Discovering Me #1
He only came back to get her ashes; he never thought he’d find a reason to stay.
Cole Alston swore he’d never return to his childhood home in rural North Carolina--until he inherits his mother’s hoarded property. He hopes to sell everything and use the money to start over in Canada, far away from his abusive ex-boyfriend. It’s a daunting task, and Cole has no idea where to start.
Luckily for him, the local antique store owner, Jeremy Collins, offers his services in sorting and selling the hoard in exchange for a fee. Their chemistry soon turns their professional relationship into a personal one, but Cole must overcome his past and his anxiety before he can accept a new man in his life.
Or the possibility of a happy future.
This title was previously published but no significant changes have been made.
Talk about an emotional read. Cole's past breaks your heart and Jeremy's past isn't exactly a sunny walk in the park either. They may have survived separately but together they begin to heal and thrive, but that doesn't mean everything is free and clear the minute they find each other. Unearthing Cole may be Cole's story and Understanding Jeremy may be told from Jeremy's side but you really need to read both books to have a complete story. There is only a few secondary characters but each one serves a purpose, none of them are there to just "pad the pages". So if you're looking for a sexy read that will tug at your heart, AM Arthur's Discovering Me duology is definitely for you, they burn up the pages and make your heart pound for multiple reasons, having a few tissues handy won't hurt either.
RATING:
AM Arthur
A.M. Arthur was born and raised in the same kind of small town that she likes to write about, a stone's throw from both beach resorts and generational farmland. She's been creating stories in her head since she was a child and scribbling them down nearly as long, in a losing battle to make the fictional voices stop. She credits an early fascination with male friendships (bromance hadn't been coined yet back then) with her later discovery of and subsequent love affair with m/m romance stories. A.M. Arthur's work is available from Carina Press, SMP Swerve, and Briggs-King Books.
When not exorcising the voices in her head, she toils away in a retail job that tests her patience and gives her lots of story fodder. She can also be found in her kitchen, pretending she's an amateur chef and trying to not poison herself or others with her cuisine experiments.
Chapter One
NO ONE ever expects to spend their thirtieth birthday in a crematorium, writing a check for their last eight hundred dollars, so that the people who took your mother’s dead body will hand it back to you in a little cardboard box.
Happy birthday to me.
It wasn’t quite the last of my money that purchased my mother back. My account still had a paltry eighty-six dollars and twelve cents, plus the four hundred in cash tucked into the zippered pouch in my suitcase. The money should let me rent a room in town long enough to clean up my mother’s property. So to speak. I just wanted the house and surrounding sheds clean enough for a local realtor to be able to put the whole sorry parcel of land on the market.
There was no way, I’d been told over the phone yesterday, it could be sold in its present condition. I hadn’t asked the woman from Connor Realty to elaborate. I had my own memories of my mother’s house to go on, plus the immense deterioration of the last two years since I’d been here. Two years since Dad died of a heart attack. Epic didn’t have enough letters to carry the weight of the fight I had with my mother after his death.
I left, hadn’t spoken to her since, and then she was dead. Her final “fuck you, Cole” came in the form of her will—she gave me ownership of her house and the undeveloped farmland it sat on. It might have been the solution to my own financial woes, if I hadn’t already known the disaster I’d find. Dad had been a mechanic and a collector; my mother was a housewife and a hoarder. Their house, barn, garage, two sheds, and surrounding woodsy property was the result of thirty-four years of accumulation.
I hadn’t driven out to see it yet, and my stomach was already in knots.
The box of ashes went on the backseat of my car, between my two suitcases and a box of cleaning products. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to put my mother. She wasn’t going up front with me, and the trunk was out of the question. Besides the weirdness of it, the trunk was already full of heavy-duty trash bags, packing tape, cardboard packing boxes, a shovel, and a box of books.
Franklin hadn’t changed much as a town, I noted as I drove through it. Same homes and offices and small shops. Same churches and Christmas decorations as I remembered growing up. Same restaurants dotted with cars in that odd, less busy time between breakfast and lunch. An antique store had popped up in the bottom floor of someone’s house, and the hardware store was shut down. A handmade sign hung in the window with Damned Chain Stores scrawled in black paint.
It made me smile.
I turned west out of town, toward the hillier, woodsy area and winding road that eventually led to my old homestead. As a child, I’d loved being out in the woods, miles from town, able to have adventures far from the chaos of my house. As a teen, I’d hated having to ride my bike into town just to hang with the few friends I’d cobbled together. They hadn’t minded my secondhand clothes or my odd mother who wore big straw hats all year long, or that I never invited them back to my house. Friends I’d lost touch with when I went six states away to college, where I discovered acceptance for the first time as a gay man. Then, during my sophomore year, I met Martin and began an eight-year-long nightmare I’d only just surfaced from.
The road curled like an S, and I slowed to negotiate the two turns. A familiar, barn-shaped mailbox came into view a hundred feet farther down. I turned on my blinker, even though the road was clear, and made a left onto a crushed-shell driveway I’d treaded a thousand times, both on rubber and on foot.
