinated glory of summer-time relief, topsy-turvy, let myself float near the bottom until the oxygen in my lungs bubbled upwards, tell me which way the surface was. A light kick, and I would be in the air.

But it wasn’t working.

Crushing.

I panicked, unable to stay still for fear of wasting precious surface-reaching seconds. I opened my eyes. The salt stung. Shadows loomed around me, and I couldn’t tell in my oxygen-deprived haze if they were pieces of airplane, or fish, or corpses.

I refuse! I thought. Anything but this!

A swirling blot of darkness passed so near to my face that I swatted at it. It was a strange and stupid reflex to give into while slowly dying, but the human body is a bizarre machine. The thing was slick and moving fast. My fingers curled into the cord trailing from it.

Jellyfish! I won’t drown to death, I’ll get stung! How’s that for irony?

But the sharpish tug wasn’t the jolting burn of a sting. It was more painful than that, my whole arm wrenching sideways. My shoulder cracked.

The only thing I could hear was white noise—leftover static from the hissing shriek of tearing metal, or the throbbing call of the bottom of the ocean?

The world blurred. I zipped past the shadows now, up, up to somewhere where the water shaded from still black to churning frothy gray, heaving with whitecaps.

The shadow I held onto resolved into something desperately yellow.

Dark shapes blocked out the sun on the surface. Oval, backlit by crackling flashes of bright green, the shadow of lacework rope swaying in whatever wind was blowing up there in the, air, air, air, air—

That can’t be right.

I spluttered as my fingers, then my hand, then my nose, my cheeks, my face, my whole head broke the surface. I sucked, but there was no space in my lungs around the saltwater, and it burned.

That ship is weird, I thought, and then I was pushed under the waves again. I thrashed, but my legs wouldn’t obey. No, no! Kick, you stupid bitch, kick! Anything but this, c’mon!

I tugged hard on the string of the yellow thing and punched up into the air a second time. I couldn’t breathe but I could scream. The sound was half-lost in thunder, the pound of rain on the surface. I screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

Something beside me, a boat, an oar, a voice: “Overboard! Ahoy!”

A hand on my collar, pulling, and it choked, but my head was above water.

“Back to the ship! Go!”

I was hauled up, still going up, ever up, up, up. My head spun and the horizon slipped sideways to the tune of the clack of a rope ladder against a wooden hull. I came back to the world when my head hit planking.

“Careful, lads!” someone snarled.

I coughed, gagged, coughed. Air! My lungs burned. Cold, fuck, cold. I turned my head and puked; seawater and fear and lousy in-flight wine.

“Here now,” someone said. “Sit up.”

I let out the air I had so hard won in another hacking gag and puked again, vile and slimy. I coughed until I tasted only stomach acid and blood, sucked in great hungry lungfulls in reedy gasps. It was like breathing through a straw.

I was making a high keening sound, bubbling up out of me as surely as any empty life jacket. Somebody hadn’t secured their life-vest properly, had slipped out the bottom, falling down, down, down, and the vest had gone up, up, up, and me, lucky, stupid me, had grabbed it.

Somebody was dead.

And I was not.

We were under shelter of some kind; the rain had stopped pounding on my back. Instead, something warm and dry scrubbed at my hair. The friction caused agonizing, delicious warmth against my scalp. Sensations chased each other down my spine but I couldn’t tell if they were pleasure, or pain, or just feeling.

Alive!

I said it out loud, around the blood, the puke, the acid, the salt, the terror: “I’m alive.”

“You most definitely are,” said a voice by my ear.

I turned into it, hot and breathing, and here. Human. A hand down my back. I folded against a warm chest, and sobbed, and shook. So fucking cold.

Then the darkness rose up, crushing and cold as the bottom of the sea, and I fell head-first again, topsy-turvy, and let fate decide when it was time to bubble back to the surface.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two: In Which Sam Languishes

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.”
– Jane Austen,
Mansfield Park

 

The return to consciousness was slow. I wanted out of the darkness, quickly, now; and at the same time I wanted to stay in it forever.

Why? Are you feeling guilty? You got out of the water and someone else, some poor bastard—No. Shut up.

The room creaked and bobbed. I found myself staring up at the ceiling of wooden beams and smooth planking. I sucked in an experimental breath, shallow and cautious. It tasted of stale tobacco. Of furniture polish. Of too many men in one place, like the change-room of the community hockey rink after the teenaged boys’ practices. My tongue was tender, a cut from my teeth blazing across the middle. My chapped lips stung.

My hair was wet. The rest of me was dry, swaddled naked in cool, slightly scratchy sheets that did not glimmer in the semi-darkness like I thought emergency blankets would. These were cloth, roughly the texture of burlap, but with a softer, finer sheet between my skin and the warm outer blanket. The mattress was a sack, vaguely lumpy.

Surely this had to be a hospital. But then why wasn’t I hooked up to a morphine drip? A saline IV? Where was the buzzer to call for a nurse?

None of this was right.

I sat up gently, tugging the sheets high for decency. Only my stud earrings and watch remained on me. I was a cheap analog, supposedly water-resistant, but the face was beaded with condensation. The hands jerked unnervingly, lurching forward then pausing. Functioning, but no longer at the comforting, steady pace of a heartbeat. The strap was salt-crusted, fraying a little at the edges, but otherwise intact.

The world under me continued to sway and bob and I choked back another desperate whimper as it shifted my stiff and burning torso.

Why won’t you stop moving?

The room pitched slightly, I bit off a mewl of pain. My throat was tight, and the bottom of my ribs ached from the puking, from the pressure of the seatbelt, and from the burn of holding my breath so long.

“Miss?” a voice called from the other side of what must be a door. I couldn’t see said  door, couldn’t see much further than my own hands and the low ceiling, but it wasn’t coming from inside the room.

“Yeah?” I croaked, mouth sour.

I was parched.

I had nearly drowned and I was thirsty.

Ha.

The other person took my response as an invitation to push into the darkness. Harsh sunlight cut into my eyes. I raised my hand to block it before I could think, and whined again when every muscle above my knees protested. I twisted away, squinting, feeling small and stupid.

“Please, Miss, do not move,” the voice said, gentle. Sharp clip of heeled boots across a wooden floor. The door swung closed, blocking out the light again.

A few clacks of what sounded like metal and stone, and a spark leapt out of the darkness and onto the oil-soaked safety of a lamp wick. For a moment it flared too bright, too orange—recycled oxygen catching fire—before it was shaded by a milky globe of glass dropped into positioned by nimble fingers. The glow deepened the shadows, insulating us in a haven of liminal warmth. I was able to shut out, just for a second, the memory of what had happened, trapping it in the darkness with the rest of the ignorable world.

The face revealed in the new light was youngish, more or less thirty, and handsome in a sharp-nosed, doughy-chinned way. His dark hair was rakishly tousled. His eyes were remarkably round, deep and brown like a deer’s, and filled with more concern than I could digest just yet.

“How do you feel?” the man said, and dropped carefully onto a chair a respectable distance away. He held the shaded lamp by its base, perching it expertly on one knee.

“Disoriented,” I admitted.

“Your accent—” he said, but cut himself off. What I had mistaken for water in my ears was actually his own British lilt. “Where are you from? Moreover, how on Earth did you make it all the way out here?”

I pressed my fingers against my eyelids, pushing my eyeballs back into their sockets until they ached. It distracted me from the pain everywhere else. “Didn’t you see the crash?”

“We’ve quite missed the battle.” His thick eyebrows pulled down into a frowning vee. “I’ll admit that we have arrived too late to join Lord Nelson in giving Napoleon a taste of good British cannon. But just in the nick, it seems, to save a foreigner from a watery grave. Which ship did you fall from?”

“Napoleon? Ship?” My brain felt too big for my skull, like a sponge that had soaked up too much sea water, in danger of cracking bone and oozing out my skull. “Where are we?”

“Off the coast of Spain, nearing Cape Trafalgar.”

