Kevin Snell

They met at the café at seven. Julien was already there, standing outside with his pack on and a coffee in his hand, looking at the mountains he had looked at every morning for years and hadn’t stopped finding them worth looking at. He handed Oliver a second coffee. Oliver hadn’t asked for it. The coffee was black and burned his lip on the first sip. He drank it standing next to a man he’d met yesterday. The morning was cool. Above the town the early light had reached the peaks but not the stree

He took a rest day on day fifteen. The town was larger than the villages he had passed through. The main street held two cafés, a boulangerie, and a pharmacy whose green cross blinked on and off. In front of the church there was a square where old men sat on benches in the morning sun. He had checked into a hotel the evening before and slept in a proper bed with sheets that smelled of detergent and a pillow that was too soft after two weeks of refuge bunks. He woke late. Nine-thirty. He couldn’t

That's how I was trying to write him lol

He woke in the dark under a weight. The arm lay across his waist with the whole mass of the man behind it, and it didn’t adjust when Evan moved and it didn’t check on him. He lay inside the weight of it, and the weight went on being only weight, and behind it a chest rose and fell against his back on its own slow schedule, asleep, unbothered, going nowhere. The ceiling was wrong. The radiator ticking somewhere in the wall was wrong, and the light around the curtain was the orange of a

The Queyras was different. Oliver felt it on the morning of day ten, when the trail climbed out of the valley where he had slept and crossed into terrain that didn’t welcome him. The Mercantour had been generous—green valleys, reliable water, the softening presence of trees. The Queyras offered none of this. The vegetation was sparse. The rock was exposed. The sky above the ridgelines was so large that it made the land beneath it look provisional, as though the mountains were a temporary arrange

Thank you!

The days began to lose their edges. In London, days had bled into each other through the anaesthetic of routine. Here it was the opposite—each day was so full of physical information that Oliver couldn’t always remember which vista belonged to which afternoon, which descent had ended at which valley, whether the river gorge with the waterfall had been yesterday or the day before. He walked eighteen kilometres on day seven, twenty on day eight, nineteen on day nine. He knew the numbers becau

The bag had been under the bed for three months. It came out with a grey seam of dust along one side, and Evan stood in the cold of the flat and hit it twice with the flat of his hand. The dust went up into the light and came down again on everything. A boarding pass sat in the side pocket. Dublin to Chicago, never used, a flight Nolan had booked for the two of them the summer before last and then hadn’t wanted to take. Evan took it out and held it, and then he put it on the bed, and then h

lol... we are getting somewhere, I promise.

He woke sore but differently sore. The pain had migrated overnight, reorganising itself from emergency into something steadier. His thighs were still tight, but the tightness was informational now rather than prohibitive. His heels were raw. His shoulders carried the memory of the pack’s weight even before he lifted it. But the body’s report had changed in tone. Yesterday it had been a list of failures. Today it was an inventory. Here is what hurts. Here is what works. He ate breakfast in t

Nope! An online freeby!

He walked seventeen kilometres the first day and it nearly finished him. The trail left the hills above Nice and entered the Mercantour through a valley that climbed steadily for six hours. Oliver walked it the way he walked to the tube. The pace was consistent and the stride was consistent and his eyes stayed on the path ahead, covering ground as though ground were the point. He checked his watch at regular intervals. He calculated remaining distance against elapsed time and adjusted his p

The message had been sitting at the bottom of the thread since Monday, and Evan had read it enough times that he’d stopped taking in the words. One coffee. Half five. Give it twenty minutes and either of us can call it, no hard feelings. His thumb rested over it without moving. Further up the screen was the line that had made him answer in the first place. One sentence, no hedge anywhere in it, and he’d written back inside a minute. I’m a top and I’d rather meet you than talk to a scre

Begin Again starts with one coffee. That had been the whole plan. Evan wasn't looking for complicated. He had enough of it—a life he'd never settled into, a house in Wicklow he didn't know what to do with, and a habit of leaving before anyone could ask him to stay. Then he meets Cian, an Irish arborist who is steady, direct, and clear about what he wants. One night becomes another morning, a spare shirt, and a man who won't pretend this is less than it is. The sex is easy. Letting Cian see him afterward isn't. Evan knows how to leave before anyone matters. Cian knows how much of that he'll tolerate.