A wild lawn sprung up on both sides of the driveway, more closely resembling a wheat field than a yard. Grass, weeds, and wild bushes dotted the landscape between skeletal, leafless trees. It was all at least hip-height and probably hadn’t been cut in years. The lawn jungle hid the worst of the house from the casual passerby. I got a good look at my childhood home when the grass finally parted. Angry, helpless tears sprang up and stung my eyes.
The house was a Craftsman bungalow, two stories, with lots of front windows and a brick fireplace. I used to think it was one of the nicest houses in Franklin, even nicer than some of the homes built in town—until the hoard spilled from the inside of the house to the outside and maintenance stopped occurring with any regularity.
The next thing I saw was a VW bus parked beside the house, without wheels and mounted on cinderblocks, its interior packed with junk. The front porch was listing and the roof collapsing. A blue tarp had been erected over the front door to protect it from leaks, and more boxes and plastic containers stood beneath that, sentries to the front door. All the windows were blocked, either with curtains or boxes. Beyond the house, scattered in piles, were parts and appliances and bicycles and things I just didn’t recognize for the rust and weeds.
It was both better and worse than I’d expected.
The structure seemed sound, but I hadn’t seen the interior of the house yet and I dreaded it. I pinched my nose and dispelled the tears, unwilling to cry over this mess anymore than I already had, and got out of the car. It was warm for December, but I zipped up my coat anyway—for mental protection as much as physical. I already had on a pair of boots, jeans tucked in, and three pairs of rubber gloves stuffed into my coat pockets. I snapped a pair on as I trudged up to the front door.
I had a key, but it wasn’t necessary. The police had broken the front door down to get at my mother’s body. The door leaned in its frame, barely held up by strips of police caution tape.
My mother hadn’t died of any particular illness or malady, beyond her own mental disease. She’d tripped one day, hit some boxes, and they fell over on her. Trapped both her legs, and being both sixty-two and overweight, she hadn’t been able to get up or get them off. She died of dehydration twenty-four hours before the mailman noticed she hadn’t collected in a few days and called the sheriff.
Her cause of death had been my worst nightmare come true. Even worse than discovering, at this critical time in my own personal life, that she’d willed her entire mess to me. And why everything I owned was in two suitcases in my car next to my mother’s ashes.
The smell hit me when I reached the tarp. Pungent, sweet, cloying—the odors of death and decay and of rotting things. My rational brain knew the stink had existed long before my mother died on the floor, but it didn’t stop a flicker show of images from assaulting my mind. Images of Debbie Alston, my mother, dead and bloated, lying in her own waste in the same sea of rot she’d lived in for more than three decades.
That wasn’t quite right. The rot didn’t really happen until I went away to college, escaping their hoarding problem by disappearing into something else—something that became much, much worse. Then the dishes stopped getting washed, the refrigerator stopped being cleaned out, and no one could be bothered to haul trash bags to the town dump. The first time I returned to visit during Christmas break at college, freshman year, I cleaned and hauled trash. Then again during spring break. Between freshman and sophomore year, I stayed in Michigan for the summer, working and taking classes, so I didn’t see them again until the following Christmas. It was the last visit before I met Martin.
After that I didn’t go back until Dad’s funeral two years ago. I just couldn’t stand the memories, even if I’d thought it was safe to come to a place Martin could track me to. Home was gone. A disaster had taken its place.
I couldn’t walk under the tarp. And I really didn’t want to go inside that house.
Tires crunched up the seashell driveway, and I spun around, heart pounding. I wasn’t expecting anyone. The only people who knew I was in town were Penny Connor, the realtor, and the very grumpy woman at the crematorium.
“Oh God,” I said to no one. Martin had found me—he’d been trying for six months. He knew where I grew up. If he’d seen the obituary somewhere, he’d put two and two together, and he’d know where I was. My guts clenched.
Over the sea of grass, I spotted a blue work van heading toward me, growing larger by the second. I dashed back to my car on shaky legs and grabbed the keys out of the ignition. The keychain had a small can of mace attached, and I tucked that end carefully into the palm of my hand. Instinct told me to hide. I had plenty of places to burrow into and disappear, but I couldn’t seem to move.
The van parked perpendicular to my car. A door opened and shut, and a man came around the front. It wasn’t Martin Palone. My entire body felt lighter, like someone had lifted a wet blanket off me and let me breathe again. But this man was still a stranger on my land, and I didn’t let my guard down. He was in the neighborhood of my age, a little taller than me, with a shock of dark-brown hair and wide, thickly lashed eyes. He wasn’t handsome, exactly, but had a boyish charm to him, especially when he smiled. It released a pair of dimples that were incredibly appealing.
“You must be Cole Alston,” he said. His voice was lightly accented but not local to this part of North Carolina. It was more northern and hard to pinpoint on only five words.
“Yes, I am,” I said.
“Jeremy Collins. I own Lost Treasures Antiques in town.”
I shook his outstretched hand, tempted to relax a bit under that beguiling smile. Tempted, but I didn’t. He seemed like someone perfectly at ease in his own skin, which made me all the more self-conscious of the mess in and around me. “Nice to meet you.”