Fun fact, Dad’s voice in my head says, the Battle of Trafalgar was the first time the British Navy had formed a fleet. It changed the course of the Napoleonic war.

A war that had ended in 1815.

“That can’t be right,” I gasped, sucking hard on the air. Hard enough that I gagged, and choked up some lingering seawater. The man hastily set the lamp on a nearby table and shoved a handkerchief at me. I clapped it over my mouth to catch the bile and disbelief. My lungs burned from the strain, from the confusion, from the fear, from the panic. “That can’t be right.”

“Miss, are you quite well?”

“No! Of course not! This isn’t—” Real, I was going to say, but I could feel it. I could see it, smell it, and taste it. “This isn’t possible.”

The man was obviously concerned about my erratic answer.

He tried a different tack. “By what name shall I address you?”

“Sam. Samantha Franklin.”

“American?”

“Canadian.”

“Captain Fenton Goodenough, at your service.” He dipped his head formally at me and before I could decide if I should dip mine back, he added: “You are aboard my ship, the HMS Salacia.”

When I said “anything but this,” I thought, staring into his earnest face. I was really expecting… uh, anything but this.

 

#

 

As my clothes were soaked, Captain Goodenough sent for a spare pair of a cabin boy’s britches and shirt. Apparently my chubby figure in my new attire was lewd enough that the captain had implored me to stay in the safety of his cabin.

But I had to be outside. I had to see it.

We compromised with a thick oilskin slicker over the indecent clothes, and he escorted me to the nose of the ship. I spent the next few hours on the deck of the Salacia. A morose figurehead, I was undoubtedly as gray in the face as the weathered carving of the ship’s namesake goddess, crowned with seaweed and netting, stranding sentinel directly below me. The pounding rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, the ocean swelling only occasionally, knocking me into the rails.

This had to be a joke. It had to. I shoved down the desperate urge to cry. But there was enough salt water around me. I wasn’t in the mood to be adding to the world’s supply.

There were no planes or vapor trails in the sky. No low-slung tankers on the horizon. Only me, the gunmetal-gray vastness of the ocean, and underneath, behind, all around me, a nineteenth century ship with crow’s nests and everything. The sodden ropes above me hung like limp spiderwebs. The sails were rolled up. The air reeked of smoke, even through the rain—burning wood and black powder.

The water frothed, jumping up the hull as if to lick what was left of the future off my skin. In the distance, only darkness. Above me, only clouds. No stars. No moon. No floodlights, or city ports, or orange glow on the horizon from light pollution. I searched the rigging again, looking for LED flickers that might give away hidden technology, but even as I did, I knew it was futile.

The night was deep, and unkind.

No one could black out a whole continent’s electrical infrastructure.

“Stop it,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut, but all I saw behind them was the red orange blaze, the loose books and phones flying up to crack the plane ceiling, the sky falling away too fast through the window. Then I shouted it, screamed it from the bottom of my stomach, from my bowels, from the sour twisting place all the way down: “Stop it!”

The world went silent. I could not hear the rain. I could not hear the waves. I could only hear the reverberating echo of my voice, rolling back at me from across the ocean, from across the horizon, from across a time that was no longer mine.

And then a soft voice: “Miss Franklin.”

There was no reproach in it, no warning, no fear. Just my name. Concern.

“I’m fine,” I lied to the captain. “Sorry. Ignore me. I’m fine.”

I dragged my attention back to him,  to the men around us who shamelessly curved toward us to eavesdrop, even as they continued their tasks.

As far as Dahlia’s historic dramas had taught me, the crew that populated the ship were also impeccably dressed for the era. Some were appallingly young, hauling buckets, wrestling with wooden pegs nearly as tall as they were,  coiling rope into neat piles; some were old and grizzled, beards frizzy, unwashed and uncaring, scarred and hard. In between were men of every age hustled from duty to duty, clad in blue-and-white striped trousers, loosely tied scarves, sweat-greyed shirts, their skin weathered dark and rough.

“What year is it?” I croaked.

The captain, who had been keeping me company, stared at me with obvious worry.  “’Tis the year 1805, hand to God,” he said gravely, sensing how deliberate my inquiry was. “October twenty-first, if we’re to be particular about it.”

There was a commotion at the rear of the ship, something to do with nets and boats, and hauling things below-decks. Someone shouted for the captain to guide their work. I wondered who was steering the ship. Wasn’t the captain supposed to steer, or was that a Hollywood trope?

“Please, remain here,” the captain said, and hurried off.

I looked down.

In the churning water, scattered like a thousand tiny glimmering islets, were the remains of the airplane. Acres of debris stretched into the mist. No one was lying on it. There were no waving arms. No pleas for rescue. No screams cutting through the rain. Only yellow life vests, empty or buoying up the dead; seat cushions not quite soaked enough to sink away forever; the odd bobbing piece of overhead luggage; a laptop carrier just slipping beneath the waves; a child’s doll with its plastic head filled with air, staring with emotionless painted eyes; half-filled toiletry bottles; a bath-time floating picture book; a ballcap; a cosmetics case; a piece of the wing.

Things that meant nothing to anyone but me. I, alone, among these hundreds, had survived. I alone had been rescued from horrifying death.

Sailors doffed their caps at the rail, muttering quick prayers, but making no move to pick the dead out of the water. I guess there was enough grave dirt at the bottom of the ocean for all. Or empty shark stomachs.

Among my peers, the bloated blank-faced drowned, were the dead of the battle Captain Goodenough had spoken of. Red and blue uniforms alike were blackened with the weight of the water, the stain of blood and gunpowder, the char of fire.. Interspersed with the plane pieces were broken planks, the ghostly billow of a sail still lashed to a bobbing mast, a crust of hull still burning, flames spluttering. The last of the battle-dead began to give up the gasses that had kept them afloat.

And any proof that I was not when I belonged would soon go with them.

Then I saw it, clear as day, in my mind’s eye: my parents, amid other confused and angry mourners, standing on a beach, holding a wreath with my name on the ribbon. I felt it, in a yawning pit behind my stomach: the crush of sudden loss, the lack of closure because there would be no body, the inability to hold cold clay and press a goodbye kiss to a beloved face one last time. I swallowed against the squeeze of my larynx—the ferocious resentment of ambiguous loss, unable to mark or mourn it, denied any good and final moment.

Just life, presence, and warmth.

Then none.

And nothing but heartbreak to fill the ragged, bleeding gap left behind.

A few sailors tried to start conversations with me, but I couldn’t unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth enough to speak. And at the same time, I also couldn’t bear the thought of drinking anything to make the task easier.

Water and I were quite at odds for the moment.

Just a small tiff. A fair-weather break up. Understandable.

They each drifted off when I proved to be unsociable. They smelt like unwashed hair and unwashed clothes and too long at sea with only other men and hot hands, anyway. I had been gearing up for a run of revenge one-night stands, but I didn’t want it now. Didn’t think I’d ever want it ever again.

Weren’t survivors of traumatic accidents supposed to feel a desperate drive to affirm life?

Right now all I wanted was to exist without each inhale being a small agony.

Why me?

Why me?

Why only me?

Would it have been better if I had drowned? Was I meant to have drowned? Had fate, or destiny, or whoever is responsible for airplanes that just blip out of existence, spared me? Or had it been a mistake? The parts of the twenty-first century that were here—so anachronistically here, out of place, superfluous, wrong—would sink. It would vanish from history forever, lost to the future because it was at the bottom of the sea in the past.

And I should be with it.

Shouldn’t I?

I wasn’t honestly believing this, was I? No. And yet… there were no lights on the coast.

If there was a meaning, a reason for my survival, I didn’t know what it was. I was about as religious as any other queer who’d spent her small-town upbringing being told that people loved me as a sinner, but hated my sins; that is to say, not at all. If God—whichever one of them—had saved me for a purpose, they’d forgotten the bit where they were supposed to strike me with divine inspiration and explain why.