I think pilgrimage would be a good description of it!

Thank you! ❤️

Thank you for making my morning! ❤️

The plane descended through cloud and then there was the coast. The blue had no equivalent in England. It was saturated past reason, as though someone had made an error in the colour settings and no one had corrected it. Oliver watched it from his seat and his chest loosened before his mind could intervene. His breathing changed. His body knew there was warmth down there through the aircraft’s pressurised skin. He hadn’t been south in two years. Nice-Côte d’Azur airport was small and bright

I'm new here and have too much time... let me know if I took this whole comment thing way too seriously, lol. Nos is good company. He knows the smart play is to shut up and he never once does it. The ring line gets him knocked off his chair and he goes straight back in with the mother joke. Real trait, real cost, and it tells me more about him than a paragraph of description would. Two things you might play with, both fixable in about ten minutes. The mirror explanation. Right now the physics of it walks across the emotional beat, which is him sitting there hating that he's got Andrea's eyes. That's the gut-punch of the whole chapter and the 'how it works' steps on it. I'd let him sit in it, ugly and unresolved, and move the reflection mechanics somewhere with less at stake. Or lose them entirely, honestly. Nobody's going to stop reading because they don't know why vampires don't show up in mirrors. The other's a habit rather than a fault. There's a decent amount of Nos realized, Nos figured, Nos knew, Nos remembered so that it is noticable. Those put a pane of glass between the reader and the thing. Most of them can just go and let the thing be the thing. Instead of "Nos realized he could see the little wrinkles on Luc's face, even without his glasses," give us the wrinkles, right there, suddenly sharp, and let the reader do the realizing. You already know how to do this, which is why I'm bothering to mention it. The lavender arriving twice before anyone explains what it means is exactly the right instinct. That one might just be my writing, but I operate on noticed what? knew what? remembered what? How did it make him feel, what did he see, smell, hear, think... Also, tiny one, there's a butler's hand at his temple that I'm fairly sure is meant to be Luc. Sven's the chef and no butler turns up anywhere else (this might just be me reading it wrong). Solid opening. Warm where it counts, mean where it needs to be, and the mark showing up already is a good place to leave a reader. And credit to everyone while I'm here. @kbois and @CassieQ on edits, @Thirdly, @Jason Rimbaud and @chris191070 betaing, with @LJCC, @drown, @Jack Poignet and @Headstall pitching in. The chapter reads clean and moves well, and that's almost never one person's doing. Thanks for the work, all of you, it shows! Looking forward to the next one, @BendtedWreath.

In my head... he just walked away. Not that he won't go back later—it's just what he needed to do in the moment. The weight of things becoming too much, so you stop, make a decision, and just... do.

Thank you!

Thank you!

My first chapter is up if anyone is looking for Sunday distraction. Hope everyone is having a great weekend! How We Became Ourselves ❤️ - KS

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, which Oliver would later consider appropriate. Not because Tuesdays held any significance in the taxonomy of the week, but because they were the day most likely to pass without being remembered. Thursdays carried the gravitational pull of Friday. But Tuesdays were administrative—the day the council collected recycling, the day his dentist sent appointment reminders, the day, apparently, that a marriage could be confirmed as finished and the confirmation could fee

Oliver's marriage ends and his job disappears on the same Tuesday. So he flies to France, straps on a pack, and starts walking. Somewhere in the French Alps he meets Julien, a man carrying his own weight, and the two of them figure out—slowly, carefully—whether they've got room for each other. Two grown men, a lot of hills, and the slow business of letting someone in.