Cane23

It was the first SA contest I actively followed as a member reader at GA, and it was so much fun. @Mark Arbour's story was definitely one of the best that year.

This change of hearts, slowly accepting the bond that connects the three of them, is amazing. Even more beautiful is how it shapes their communication - they become considerate, tender, caring… even respectful. Not that 'the thing' didn’t try to separate them; if anything, it only made their relationship stronger.

Reading the epilogue, I remembered a line Alexander said about Lyn, just before that disastrous meeting with Brad: “And you have these strong beliefs. Once someone is good in your eyes, only something earth-shattering can change your view. You saw him as this great person, this amazing guy, right? While I was your demon. Always your demon”. The epilogue confirms these Alexander's words - it’s about how Lyn loves. We can see now that, Lyn’s “strong beliefs” aren’t moral principles so much as fixed emotional verdicts. Once he places someone into a role - the good one, the chosen one, the ideal - that role hardens. It becomes a lens through which everything else is filtered. With Brad, that lens cracked painfully. With Alexander, it simply… shifted owners. The important thing is - Lyn hasn’t moved from illusion to clarity - he’s moved from one absolute to another. In the epilogue, Alexander is no longer the demon - he’s the husband, the figure Lyn is proud of, praises, almost reveres. And while Alexander does deserve love, respect, and admiration, what’s slightly unsettling (and very on-brand for Lyn) is the totality of it. There’s little ambivalence, little space for contradiction. Lyn loves Alexander with the same all-in certainty he once reserved for Brad. What’s changed in the epilogue isn’t Lyn’s psychology, but his luck. This time, the person at the center of his belief system is someone capable of carrying that weight - older, more self-aware, more grounded than Brad ever was. Alexander can live with being adored without being mythologized too far, or at least he can push back when needed. Lyn still moves between extremes, but @Laura S. Fox quietly suggests that adulthood doesn’t always mean shedding your flaws. Sometimes it means finding someone whose flaws interlock with yours without shattering the whole structure...and that’s very Misaligned - not a clean arc of self-improvement, but a compromise between temperament and love. So, Lyn doesn’t “grow out” of himself. He doesn’t undergo a personality overhaul, a therapeutic breakthrough, or a moral re-education. What changes is his relationship to truth, not his temperament. Lyn remains prone to absolutism in love, emotionally loyal to his own internal narratives, slow (sometimes painfully slow) to revise first conclusions and more observant than interpretive (he sees but often misreads) - that’s consistent from college to the epilogue. What finally realigns him with Brad and Alexander isn’t maturity in the conventional sense, but clarity without illusion. The truth doesn’t transform Lyn's personality - it stabilizes it. It removes the emotional static that kept him misaligned with both men for years. With the myths gone, he can finally stand in the same emotional present as his friends, rather than living half in memory and half in longing. That’s why the ending feels earned rather than redemptive. It’s not “Lyn becomes better.”, it’s - Lyn finally stops being wrong about the most important things. And for someone like him, that’s growth enough. Finally, to be totally fair to Lyn - being loved by Lyn is not casual, not partial, not negotiable...it’s total investment. That’s why the gesture with Alexander’s family matters so much. No one asks him to do it. No one even expects it. And that’s the point - Lyn’s love expresses itself through repair, he tries to heal fractures that predate him, that technically aren’t his responsibility at all. It’s almost instinctive - if you are his, then your wounds become part of his moral landscape. There’s something quietly radical about that. Lyn isn’t a grand romantic in the performative sense - he’s not making speeches or demanding devotion in return. Instead, he acts, he intervenes, he does emotional labor on behalf of others without announcing it, sometimes without fully realizing how extraordinary it is. Of course, this generosity has a shadow side because it can tip into self-erasure or place an impossible weight on the beloved. But in Alexander’s case, it reads less like self-sacrifice and more like chosen responsibility. Lyn isn’t trying to fix Alexander instead of him; he’s standing beside him and saying, you don’t have to do this alone anymore. That’s why being loved by Lyn is such a rare prize. You don’t just get affection - you get advocacy. Someone who will argue your case even when you’re not in the room. Someone who believes you’re worth reconciliation, even with people who failed you first. Love, for him is not a feeling - it’s a decision to carry part of another person’s unfinished history. And very few people are capable of loving like that without keeping score.

