Literary Fiction - Stories

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.

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.

Under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Benjamin and Alexander built a life behind the word roommate. Afghanistan cost them the rest of it. Now, every evening at dusk, Benjamin sits by a river with the only photograph of the day he let himself be seen.

He kept the photograph. The river keeps the rest.

Seventeen years ago, Tyler was Martin’s high school drama club rival, accusing him of stealing the role he deserved. Now in their 30s, Martin has no interest in reconnecting with the guy who made his school years miserable. But when their employers team up to create a theater program for underprivileged youth, Martin and Tyler are forced to work together. It doesn’t help that Tyler is still cute as hell.

As old rivalries give way to some kind of friendship, Martin is plagued by painful memories of the past—and increasingly aggressive fantasies about his former nemesis. Have these theater nerds grown up at all?

Brick has a husband and a man on the side, Vincent, the client across the table. On a trip in Italy for a conference, Pompeii is not on the original itinerary, but Brick needs the distraction. Somewhere between the Forum and a tree off the path, he tries to remember which fire he came here to let burn out.

Behind the Iron Curtain, Poland, 1983. The country is under martial law. This is not a war of armies and battlefields, but a conflict between the state and its own society. In a remote military unit, twenty-one-year-old Janusz is trying to survive the army, the system, and himself. Then Rafał arrives. What begins as fascination soon becomes something far more dangerous: desire, fear, tenderness, and a relationship neither of them fully understands.

Teacher Christopher Edwards believed his life began in the seaside town of Penmere. When memories return beneath the ancient Tor, he discovers another truth: he has lived before.

Across two thousand years, he and one other soul have found each other again and again, only to be torn apart. At the heart of the mystery lies one act of unbearable grief, when a priest's desperate refusal to accept death transformed love into an endless cycle of remembrance.

Christopher must decide whether the life he is living belongs to memory or to choice. For the first time in centuries, love may offer not a beginning, but an ending.

For many of us, our public personae and our intimate lives may be radically different; the gap between what others see and expect of us and the life we really lead may result in misunderstanding of who we are. Over two weekends, two weeks apart, this story follows three ordinary young gay men and their secret lives, their anxieties, their desires and obsessions, and, of course, their yearning for a long-term lover.

At twenty, I wrote my thirty-year-old self a letter. At forty, I found it. And here's my reply, one the laws of time won't let me send, but one that I owe him anyway.

Yorkshire, 1901. A baronet's younger son learns the duties of an estate he will never fully inherit. A groom who survived the Boer War tends horses he has known longer than the young master himself.

Between them: the precise distance that rank requires, and everything that accumulates in the space it creates.

Loose Box is a quiet story about two men who never say what they mean — because one has no words for it, and the other already knows.