I kept circling back to the idea that this had to be fiction. It was too much like the movies to be real. Like watching the footage from a public atrocity and thinking The things they can do with CGI these days, before realizing that the horror on the screen was really happening: shootings, vans plowing into sidewalks, buildings bombed, airplane crashes. The brain short circuits and tries to yank what you’re experiencing into familiar territory, and therefore right back into the realm of fiction.

People don’t really survive mid-ocean plane crashes.

They don’t time travel.

And they aren’t rescued by pre-Regency Era naval captains.

And yet, the ship I stood on was real.

My hero was the shortish, doughy-faced Fenton Goodenough. Not exactly the chiseled Fabio that bodice rippers had promised the tumbled maidens of the world. If the captain was the person the author of this surreal adventure was trying to throw in my path, they had seriously picked the wrong heroine.

How long did I stand there, gawping in disbelief? Long enough for my hair to soak through again, wet tendrils sticking to my forehead. Long enough that my bare feet began to hurt against the planking. Long enough that the water trickled into my cocoon of warmth and denial, rolling down my spine.

A low fog crouched over the water like a shroud. The sun set faded into the smudgy strip of land that was Europe to my right—starboard or port?

Though the sails were furled, the ship still drifted in the currents. Eventually we passed through the field of bodies and wreckage, and the crew stopped muttering prayers for every cadaver that bumped away under the prow.

 

#

 

I woke to the sound of the night watch’s hour call: Three in the morning. All is well.

Everything would be well if he’d stop shouting every hour on the hour and waking me the fuck up. I slept fitfully after that, drowning in nightmares, both literally and in the terrible dreams themselves.

I greeted the sunrise irate.

The denial of the night before had transformed into fury at witnessing the mass graveyard that I’d been pulled from. I was angry at the sailors for fishing me out of the drink, too. Angry for surviving. Angry at the uncomfortable bed the captain had given up for me. Angry at whatever that green-and-gold flash had been in the galley, angry at Dahlia for abandoning me to go through this alone, angry that it was even happening. I was scared, and confused, and my ribs ached worse after sleeping on a sack of straw. And worst of all, my fury had nowhere to go.

The little pool of darkness that had kept the real world at bay the night before had dissipated in the morning light filtering through the dirty glass of the captain’s cabin. I was still wearing the borrowed breeches and shirt, and I was angry about that, too. Angry that it’d taken so long for me to fall asleep last night without the familiar distraction of doom-scrolling.

I wanted my own clothes. I wanted my button-up, my jeans, my phone… My phone.

If it still worked, if the water-resistant case had kept it safe, if there was enough battery left, I could put this whole ridiculous fantasy to rest and rejoin the real world.

I scrambled for my denim jacket, which had been hung over a valet stand in the corner of the cabin, hoping hard enough that it came out as a desperate sob that everything was still zipped into my pocket.

Yes!

My phone and wallet were exactly where I had left them.

But the casing of the phone was cracked, bloated with water and corroding battery acid.

Useless.

Goddamnit!

In my black billfold, the Euros I had so carefully hoarded were damp, still legible but now as obsolete as my identification and banking cards. Which I should probably, like the responsible time travelers from stories did, toss into the drink. I hoarded them instead, the last remaining proof that I was not mad. That I was not the addled heroine of The Tempest, or Northanger Abbey, or The Welshman’s Daughters.

That I was who I thought I was.

I didn’t trust anyone not to go snooping, so I tucked both phone and wallet under the mattress, between the wall and the frame. My button-down was dry, but stiff with salt, and the seams and pockets of both my jeans and jacket were still wet enough to be uncomfortable. The purple basque hat, which I cannot believe had stayed on my head through all of that, was a wrinkled mess. Resigned to staying in the old-fashioned clothes for now, I pulled on my socks and Converses.

Wake up, I screamed at myself. Wake up. People don’t actually time travel. Come on, put some effort into it, Sam! Wake up!

The world crashed heavily to the side, swirled, and for a second I felt the crushing pressure of the bottom of the sea again, freezing and black. My ears rang. Water poured up my nose, down my throat, invading my lungs, cold and sharp and—

I sucked in a desperate breath of air, shouted “No!” The world stopped swirling abruptly, and I was rooted on the solid floor so quickly that I nearly fell over.

Awake.

Here.

Not falling from a burning plane.

Not in the middle of drowning all over again.

Here.

Shit.

Shit.

Right. So. What now?

I was alone. Which meant I had the opportunity to figure out how deep this fantasy went. That I hadn’t been flung into the past, because it’s not possible. Surely not all of the books could be real, or complete. The clothes in the cupboard, the maps, the ledger, something had to betray that everything around me was just an elaborate fiction.

Captains had logbooks, right? I decided to start there. Perched primly on one corner of the desk blotter was a book covered in maroon leather. The log was filled with even, no-fuss handwriting made up of precise nib strokes. The most recent entry read:

 

October 22nd,

 Fifth Bell – Morning – Fair, growing humid, light breeze.

 Sails furled as we continue to navigate the detritus of the battle and, according to our new passenger, that of her crashed craft. No other survivors recovered.

 

And on the page before that:

 

October 21, 1805

Fourth Bell – Morning – Clear skies, indolent breeze

British fleet spotted. Salacia still too far out to read colors. Wind not obliging. Our extended call at Antigua has all but guaranteed that unless the action is very extended indeed, we may not make it in time to support Nelson.

             

 Eighth Bell – Afternoon – Slow swell. Gale likely.

Cannon fire echoes back to us across the water. Victory has run up “prepare for battle” and “England expects every man shall do his duty.” Salacia still too far away to lend support. How I yearn to be there.

 

              First Bell – Afternoon – Thunderstorm

Freak weather has sucked the wind from our sails. We make no further headway. Sky is black above us, clouds arcing with queer green lightning. Some of the sailors have taken to sheltering belowdecks, in fear of what they are calling fairy lights. I am too heartsore with the knowledge that we will miss the battle to offer reprimand.

 

              Sixth Bell – Afternoon – Squall

Gunfire in the distance ceased. Ships burn. Weather makes it difficult to make out whose.

Another ship has been late to the fight. Being on deck, I witnessed with my own eyes a great flash of green lightning leap between the thunderous clouds, and did pray to G-d that it would not strike the mast. The curve of the water and the clouds can play tricks on even the most experienced seaman’s eyes, and the great explosion of fire (as if a whole ammunitions room had gone up all at once) could not possibly have happened in the air, though it appeared to fall from the sky directly above us.  I can only assume that the force of the blast threw the hull of the ship into the air, to splash down around us. Thankfully none were injured among my crew as they dove for safety. From the wreckage, I cannot begin to guess what form the craft must have taken when it was together. Lookout affirms no other vessels were spotted on our approach to the fleet. Only one survivor—young woman who claims to be from the Canada colonies. Samantha Franklin. Understandably distraught by the loss of her vessel. Ship’s surgeon looked her over as she slept, no injuries save severe bruising around waist, likely from some sort of harness.

 

And, in the margins of that entry, in spiky, irritated pencil scratches: Too late, may G-d damn it.

 

I tried and failed not to feel utterly violated that some dude had “looked over” me without my consent while I was unconscious. Then again, I can’t imagine I’d have been a very good patient last night if they’d tried to haul me in from the rain for a strip search.

“This is too perfect,” I muttered, leaning back in the captain’s chair.

But even flipping back through the book, there was no deviation from the calm, steady reporting. No lorem ipsum to take up space on the page, no repeated entries or gobbledygook to just make it appear to be an entry to a film camera. These were real entries, and they were each unique.

The captain even appeared to be using a cypher to record a secondary set of information, dot and hash marks beside some of the entries in red ink. The red was dark, too, not the vibrant shade I would expect from a modern pen.

Dammit!

And just like that, I was simmering with fury again.

This was just too stupid to accept at face value.

There had to be something! Maybe the maps. I knew shit-all about maps, but every one I unrolled from the bin beside the desk seemed period-accurate. Books, next: there was a shelf with a dowel across the midpoint, to keep the books from tumbling. But each volume, each title page, each publisher’s mark was spot-on. Thankful that twice-weekly yoga classes had left me limber enough to do so, I scrambled up the bedframe to cling to the joists and search for cables, or modern building materials, or something.