You've taken us somewhere between fantasy, reality, and drunken memory… Dennis and Klebber are stuck in that space between the past and moving forward. I hope we don’t have to wait long for the next chapter.

Alex is named after Alexander, the man who saves Brad’s heart, but more deeply, Alex is named after the man who made it possible for Lyn to stop confusing love with longing. And the beauty is that no one in the room is threatened by that meaning, that’s not just homage - that’s harmony. Nevertheless, it's wrong to read Alexander purely as “the savior” - although medically, yes, he saves Brad’s life. But the novel is careful not to let this slide into myth. What the name does instead is express gratitude without debt. Earlier in the novel, Alexander and Brad were linked through Lyn’s conflict - here, they are linked through continuity. The name doesn’t overwrite Brad’s role as father; it doesn’t diminish Alexander. It quietly acknowledges that both matter, in different, non-competing ways. Finally, one last mirror in the story! 🙂 Alexander’s transformation mirrored in the child - it's another subtle layer... young Alex embodies traits associated with Alexander - but softened. He's serious, observant, quietly ethical...admired rather than feared. Alexander, in youth, was rigid, intimidating, emotionally armored. Alex (Brad and Bella's son) carries the best of him, stripped of the defenses. In that sense, as I've already said, the name isn’t just homage - it’s redemption by inheritance. Alexander’s legacy isn’t brilliance or control - it’s steadiness, care, and presence.

Misaligned is a character-driven drama centered on three men whose lives have been intertwined since their college years: Lyn, an intelligent but emotionally unreliable narrator; Brad, charismatic and elusive; and Alexander, brilliant, disciplined, and quietly intimidating. Told through two parallel timelines, the present and a series of memory chapters, the story gradually reveals how friendship, rivalry, desire, and misunderstanding shaped their bond long before they understood what they were losing. The dual structure allows the past to echo constantly into the present, not as nostalgia but as unresolved tension. Lyn notices details, gestures, and words with precision, yet repeatedly draws the wrong conclusions - making memory itself an active, unreliable force in the narrative. A quiet melancholy runs through the story, not as despair but as delayed understanding - the realization that clarity often arrives too late to change what mattered most. Despite its emotional depth, Misaligned is never heavy-handed. @Laura S. Fox's writing is marked by wit and dry humor, softening the drama with sharp dialogue and human warmth. At its core, the story is not about betrayal or grand gestures, but about emotional timing - about growing out of alignment with oneself and others, and the difficult, hopeful work of realignment. This is @Laura S. Fox ’s most accomplished work to date - confident, psychologically precise, and quietly resonant. Misaligned lingers long after the final page, carried by its melancholy, its intelligence, and its deep understanding of how love, memory, and time shape who we become.

Watched the opening of the Winter Olympics last night! I love the Canadian outfits. 😍 Since my country isn’t exactly a winter sports powerhouse, I’ll be cheering for Slovenia (my mom is from there)… and for Canada too - because I really like the people! 🙂

In the Balkans, we usually resolve these situations with violence… Just kidding! 😁

Aww...

