introspective - Stories

In the Los Angeles summer of 1969, two straight men attempt to avoid Vietnam by deceiving the local draft board and pretending to be a gay couple. Their plans go about as smoothly as trying to keep peonies alive in Los Angeles.

Meet the Harding boys: Matt and his big brother Justin, their hunky dad Richard, and their fun-loving uncle Patrick.

When Matt gives his father a lavish vacation, it's meant to bring them closer -- but a secret plan to indulge a forbidden curiosity unsettles everything. An old passion reawakens in Richard, soon ensnaring Justin and Patrick too.

Sons collide with fathers, uncles with nephews, and brothers with each other. As the Harding men circle the same questions, the past simmers beneath the surface, threatening to redraw the boundaries of family, loyalty, and lust.

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.

Set in April 1848, the story opens on a fog‑bound morning in San Francisco’s Wentworth Hall, where Julian Wentworth wakes before dawn in a house ruled by discipline and silence. The estate is grand but cold, shaped by the rigid expectations of his powerful father. Julian moves through his morning with practiced composure, though a quiet tension lingers beneath everything — a sense that the household is shifting in ways he cannot yet name.

Seeing clearly what others ignore, feeling the weight of history, and refusing to lie to yourself about what the world has become.

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.

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.

After a long day of physical work, Mihai returns home and asks Lorenzo to kneel and remove his boots. What begins as a simple act of service becomes the first true test of the trust, shame, desire, and power growing between them.