Each failed investigation pissed me off further.

Regrettably, I was in a perfectly executed Downward Dog, pulling at the bottom of the bookshelf to see if it had a false back, when the cabin door swung open.

“My word!” the captain spluttered from the threshold.


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JM FreyTime and Tide: Book Preview
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Nine-Tenths: Book Preview

Chapter One

There’s this thing in stories called the “inciting incident”.

And mine? It’s a goddamn doozy.

It’s the part of the book, right at the start, where you pinch the pages between your fingers, and whisper to yourself: here we go. It’s the bit where the lovers have their meet-cute, the farm boy leaves his family behind for the wider world, the Chosen One is attacked by her first evil monster, blah, blah, blah. You know what I mean. It’s my favorite part of the book. It’s the place where everything opens up and you have no idea what you’re in for—only that it’ll be exciting.

I know all about Inciting Incidents because I was going to be a writer.

No, I thought I was going to be a writer. Historical romance, that’s my jam. Dukes, rakes, windblown-gowns, dropped handkerchiefs, cliffside confessions—I am a slut for that stuff. Forget real history (totally flunked ‘We’re-Feeding-You-Colonialist-Narratives-Disguised-As-Education 101’). Give me made-up kingdoms and far-flung pirates. Give me the fantasy of a happily ever after that lasts beyond ‘the end’. Give coffee and stories, and I am a very happy boy.

But right before he got sick, in the summer between my first and second year of university, my Dad and I had a serious talk about writing. How much work it is. How long it takes to start paying off, how little mid-list writers make. Backup plans.

And then… after, I thought, well, he wasn’t wrong. If life was going to be pointlessly, stupidly, cruelly short, then I should spend my time trying to do something good, right? I switched majors. Science makes sense. Science is logical. Science creates vaccines and saves lives. Science can bring species back from the brink of extinction.

Science doesn’t break your heart.

All of this is to say that I can—with complete and utter certainty—point to the exact moment when my life became a trash fire. It was my twenty-fourth birthday, and my big sister Gemma gave me the dumbest, but most totally plot-initiating gift: a sunrise alarm clock.

My Inciting Incident starts like this: in Mum’s pokey poppies-and-roosters kitchen, with Gemma turning over the box that the wrapping paper reveals, trying to figure out where the English description is hidden.

“It’s an alarm clock,” Gemma says, when I don’t comment immediately. She’s leaning on the back of my chair, the braid hanging over her shoulder long enough to tickle my neck. I flick it away.

“I have a perfectly good alarm clock.” I hold up my phone, then let it slap back down onto the plastic tablecloth. “Goes ding when there’s stuff.”

My sister heaves the kind of sigh only eldest-born siblings make, indulgent and frustrated at the same time. I love making her make that noise. It’s hilarious.

“It wakes you up gently,” Gem says. “So you’re not cranky.”

“M’not cranky in the mornings.”

Everyone laughs. I may have snapped at Stuart just this morning when he shook my foot through my childhood bed sheets like an aggressive chihuahua.

Okay.

So I’m cranky in the mornings.

“I don’t see how it’s supposed to work.” Stu grabs the clock. “How can you see the light if your eyes are closed?”

As the younger brother of twin siblings, I am used to having the toys I’m playing with getting pulled out of my hands. Instead of trying to snatch it back, I fiddle with the iridescent green bow that was on my gift.

“The same way you can see sunlight through your eyelids. It just works, okay? I’ve been using this exact same one for months. I promise you’ll wake up in a better mood.”

“You know, it’s rude to give someone a present that benefits yourself,” I say, playing with the tape on the bottom of the ribbon. I stick it to my ear. Mum smirks at my accessory, but otherwise her prim little ‘all my babies are home to roost’ face stays in place.

Makes me feel a bit shitty, because I’m the only one of us who went away to school, and stayed away. Gem came back to live with Mum straight after she finished her undergrad, so Mum wouldn’t be alone in the house after Dad. Stuart never left the city, though he’s got his own place now. But that’s why I stayed away after I graduated last year. Mum and Gem don’t need me, and if I came back, Stu would try to get me to join his construction crew.

To be fair, I do go weak in the knees for the kind of person jacked enough to pick me up and consensually throw me around. Standing on a roof next to a whole crew of pretty roughs trying to help them replace shingles? gonna lead to me swooning and dying of a broken neck. Stu doesn’t want that on his conscience.

Because she’s a bossy know-it-all, Gem takes my present from Stu and opens it to show me how it works.

Suddenly empty-handed, Stu helps himself to another piece of my birthday cake, licking the icing off his fingers and the serving knife.

Mum slaps the hand holding the knife, and Stu flushes up and sets it down. He descends on his third piece like a wolf, but at least now he’s watching his manners.

“There’s instructions,” I point out as Gem tosses the booklet on the table. “I don’t need you to do it for me.”

“The day you read the instructions,” Mum says, “is the day I’ll know for sure the fairies swapped you back.”

It’s an old joke, being the Changeling child. I’m the only one of them with dark hair. The rest of my family are blond as heck.

Mum’s grinning at her own cleverness, lips curving into that little curl in the side of her mouth that holds secrets. Dad always called it Mum’s ‘Peter Pan Kiss’. It’s the spot where her sense of humor lives. He’d wrap his arms around her waist and kiss that corner, and Mum would swat at him for ruining her lipstick.

Thinking about Dad reminds me that he’s dead.

I hate the swoop-and-stab sensation in my chest that comes with remembering. Especially when there’s a moment you want to share, and you think I should say that to Dad, and you straighten up a bit and take a deep breath, and turn your head to his chair and start composing the sentence in your head: “Hey, Dad, Mum’s doing that—” and then you stop.

You stop composing. Stop turning. Stop thinking about sharing. Stop breathing.

Because that chair is empty.

Dad’s dead.

And you’ll never get the chance to point out the Peter Pan kiss again. Or watch Mum swat him. Or listen to him tease us for falling for Mum’s Old World fairy stories. Or hear his stupid har-har-har donkey laugh, thick with his Lower Canada accent.

It’s my birthday.

He’s not here.

I’ll have another birthday, next year, and he won’t be there for that one either.

I try to control my breathing, but Mum hears it hitching. I’m already staring at Dad’s terrible empty chair, so it’s not like I can hide what I’m thinking about. Mum curls her fingers over my knuckles.

“I wish he was here too, mo leanbh,” she says softly.

Stu and Gem go quiet.

“Sucks,” I cough out, deciding to give no one the pleasure of watching me actually cry. I’ll save it for later, when I’m back in my own apartment. Not because of any kind of ‘real men don’t’ toxic masculinity bullshit, but because I hate the fuss. They take the shit my therapist tells them about being my support network too much to heart.

“More tea, Mummers?” I ask instead, standing, breaking her hold on my hand to pick up the teapot on the counter beside the decimated cake.

“Time for something stronger, don’t you think?”

“I’ve got it,” Gem says, leaping at the chance to be helpful. She pops my gift back into the box and pushes the whole thing into my arms, forcing me back down into the chair. “Four glasses?”

“Extra ice in mine,” Stu calls at Gem’s back as she breezes into the living room and over to the booze hutch. We all pretend Gem’s not wiping at her eyes. “I gotta drive home.”

“You’re not staying for dinner?” Mum asks him.

“One of my guys got in the weeds with something at the museum, and the city wants it done before the kids start showing up for summer camps.”

“But Colin’s come all the way from St. Catharines,” Mum protests. “I thought you’d at least spend the night.”

“I have a perfectly good bed a ten minute drive away, Mum.”

Mum’s lips pucker. I hate seeing her unhappy, but what am I gonna do? Tie Stu to the chair and not let him leave?

Ha.

“Could use your advice,” Stu says to me. “Figure out the best place to—”

“I know what you’re doing, and the answer is no,” I say, but I force a smile through it. “Try all you like Stu-pid, I’m not coming to work with you.”