The Darcy–Elizabeth parallel has always made sense for early Misaligned - pride, misreading, wounded intelligence, attraction filtered through judgment. Alexander as the “too-controlled, too-superior” figure; Lyn as the sharp observer who thinks he sees through him. That’s very Austen...desire delayed by ego and social armor. But this latest chapter...that’s absolutely Much Ado About Nothing energy - Beatrice and Benedick all over the place. In Much Ado, banter isn’t flirting-lite - it’s foreplay and warfare at once. Beatrice and Benedick only allow themselves closeness through wit. That’s exactly where Lyn and Alexander are now. Talking about furniture in the middle of charged physical proximity isn’t random, it’s - a refusal to be sentimental, shared intellectual language...a way of saying “I see you, and I’m not afraid to stay” without saying it. Only characters who are deeply matched can do that without killing the tension. With anyone else, it would feel absurd - with them, it sharpens it. There’s also something very Shakespearean in how this chapter treats passion - It’s intense, but not sacred, allows humor inside desire, refuses the idea that sex must be hushed, poetic, or solemn to be meaningful. That’s a sign of maturity; they’re not worshipping each other anymore - they’re choosing each other with eyes open. So, Lyn and Alexander being able to debate furniture mid-foreplay - it's basically Beatrice saying she’d rather hear a dog bark than a man swear he loves her - until she meets the one man who can keep up. 😁 This chapter made me think about third relationship in this triangle - Alexander-Brad bond. On the surface, what Lyn sees (and what the narrative allows us to see) is rivalry, contempt, Alexander “bringing Brad down,” intellectual superiority weaponized. From Lyn’s POV, it reads as dominance, even cruelty. But when you step back, a different pattern emerges. Alexander and Brad don’t share a verbal or intellectual intimacy - they don’t have banter, or confessions, or even clarity. What they have is action-based loyalty. Brad bringing food to a sick Alexander - not announcing it, not dramatizing it... is care stripped of self-awareness. He doesn’t name love; he performs it. Alexander choosing the heart over the brain because of Brad is monumental - a life choice shaped by someone else’s existence. That’s real love - just not the kind Lyn would ever recognize easily, because it doesn’t speak his language. Their hostility is actually a sign of intimacy without tools. They are too close, too entangled, too mutually threatening to be polite - they clash constantly, but they never disengage. So, that friendship love between Alexander and Brad is absolutely real. Maybe the most stable love in the book, ironically, because it doesn’t need resolution or consummation - it simply endures, quietly shaping lives.

I just read what you wrote - your writing speaks for itself.

I’m wondering - as the late king’s second son, is Prince Rae an heir to the throne, or is his older sibling still alive?

Time is not infinite for any of them - it is so beautifully said! Brad knows he is dying (or at least knows death is now a real presence). And faced with that, he does something painfully on-brand for him - he refuses complexity and reaches for the last moment when life felt simple, aligned, safe. That moment is before the split, before Lyn’s confession, before the insult about Lyn’s mother...before shame, violence, queerness, and adulthood fractured them. In that frozen frame Lyn is straight, Brad is the center, Alexander is background noise and nothing has been irreversibly said. By insisting Lyn is straight (practically, since the first day at the airport), Brad isn’t denying Lyn - he’s denying the event that ended his life as he understood it. The wedding isn’t a beginning for Brad; it’s a terminal ritual - marriage, illness, adulthood... all of it signals closure, not promise. So, he pulls Lyn back in not to resolve things, but to re-enact 'old times' - banter without consequences, physical proximity without naming desire and emotional intimacy without truth. That also explains why he avoids real conversations, pretends nothing happened, never truly apologizes and collapses into rage when confronted. Truth would move time forward - Brad can’t afford that. Brad doesn’t want Lyn as he is, he wants Lyn as he was, because that version belongs to a world where Brad still had a future. It is a dying man trying to relive the last days when he felt whole, even if that means erasing the truth of the person he loves. Lyn comes back thinking he’s facing the past, but Brad is trying to live inside it. Nevertheless, Lyn is not returning to relive the past - he’s returning to seal it. When he thinks “closure,” what he actually means is not truth, not confrontation, not healing-through-exposure. It’s something much more restrained, almost procedural - I will witness the ending, and then I can finally stop carrying this. That’s why his intention is so modest on the surface - see Brad married, prove to himself that Brad has moved on and confirm that nothing more is required of him. He doesn’t want answers, apologies and... he definitely doesn’t want emotional excavation. For eight years, Lyn has been living around the past, not inside it - useless therapy, relationships without depth, a body built as armor and career built as legitimacy. All of that says... I survived - now please don’t make me reopen the wound. So, when the wedding invitation comes, Lyn’s logic is - if I can attend the wedding without breaking and if I can smile, shake hands, leave...then the past is officially finished. It’s self-preservation, and crucially - Lyn believes closure can happen without speech, he thinks presence alone is enough. Lyn’s desire for closure without digging is also a quiet lie he tells himself, not because he secretly wants Brad back - but because the insult, the punch, the erasure of his love, and the wound around his mother were never metabolized. You can’t put a full stop on a sentence that was never finished. Finally, Alexander is the only one who enters this reunion with a forward-facing logic. Not hopeful, not nostalgic, not frozen - curious, deliberate, and resolved. Unlike Brad and Lyn, Alexander has learned something painful but essential - truth alone doesn’t move Lyn, confrontation shuts him down and moral arguments make him retreat into composure. So, Alexander does something both risky and grown-up - he leads with desire, not accusation. Mature Alexander doesn’t beg, doesn’t demand closure, doesn’t rehash college - he seduces because seduction is permission. “I wanted to see how this is going to end” - Alexander doesn’t need a guaranteed outcome anymore. He’s not chasing the fantasy of “us” - he’s willing to witness the truth, whatever it is. Alexander says - I’m done living inside unfinished sentences. And that’s why, no matter the outcome with Lyn, Alexander is already changed - while Brad collapses, and Lyn is forced, finally, to stop running from the end he thought he could choreograph.

This is the genre I’ve really started enjoying here on GA! The plot is very interesting. I’ll admit, I was a bit confused at first because of the mixed timelines -there was a moment when I thought Willem was talking to the prince in jail. Going back to this chapter, I realized the prince is actually Reamande, and the mysterious voice from the other cell is Richard. I’m really looking forward to seeing how the adventure unfolds!

This chapter already behaves like an ending, just not a chronological one - it’s a terminal image. Most stories end with reconciliation, revelation or loss. This chapter ends with proof. If Misaligned cut to black here, the story wouldn’t feel unfinished because the question wouldn’t be what happened, it would be how did something this real get lost? Cinema loves that kind of ending...three boys on a beach, laughing, sunlit, unburdened - not because it resolves conflict, but because it confirms authenticity. Their friendship was real and that’s all the audience (readers) actually needs. This chapter hurts because it proves the tragedy wasn’t inevitability...it wasn’t incompatibility...it wasn’t lack of love. It was timing, fear, silence - and men too young to understand that some alignments don’t come twice. This chapter doesn’t explain the pain; it invalidates the excuses Lyn has used to live with it.

There is so much more to people than the masks they show. I really like the progression you create in this story - starting with a marriage trapped in routine, moving through a family reunion that helps heal their relationship, and ultimately renewing their intimacy. Another great story, @Boy Mercury X!

Wow, what an exciting chapter! It’s so good to see Altair finally maturing - and Cane… how did he get so smart?! 😁

Brad’s behavior makes sense once we accept he is living with a foreshortened sense of time...not consciously heroic - viscerally urgent: drinking too much, pushing his body (volleyball, hiking...), sexual recklessness and emotional volatility. These are not random flaws - they are symptoms of temporal collapse. Brad is not thinking “I might die” - he is living as if tomorrow is not guaranteed. That’s why his life has always looked like a party teetering on the edge of disaster. Nevertheless, understanding Brad doesn't mean absolving Brad. Bella is still harmed; Lyn is still wounded and Alexander is still destabilized. Brad’s illness contextualizes his recklessness - it does not sanitize it... which is why the chapter doesn’t ask us to forgive Brad fully - it asks us to see him clearly. Once we know this, earlier scenes reframe themselves - cliff hiking stops being carefree masculinity, it becomes flirtation with mortality. Excessive charm becomes a bid to be remembered; cruel jokes become panic attacks in disguise while sexual acting out becomes proof-of-aliveness. Brad wasn’t chasing pleasure; he was outrunning disappearance. But Lyn, being Lyn is doing something he has done his entire life “Were you trying to push her away by doing those things with Luke?” - reframing harm as intention, searching for a noble motive behind cruelty, preferring tragic coherence over moral messiness. This is Lyn’s defense mechanism as an intellectual and as a survivor of emotional chaos. Because if Brad is simply selfish sometimes, Lyn must accept love can coexist with harm, understanding, doesn’t equal safety, affection doesn’t guarantee care. That’s a harder truth than heartbreak. Very important, @Laura S. Fox doesn't use Brad’s cardiomyopathy melodramatically. She avoids countdown theatrics or guilt manipulation. Instead, the illness functions symbolically as the end of Brad’s centrality, and the beginning of his clarity. Brad has always feared being forgotten, now, ironically, he’s the most generous he’s ever been. His confession reframes his past cruelty not as malice, but as panic, fear of irrelevance, terror of joy happening without him. This line is the emotional thesis of Brad as a character “I wanted to be the source of that happiness or else they’d forget me soon.” - that’s a child clinging to light. Brad, the least introspective of the three, becomes the clearest witness. He sees Alexander’s romantic nature (before Lyn ever names it), Lyn’s happiness (before Lyn allows himself to feel it) ...the difference between jealousy and love. And when he says, “I know I care about you, but it’s nothing compared to what he feels for you” - this is Brad stepping out of the triangle. Not in defeat but in acceptance. That’s why the “dying wish” line works emotionally even though it sounds jokey - it’s Brad choosing alignment over rivalry for the first time in his life.