“It’d be nice to see both my boys working in their Dad’s company,” Mum says, trying to keep the peace.

“I need a landscaper for the summer—”

“My degree is in environmental and sustainable tourism,” I remind everyone. “I wrote my thesis on biodynamic viniculture. Y’know, the science of biodynamic vineyards? Not grass-cutting.”

“It’s all outdoors and nature, isn’t it?”

“Give it a rest.”

“It’s just a job,” Stu presses. “I know you’re still figuring out the career thing, but you gotta make money in the meantime—”

“I have a ‘just a job’. Hadhirah pays as good as you, and I don’t have to get eaten alive by bugs in the backwoods—”

“Orillia is hardly the ‘backwoods’,” Mum tuts.

“I’m happy in St. Catharines,” I say, trying to stay firm but non-confrontational, like Dr. Chen taught me. “I like my friends, and I like Beanevolence. I don’t want to work for Stu when he has no idea what I actually do.”

“It’s not like I’m going to kidnap you and force you to wear a tool belt. Don’t get your feathers in a ruffle, mo leanbh,” Stu says, in his best imitation of Mum’s Scots brogue.

Mum was seven when she and my Nan emigrated to Canada to get away from Nan’s horrid husband, and Mum still has that pretty Scottish burr. Doubly so when she gets off the phone with her half-sister Patricia. I wish you could inherit an accent.

“Thank you for the offer,” I say, baring my teeth. “But I decline.”

“Suit yourself,” Stu says. He rubs his hand through my hair, which, rude! Some of us actually style our hair and use product, like civilized people, Stuart!

“Plan to.” I take a sip of my cold tea before I can say anything that will turn this into an actual argument.

“Need help, Gemmy?” Mum asks. As a way to change the subject, it’s not a subtle one.

“I’m coming,” Gem says, over the clink of glass tumblers on Dad’s mid-century bar tray. Dad had a thing for cocktails and James Bond. Mom has a thing for a good peaty scotch, so it was a match made in a shaker.

Gem sets down four Old Fashions, extra ice in Stu’s, and extra cherries in mine. Our “Slàinte mhath!” is maybe too forced, but whatever.

Casting around for something to start a new conversation, Gem says: “I like your shirt. It’s not black.”

“Oh, yeah,” I say, stroking the olive button-down. It’s a tight fit, one of those tailored shirts that makes me look gawky and skinny, but Mum always appreciates the effort. Gem is wearing one of those cute dorky matching summer-dress-and-cardigan sets that makes her look like the librarian she is, and Stu is in a bright blue tee-shirt and dark jeans that are actually free of construction debris or paint. “Beks picked it.”

Mum perks up. “And where is Rebekah? I expected her to drive you.”

“Mum,” I groan, and it’s a waste of Dad’s good Scotch and Gem’s artful work, but I down the cocktail in one go.

“What?” she asks.

“They broke up last year,” Gemma reminds Mum gently.

“Doesn’t mean she’s not still your friend. She could have driven you up.”

“It’s five hours, Mummers,” I protest. “I don’t want to be in a car with her that long.”

“Maybe all you need is the chance to have a good conversation, sort out—”

“There’s nothing left to sort out,” I cut in sullenly. “Yeah, we’re still friends, but that doesn’t mean I can just let you ambush her—”

“Ambush!” Mum echoes, looking guilty enough that it’s obvious she totally had plans. “I would never.”

“You have,” Gem reminds her. None of us have forgotten Gem’s high school crush, and the inflatable kiddie pool.

“Well,” Mum says, flustered and caught-out. “It still would have been nice to see her.”

“You could have brought Caden,” Gemma says with a sly eye-side.

“Choke and die.” I offer up a sharkish smile.

“Colin!” Mum scolds.

“Who’s Caden?” Stu asks. My himbo brother likes gossip just as much as his twin.

“Breach of confidence!” I snarl at Gem.

“There was no NDA,” Gem says through her own knife-slice grin.

“Who’s Caden?” Stu asks again, amused.

“He’s no one,” I insist.

Gem scoffs. “That’s not what you—”

“He’s no one now,” I amend, fiddling with my glass, watching my ice cube melt and wishing I hadn’t drunk it all in one go. I always feel like a jerk if I get up and refill before everyone else has finished. I’m not, like, an alcoholic, but I don’t want my family thinking I am one. They already watch me like a time-bomb when it comes to mental-health shit.

“Oh,” Stu says, catching what I mean.

“You’ll just have to try harder next time,” Mum says. It’s meant to be pleasant and understanding, but I literally grind my teeth together so hard Gem shoots me a startled look. “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, that you can’t keep a partner, mo leanbh.”

“Gem and Stu are single right now too, Mum, it’s not like—”

“Just remember what Dr. Chen said about needing stability, Colin. It’s not good to jump from relationship to relationship like this.”

That’s skirting dangerously close to calling me a ‘greedy bisexual,’ I think, but don’t say, because that’s not a conversation I want to have right now.

“Cut Colin some slack,” Gem says gently.

“I just don’t know why Rebekah couldn’t come up with you,” Mum says, wringing her hands. “She was such a nice girl, and you were going to get—”

“You said you weren’t going to bring that up,” Stu stops her.

My stomach bottoms out, and I shove away from the table.

“Just forget I said anything, okay?” Mum says. She pats my shoulder lovingly, and leaves to go turn on the TV. I hate when she does that. Can’t argue at her back, ‘cause she can’t read your lips that way. Mum keeps her hearing aids turned down so she can’t hear anyone or anything that isn’t directly in front of her. It always bugged her when we screamed across the house.

The TV flicks on, the channel flips, and Stu stands up to peer into the living room when it stops on a program with someone singing in that high, signature ‘70s tone we are all very familiar with.

“Mum’s watching Lawrence Welk reruns again,” Stuart says accusingly as Gem starts to tidy up.

“Rebekah broke up with me,” I snap.

“We know,” Gem says. “Stu, when are you planning to leave?”

“Might as well be right now,” Stu grunts. Then he comes around the table and wraps me up in a huge bear hug that has me dangling a few inches from the floor. “Have a good trip back tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” I wheeze, nose smooshed.

He sets me down and slaps my shoulder in a manly, hetero way. “Happy birthday.”

“Just one year away from my quarter-life crisis. I’m thrilled.”

“Will you have figured out what to do with your fancy degree by then?”

“Har har.”

“Oh!” Gem says, and turns away to rifle the junk drawer. She sifts through archeological layers of take-out menus, dried up pens, and loose Canadian Tire money and emerges with a rumpled, used-to-be-white envelope. “This came for you. Like, last year.”

“Why didn’t you forward it?”

“I’m not your secretary.”

I take the envelope. “I was here at Thanksgiving. And Christmas. And Easter.”

“I’d forgotten. Mum found it when she was looking for the birthday candles.”

I slip the letter out of the envelope. The paper is textured and expensive. The letterhead is crowned with maple leaves, and a little flame. Underneath it says, From the Office of Lt. Gov. Francis A. G. Simcoe.

Dear Colin Fergus Levesque; the letter reads, in a computer-generated handwriting font. On behalf of the office of the Lieutenant Governor of the province of Upper Canada, and in the name of her Royal Majesty, Elizabeth Regina, we are pleased to congratulate you on the occasion of your graduation from your post-secondary studies…

…blah blah blah.

“What is it?” Stu asks, looking over my shoulder. “Oh, one of those.”

“Yeah.” I chuck it into the recycling bin under the sink. “Just the same thing the dragons always send. Nothing special.”

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

Someone shouts “surprise!” from behind my sofa as soon as I shoulder open my apartment door.

“Shit!” I drop my bag on my foot in shock, grabbing at my shirt over my heart.

The shout is followed by coughing, which doesn’t surprise me. It hasn’t been vacuumed back there since my roommate Katiya left on her Grand Backpacking-and-Smelly-Hostels Tour of The Continent with her fiancé. Happily, this means I get the place to myself for the rest of the summer. Even more happily, it also means she’s not bugging me to spin the chore wheel every weekend.

Less happy for Dikembe, my fourth year lab partner, who is crawling out from behind the sofa, streaked with gray dust.

The “surprise!” is echoed from a few other hiding places around the apartment—not that there are many, it’s just a two-bedroom, first floor of a crummy, crumbling row house in the student-ghetto part of downtown—and two more people tumble laughingly into the front hall.

“This is a gross misuse of the emergency key I gave you,” I say as Hadi steps out of my front closet.

“Happy birthday!” she jeers, detangling the back of her purple hijab from the Velcro on one of my coats.

“Keep your shoes on,” Dikembe says. “About face.” He pushes at me until my nose is nearly against the front door.

“No, no, no,” I complain. “I’ve been on a train for five hours. I want to go to bed.”

“You want to go with us to the bar and get waaaaaasted!” Mauli says, coming in from the kitchen. They’re in their Party Skirt, the sparkly blue one, which means they are planning to really properly drink tonight. Shit, is that the last of Katiya’s vodka swinging from their fist?

Dammit, I’m gonna have to buy a new bottle before she gets home. Make it an apology present to sweeten her up to the idea that I might not be moving out right away after all. The hope was that I would find a job and be outta her hair before January. But I’m starting to think that won’t happen.

“It’s a school night,” I protest.

“You graduated a year ago!” Mauli reminds us.

“So it’s a work night.” I aim an elbow at Dike so he’ll back up.

Hadhirah makes a noise like an old-fashioned telephone and lifts her palm to the side of her face. “Hello? Yes? Hmmm, you don’t say. I’ll let him know.” She drops her hand. “Your boss says it’s fine.”

“Har har.” I let them manhandle me outside and down the grungy cement porch to the broken sidewalk. “Just don’t be on my ass tomorrow if I’m hungover.”

“Hey, they’re not my tips at risk.”

We end up at The Brass Monkey, just down from Beanevolence. My apartment is a few blocks north of the main street, where both the bar and the café are located. It’s one of the few advantages to living in a place where the smells and stains of a hundred students who rented it before me are ground into the carpets.

Hadi spends a few minutes chatting with the bartender, while Mauli opines on the wonders of microbreweries. Dikembe makes eyes at the girls at the table next to us, and tries to look as cool as he can with a Chez Levesque dust bunny stuck in his twists.

One of the other nice things about living and working within the same few blocks is that you get to know everyone else who does the same. And sometimes, because of it, they give you free shit.

“Turn that frown upside down, grumpy gus,” Hadi says in a syrupy voice when she comes back with a basket of ‘Happy Birthday Roasted Cauliflower Bites. There’s a candle in the curry mayo. “Look, on the house.”

I didn’t realize I was frowning. The train trip must have worn me out more than I thought. I blow out the candle, and Mau and Dike pound me on the back like I’ve scored a winning touchdown. Our tasting flights come with an extra shot of Jaeger for the birthday boy, courtesy of the table of girls, and I tell Dike to go thank them for me. I even brush the dust bunny away first.

“You’re not going with him?” Hadi asks as I down the shot.

“Nah, too bagged. Long day, crappy travel.”

I’m not…

I’m not going to do it.

I’m not.

Somehow my phone is in my hand already, though, and from a distance I hear myself saying: “Rebekah usually has Mondays off. I could—”

“No!” Hadi shouts, so quick it’s actually kinda insulting.

Mau pulls the phone outta my hands. They’re tipsy enough that they fumble it. If they drop it into one of their glasses, I’m going to eat their soul. But they shove it down the front of their skirt instead, right into the boxers below it.

“Don’t think I won’t go in there after it,” I say, pointing at their nose. “You know the saying about a bi person sticking their hands in someone’s pants and being happy with whatever they find.”

“Buy me dinner first,” Mau says, sticking out their tongue. I make a swipe for it and miss.

“What do you call this?” I Vanna White the cauliflower.

“Didn’t buy it. No Gs, No Os.”

“I can get my own Os!”

Hadi snorts, and I realize what I just said.

“I can do that, too,” I say, leering cartoonishly. “Masturbation is a normal and healthy part of—” She shoves me. “Abuse! Abuse! This is homophobia!”

Hadi finally breaks out a real smile, instead of that tight, sardonic thing she likes to call one. Score.

“If you can get your own, go get one from them.” Mau leans across the table and flicks their eyes at someone at the bar. Their back is to us, but they’re still moving enough to make it clear that they were turning away quickly. Like they didn’t want to be caught. “They’ve been staring at you since we got in.”

I turn to glance over my shoulder and—

It’s him.

My heart jumps into the back of my throat, and I’m halfway off my stool before my brain catches up with what I’m actually seeing. In the light of the overhead lamps, the guy at the bar’s hair only looks ginger, their dirty blond hair reflecting the reddish light of the barback.

Not him.

“Snacky,” I stage-whisper all the same, committed now that I’m on my feet. Mau drops my befouled phone into my hand.

“Colin,” Hadi says, grabbing my sleeve before I can head over. “Hey, be smart, okay?”

“The Rules?” I tap my temple.

“The Rules,” she agrees, and lets me go.

As I work my way through the crowd, I try to shove away the weird flutter that even thinking I had spotted him caused. It’s a stupid thought. There’s no way someone like him—upright, posh, snobby—would sit and shoot the shit with the bartender for funsies.

So why had I been excited when I thought it was him?

People like him don’t date people like me.

Do they?

It’s just curiosity. It has to be. Because of the access, right?

It would have been the perfect excuse to finally bridge that customer-service gap. Sidle up to him, actually meet in a place where I didn’t work to distract me, where I could casually drop the fact that it was my birthday and I wouldn’t say no to a celebratory drink.

Actually get a conversation out of him.

Yeah, right.

He never talks to me. I stopped trying to have a conversation with him over a year ago, because he’d always looked like I’d smacked him between the eyes with a wet fish whenever I tried. It seemed kinder to just let him hide behind his newspaper—an honest-to-god paper paper—and stare at me.

And he does stare.

Sometimes I think the staring is the kind you do when you appreciate the look of another person. Sometimes, I think it’s some weird split-tongue thing. It’s gotta be, ‘cause if he was into me, he would’ve said something by now, right?

The part of me that’s still a writer sometimes makes up stories about my fussy regular. Why he’s here. What he’s thinking about. Whether he really sleeps on a pile of gold (if that’s not a speciesist stereotype.) What the no-doubt beautiful maiden he goes home to every night thinks of his morning routine. Or if maybe he’s into something a little more me-shaped.

Oh my god, I am such a romance novel cliché right now.

Also, dammit Colin.

Maybe focus on the dude you are actually trying to get between the sheets?

“Hi.” I slide onto the bar stool beside the guy.

“Hi. I hear it’s your birthday.”

“Yup.” I flash him a smile.

It’s about half the wattage I can usually manage.

I’m tired. The long train ride, the unexpected surprise… and I remember doing this with Caden. And from Caden, my brain jumps to Rebekah, and how last year for my birthday we’d done one of those boat cruise dinners at Niagara Falls, and I’d had a ring burning a hole in my blazer pocket, and…

… I just don’t wanna anymore.

“Sorry,” I say, before he can suggest anything. “I thought you were someone else. I shouldn’t have… my bad.”

I don’t wait for his response and slink back to the table.

“Not into you?” Mauli asks.

“I’m not up for it.”

Up for it,” Mauli snickers, and I pinch them hard on the shoulder.

I leave at closing time, after a few beers too many, frustrated and manhandling Mauli into one of the cheap cabs that prowl St. Paul street for desperate fares. Dike had headed off with one of the ladies hours ago, and Hadi had bailed before I’d even returned from my failed attempt to hit on the guy at the bar.

Happy birthday to me, I think morosely as I trudge home.

Alone.

 

Chapter Three

 

You remember what I told you about the Inciting Incident? Well, this is where it matters.

Because that alarm clock?

It sucks.

Stu was right, and I can’t tell when the light gets bright. I am stupid-lucky my brain wakes up on its own, shouting something is wrong! It takes me thirty solid seconds of staring at the display to figure out what ‘something wrong’ is.