You’ve made me feel like shit for all those comments about Brad (even though I’ve really tried to see him as human). In the end, maybe my comparison to Commedia dell’arte at the beginning wasn’t an exaggeration after all - Ridi, Pagliaccio! 😢

I think it’s because they function more as armor, similar to American football gear, than as standard uniforms. Takes some time to take it off, no easy quckie! 😁

Nope 😁 And it’s not Lynton either!

This chapter is a major psychological and character trial for all three of them. It isn’t only Jake who is forced to confront his fears and insecurities, but also Theodor and Vince - who, unexpectedly, move beyond accusation and find their way to empathy, support, and understanding. They may not be officially mated yet, but the bond between them is already very strong.

Zach Grayson is a soap-opera actor at a crossroads. His career (and his character) hangs in limbo - obey the producers, play it safe, and wait for a coma storyline to revive both his role and his relevance… or walk away, return to his theatrical roots, and risk being quietly erased from the industry altogether. Lost in this uncertainty, Zach travels back to his hometown for the funeral of his former drama teacher - a professor whose faith in him once shaped everything he believed about art, ambition, and himself. What begins as a formal, almost perfunctory goodbye quickly turns into a life-altering reunion. Old assumptions fracture, long-buried emotions resurface, and repulsion gives way to possibility - then to desire, tenderness, and truths long avoided. Is this return merely a detour, or the beginning of something braver and more honest? Charming, romantic, and delightfully witty, this story explores the cost of compromise, the pull of unfinished lives, and the courage it takes to choose authenticity - onstage and off.

After Brad’s drunken cruelty and the mother-insult (a psychic wound), the present-day confrontation and truth spilling out, Lyn’s flight response kicking in again...this chapter functions as a deep breath. Not filler or nostalgia but regulated emotional space. @Laura S. Fox says to the readers - you’re allowed to rest here for a moment. These people were once capable of gentleness. That matters, because without this chapter, the story risks becoming only about damage. This memory insists on capacity for care, which is crucial if a happy, or even humane, ending is going to feel earned. October/November, post-summer, post-mother’s death looming - this is the threshold moment. This is the last time tenderness exists without cost, which makes it soothing and ominous at once. This chapter restores trust after cruelty, reminds us why these people loved each other, prevents Brad from becoming a pure villain, prevents Alexander from becoming a cold manipulator and prevents Lyn from being only a wound-with-legs. For us (the readers), it says - you’re not foolish for caring about them; for @Laura S. Fox, it says - I’m allowed to remember softness without invalidating pain. This is not the calm after resolution; it’s the calm that makes resolution possible. With this chapter the ending can be framed as return, not escape; healing becomes rediscovery, not invention and love is something they once knew how to do. Even if they fail later, and they do - this chapter proves that the system was not always broken and that’s why a hopeful ending is not naïve here. It’s not “they lived happily ever after.” ... it's - they learned how to stop running from what once felt safe. This chapter reframes escape. Present-day Lyn escapes because truth overwhelms him and intimacy threatens his self-story. Memory-Lyn stays in the room, in the bed, in discomfort...in silence. That contrast is healing in itself. It whispers to us - Lyn was capable of staying once, he might be again.