I am very late.

I am also hungover as hell.

I run the four blocks to Beanevolence, throbbing head down, gulping on air to keep from puking, and hoping I don’t bowl someone over. I’m envisioning a line of pissed off suits waiting by the door, tapping expensive shoes on the filthy pavement. Or Hadi writing out a pink slip to fire me. She’d do it, too, even if she had to go buy the pink paper specifically for the dramatic gesture.

Rounding the corner, I’m both relieved and horrified to see there’s only one person waiting. Shit. I’ve totally screwed the morning rush. That’s hundreds of bucks Hadi is out.

Hard fail.

Then my stomach swoops, because it’s him. The guy I’d thought, for a hopeful split-second, had been at the bar last night.

Now is not the time to be kicking yourself.

Now is the time to open the goddamn door, and make some coffee, and steal some of the weapons-grade painkillers Hadi keeps in her desk. Hangover Headaches are the worst. The fact that I did it to myself makes it even worse-er. Worser? Whatever, I hurt too much right now to care whether that’s a real word or not.

Worser-er than even that is that I look like something that crawled out from under my bed, and he looks unfairly delicious.

He’s in his usual uniform again today: a button-down, and a matched tailored-within-an-inch-of-its-life waistcoat and dress pants. This time it’s the hunter green with the yellow oversized check and matching shirt. Flattering, but not my fave of his looks.

The newspaper under his arm is in French today. He looks slightly desperate for his caffe tobio. That’s a short pull of espresso doppio’d into drip-coffee in equal amounts. Hard core. If I didn’t know what he was, I’d say it was a macho drink ordered to intimidate, like dudes who eat hot sauce that’s too spicy to look cool. But who knows what caffeine does to people like him? Maybe coffee alone isn’t enough to give him his morning perk. Maybe he just likes the taste.

“Sorry,” I say, as I swoop in.

The split-tongue steps back, gesturing to the door. This close to him, I can tell he’s got that weird aftershave on. It’s smoky-amber, with musky deep undertones of fermenting grapes that one field trip too many to peninsula wineries has tattooed on my brain.

“You’re late—” he starts, and I shouldn’t call him a split-tongue, even in my own head. He doesn’t lisp.

What he does do is talk in a skin-tinglingly precise accent that’s British in the vowels and hard Canadian on the consonants. It’s arresting, and lyrical. He even rolls his ‘r’s a little and, okay, I have wondered how you get a forked tongue to do that. The point is, it’s the kind of accent no one else has had in decades. Maybe centuries, I don’t know.

I mean, I have no idea what the dude’s name is, let alone his age. Kind of a rude thing to ask.

“I’m aware,” I grunt.

“Allow me—” It takes me a second to realize he’s trying to get at the door to, what, open it for me? Like some sort of romantic hero?

Oh, no.

No.

That’s cute.

That will not do.

This close, I can feel his body heat , and my brain is seriously not online enough to separate last night’s fantasies from reality, and arrggggh, it’s too early for this.

“I got it,” I say, a bit stronger than is polite.

His eyes snap wide. This close, the sunflower yellow of them is flecked with sparks of warm amber. He blinks a few times, the gold-leaf freckles that dance across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose getting lost in a mortified flush.

Shit, I’m being an asshole.

“Sorry,” I say again. “Can you just… let me actually unlock it?”

He stands there, all handsome and forlorn. “I thought you might be ill—”

I drag my under-caffeinated gaze from his mouth—this close I can see that the upper peak of his lips are so perfectly shaped they look like they’ve been tattooed there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen his elegant face composed into anything except a politely thoughtful expression of near-nothingness, sort of like if resting bitch face had a refined older brother. But now he looks hang-dog.

I want coffee.

I want him to back off.

(I want to kiss him.)

I’m so hungover.

He is so pretty in the morning light.

I’m being so uncooly feral.

What is wrong with me today? I bet if I’d actually gotten laid last night I wouldn’t be staring at him like he’s the last donut.

“Alright, come in.”

He heads for his usual front corner table. He must know he looks good sitting there. Possibly he likes this table because he likes his back to the wall, and a full view of the street. Hadi painted the support columns of the old black building the same blazing bronze as her logo, and they do frame the view of the street nicely. And the view of him, from the sidewalk. Or maybe he just likes the warmth from the windows—it could be a cold-blooded lizard thing. But honestly, I really think he’s doing it just to torment me.

‘Cause when the sun hits the front of the building just right, it sparks off his spun-copper hair, lines his high cheekbones and beaky nose in gold, gilds his shining freckles, and lends a flush of warmth to his otherwise cream-pale skin.

(What? I’m still a writer at heart. I’ve already decided exactly how I’d describe him on paper. Don’t judge me.)

God, I’m thirsty.

I lie to myself and pretend I mean I need something to drink.

The fact that I can almost hear the syrupy anime love theme every time I look at him is the unfairest kind of bullshit imaginable. I am a trashperson, lusting after him when the most we’ve ever spoken before today was the time he miraculously asked for a second caffe tobio (he’d had bruises under his eyes like thumbprints. I’d wanted to ask him if he was okay, but he was back to his table so quick and—)

Maybe Gem is right and I do need to lay off the romance novels.

(Never.)

Thirsty. Focus on the coffee.

Right.

Maybe I need a glass of ice-water instead.

Maybe just a whole-ass cold shower.

I get all of the gear flicked on, checking water levels and pulling the wands out of the sanitizer, then grind the first pot for the perc. As the espresso machine chugs its way to wakefulness, I peer into garbage cans and inspect tables. The till is all counted out neatly, with a post-it note reminding me to buy a roll of quarters stuck to the crisp purple stack of tens.

Obviously Min-soo closed last night, ‘cause she always kills it.

In the dark kitchen, I crank the industrial oven up as high as it will go to pre-warm, scoop dough from the huge bowl Min-soo left in the fridge last night onto trays, and climb the ladder to dump a burlap sack of fresh beans into the massive stainless steel bean roaster in pride of place in the corner of the kitchen.

In my back pocket, my phone starts playing a punk version of You’re the Cream in My Coffee. Shit. That’s my alarm to start the second batch of scones. Dammit. I don’t have time to let the oven preheat properly. I shove the tray in.

Then it’s back out to the front, where he is sitting primly in his corner, eyes on his newspaper.

Yeah, I’m a basic bitch and prefer coffee that’s more sugar and froth than bean juice, but there’s something so good about fresh-brewed black coffee first thing in the morning. That’s art in its own right, my loves. I interrupt the drip machine to pour myself a mug, and take one selfish minute to revel in a perfect sip.

But what is usually a soft symphony of my mornings is instead a self-inflicted cacophony. The plink of coffee into the carafe, the hiss of the espresso machine, the hum and clunk of the bean-roster in action, all punctuated by the crisp rustle of his newspaper? Agony.

A year ago, I would use this quiet time after the morning rush to work on my thesis. Before that, it would have been an essay, or a lab, or something else I’d procrastinated. Now, I have nothing to work on. Nothing to do but this. Nowhere to go but here. No career, no demand, no drive, just…

Me.

And him.

And the stretching, hissing, clunking, dripping, painful silence.

“Ugh, get your ass in gear, you embarrassment,” I mutter to myself.

“Beg pardon?” he asks, voice raised politely.

Shit.

“I said, uh, the espresso machine is warmed up. Caffe tobio?”

“Please.” He crosses his legs. There’s a flash of turquoise at his ankle. I only catch it for a second, but it looks like he’s wearing socks with cartoon dragons on them. Huh, okay… that’s more playful than I expected him to be.

“Coming right up.”

“I appreciate it. And you are well?” he says, which is the longest string of words I’ve ever heard out of him.

“Yeah.” I turn to the machine, tapping out a careful twenty-seven seconds with the toe of my chucks, timing as the espresso fills the demitasse. So I’m completely in my head, and totally not expecting it when his voice comes from somewhere much too close, just over my left shoulder.

“Oversleeping could be the sympto—”

“Gah!” I shout, and Christ no, the wand in my hand goes flying up, up, sprinkling boiling-hot grounds like freaking pixie dust.

He ducks and snaps the newspaper over his head as they rain down. The sharp clatter of the wand hitting the tile makes us both wince. In the aftermath we stare across the counter at one another, eyes wide, with what I assume are matching shocked expressions.

“Are you—” he starts again and I hold out a hand to stop him.

“I’m fine.”

“I’ve never known you to—”

“Shit, you’re chatty today,” I say, and it’s accidentally catty. He flinches, stung. A glob of espresso grounds plops off his shoulder and splats on the tile floor. “Sorry, sorry! That came out wrong. I’m not… I’m not having a good morning.”

“My apologies,” he murmurs mournfully, and aw, no.

“I’ll make you another one,” I say quickly. “On the house. Just… sit, and I’ll—”

“Perhaps I should go.” He lowers his paper and flicks grounds off the toe of his shoe. Oh, shit, are they expensive? Am I going to have to pay for, I dunno, shoe dry cleaning?

“No, please.” That lurch in my stomach again, and it’s only because a morning that has started terribly (and has only gotten worse) would really become awful if he wasn’t sitting in the sunlight, glimmering and reading. “Please stay.”

It would be just wrong.

“If you are ill, you ought to be taking care of yourself first,” he insists, instead of acknowledging my plea “Don’t you have a colleague who could cover—”

“I got a new alarm clock, I didn’t wake up, it’s fine, it doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.” He crunches the ruined paper in his hands, flexing and twisting. “In fact, I, er, perhaps it is time I confessed that… I smell something burning.”

“You smell burning?” I swig another mouthful of coffee from the mug I’d left by the till, and take a deep breath to calm myself. Wait. “I smell it, too.”

His gaze flicks to the door behind me, slit pupils dilating. “The kitchen.”

“The scones!” I squawk and spin on the spot. I slip in spilled espresso, toppling sideways. Before I can hit the ground, he lunges across the countertop, catching my arm in a grip that’s stronger than I think he realizes. It also prickles.

Trying to get my stupid feet under me, I catch the barest flash of red scale and black, long-tipped nails. Then his hand is back to a perfectly pale peach, fussily manicured, and human.

I shrug him off and push through the door. I shouldn’t have gasped, that was a stupid thing to do when the air is heavy with smoke. But I do, and jerk to a stop, folding double, coughing. He runs into me. I nearly topple. That prickling grip pulls me upright again.

“What can I do to—” he starts, but the fire alarm cuts him off.

“I forgot to turn down the goddamn oven!”

“I’ll get it.” He reaches out with his free hand. It’s covered in deep red scales, his fingertips ending in delicately curved claws.

Holy crap.

He’s dexterous, able to work the knob, then swing down the oven door. Black smoke, oily with burning fats, cascades into our faces. I cover my mouth and nose with the edge of my Henley, eyes burning.

“Oven mitts!” I warn.

“Not necessary!” He’s got the tray balanced in his claws. “Where should I—?”

And that’s when the fire suppression system kicks in.

It lets out a sharp, high whistle that startles him so badly the claws of the hand holding my arm spasm. They go right through my shirt and into flesh.

I holler.

Five things happen at once.

First, he drops the tray of scones. It clatters off the tile, sending burnt pucks of dough into the air. One smacks into my leg, and two pelt him as we dance away.

Second, he yanks his claws out of my arm, blood on the tips, and freaking hell, it stings.

Third, white foam pours from the pipes that ring the kitchen ceiling, coating every surface in a bitter-tasting cloud. Including us.

Fourth, the guy makes a sort of gurgling belch noise, then a sharp bony click accompanied by a spark that looks exactly like the kind you get from a lighter.

Fifth, he spits fire.

Right into the corner. Where the giant custom bean roaster is. The drum is perforated, and the beans inside it immediately go up in flames. They’re so hot they burn blue. The steel drum starts to goddamn melt.

Coc y gath,” he gasps in horror, dithering on the spot.

“Holy shit,” I say, clamping my hand down over the punctures in my arm.

“I’m terribly sorry!” he shouts over the sound of the alarm and the hiss of the foam deflating around us. “I didn’t mean to—I was startled!”

The urgency of the situation suddenly hits home, fire crawling up the wall toward the ceiling, and I scream: “Put it out!”

“What do you want me to do? Suck it back up?” he shouts back, all his cool calm evaporating in the heat of the inferno. “I’m a dragon, not a fire extinguisher!”

Well.

Fuck this meet-cute straight to hell, then.


Enjoyed this preview? Buy the book here.

JM FreyNine-Tenths: Book Preview
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TIME AND TIDE now in Audiobook Format

TIME AND TIDE now in Audiobook Format

The audiobook has arrived!

I really enjoyed listening to the auditions, and was delighted that we cast the incomparable Hayden Bishop to narrate the book. They’ve done a wonderful job, and it’s a really enjoyable interpretation of the story. I loved hearing what they picked out of the text, what they chose to emphasize, and how they brought my favourite lines to life!

You can find the audio book for sale at:

SPOTIFY | KOBO | AUDIBLE / AMAZON | LIBRO.FM | AUDIOBOOKS.COM | STORYTEL | … or wherever else you like to listen.

And if you have a Spotify Premium subscription, you can listen to the whole thing here for no extra charge.

Happy listening, everyone!

-J.M. Frey

JM FreyTIME AND TIDE now in Audiobook Format
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BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: Nine-Tenths Releasing June 30th

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: Nine-Tenths Releasing June 30th

I am extremely delighted to announce that I have decided to indie publish my contemporary queer romantasy novel NINE-TENTHS, just in time for Pride Month!

Those of you who have been following me for a while may know that I wrote this book during the first lockdown in 2020, revised and polished it in 2021, and began to query it to agents and publishers shortly thereafter. Based on the response I got in my rejection letters, lots of people loved the story, the voice, and the characters, but it was apparent that the book was too niche-y for mainstream publishing. The book has received lots of praise from beta readers, agents, and readers on Wattpad alike, and so I decided it deserved to reach the audience it was meant for.

I have spent the last year working on getting the manuscript up to snuff and teaching myself all manner of new kinds of software and publication processes, and I am very pleased to say that I think I am going to put out a really pretty little book.

The book drops June 30th 2025 on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited; Paperback and other eBook Formats Wide Release on September 30th, 2025.

📘PRE-ORDER THE BOOK ON KINDLE

💙SHELVE THE BOOK ON GOODREADS

Additionally, my PR company Gay Romance Reviews is looking for people eager to spread the news about the book, and celebrate the release with me!

📣JOIN THE PROMO TOUR AND/OR RECIEVE AN ARC

About the Book:

Colin Levesque is at loose ends. He’s finished university, but has no career; he adores romance novels, but he’s crap at relationships; and his prickliness is a detriment at the café where he’s making ends meet. He also has a crush on his regular Dav, a homo draconis who comes in every morning to read his newspaper, sip his double-strong coffee, and stare longingly at Colin in return.

So it figures that the day Colin gets up the courage to do something about the sexual tension simmering between them, he also learns that Dav has an embarrassing habit of hiccupping fire when he’s nervous. Which, in this case, destroys the fancy custom-made bean roaster. When Dav volunteers to take over the coffee roasting with his fire-breath, being squished together in the hot, cramped kitchen leads to even hotter kisses.

Everything’s finally happening for Colin—until people start claiming the dragon-roasted coffee has cured their genetic ailments. As their budding relationship struggles under the scrutiny of scientists and media, the hype around the coffee leads the lovers to be inducted into a centuries-old conspiracy: dragon-roasted food has always healed humans. And the most powerful draconic nobles have been withholding this symbiotic advantage to keep themselves on top. Colin and Dav are determined to expose the truth, but if they’re not careful, their objections could goad power-mad monarchs into destroying everything they hold dear.

Including each other.

JM FreyBOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: Nine-Tenths Releasing June 30th
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