“I’m sorry about your mother. She came into the store sometimes. She was… a nice lady.”
His hesitation made my lips twitch. “She was definitely interesting, and thank you for your condolences, but I’m sure you didn’t drive out here just to offer them.”
“No, you’re right. I wasn’t sure how long you’d be in town, and I wanted to talk to you.”
“About?”
“This.” He waved his hand at the hoard, and his eyes lit up. He didn’t see the tragedy in it, or the horror.
“What about it?” I waited for the insults, for the inevitable slew of “how could you let this happen?” tirades I knew were waiting for me. I’ve heard variations on them my entire life.
“Like I said, I own an antique store, and I’ve come out here a few times trying to buy things from your mother.”
I burst into laughter, unable to help myself. Trying to buy something from my mother, whether it was a diamond tiara or a bag of rotten apples from the Big Bag grocery, was like trying to pan for gold in the Atlantic—pointless.
At least Jeremy seemed to see the humor in it, because he never stopped smiling. “Yeah, exactly. But folks in town still talk about your father and what a keen eye he had. There are treasures on this property, some things that could make you a decent pot of money, and I want to help you sell them. For a commission, of course.”
“I was just going to have a yard sale or something.”
“You could do that, but I’ve got connections to dealers in three states. Depending on what we find, you could get a lot more money for the antiques by going through me.” He cocked his head to the side like we were buds sharing a joke. “You can still yard sale the other stuff.”
I studied him; he seemed sincere in his loose jeans and cowboy boots and brown cotton coat. The solution to one of my biggest problems had just driven up in a big blue van. All I had to do was ask the Wizard for my courage and trust Jeremy not to screw with me.
Not an easy task, considering I’d spent eight years being screwed with on a daily basis by someone who was supposed to love me.
“What kind of money are we talking about?” I asked.
“I’ll show you.”
We walked through the weeds to a pile of machinery near the barn, twisted and rusted, and I didn’t see much to be saved. Jeremy tugged on a pair of work gloves, reached in, and spent a few minutes wrestling something out of the mess. He produced a bicycle frame, missing its seat and chain and tires, but otherwise intact.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked.
“Enlighten me.”
“It’s a Columbia from the 1950s. Intact, it would be worth a lot more, but some collectors will shine up parts and restore them. This frame alone could get you a hundred dollars.”
I stared at him. “For that?”
“For that. And this is only the first thing I saw. Who knows what else we could uncover in that barn, or those sheds?”
I saw the hunger in his eyes, the desire to go hunting for other treasures. It made him seem almost boyish, a kid on the verge of a trip to his very favorite amusement park. I just saw the dollar signs and an extra pair of hands getting me out from under this hoard.
“Okay.”
He blinked. “Really?”
“Yes, okay. We’ll need to arrange some sort of contract, though. I don’t want any confusion over your commissions or labor or whatever.”
“That’s fair. Why don’t we hammer it out over dinner at the Sow’s Ear.”
“Dinner?”
This was my first dinner offer in years, and I had no clue how to take it. No one in this town knew I was gay. I hadn’t come out before I left for college, and I hadn’t told anyone on my occasional visits since. Not even my parents. Martin had been a “friend from school” and then “my roommate.” And Jeremy didn’t strike me as being particularly queer.
Then again, I’d spent the last decade perfecting the art of not looking, so my own personal gaydar was pretty damn inaccurate.
“You do eat dinner, don’t you?” Jeremy asked.
“When I can afford it” very nearly slipped out. Instead, I said, “Yes.”
“Good. It’ll give you time to decide what you need me for, and I can make some phone calls. I know a few guys in Ohio who’d love to come down and pick through—”
Panic set my heart fluttering. “Wait, no.”
His eyebrows arched. “What?”
“Look, I don’t… this is all, um—”
“Overwhelming?”
“Shameful.”
I couldn’t believe I’d just said that. Out loud. To a stranger.
Jeremy nodded, more thoughtful than anything else. At least he wasn’t blatantly judging me for my family’s awful secret. “You don’t want a lot of strangers poking into your personal life.”
I didn’t know if he was really that observant, or if he’d seen hoarding shows on television. All that mattered was he got it—even if he didn’t know the comment extended far beyond the hoard in front of us. “Right, I don’t.”
“This is a lot of stuff for one person to haul out on their own.”
“Welcome to my world.” I jacked my thumb at the house and the countless hours of work waiting for me inside.
He slipped his hands into his rear jeans pockets and rocked back on his heels, head tilted to the sky. “How are you going to haul all of this to the dump on your own?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it.” Truth—and something I didn’t know how to solve without more money in my pocket. Some of those bags would be filled with rotten food, and they weren’t going anywhere near my car.
“Then meet me for dinner at the Sow’s Ear, at six o’clock, and I’ll have a proposal for you.”
“Jeremy—”
“If you don’t like my ideas, you won’t hurt my feelings. Promise. Just give me a chance to make this work for both of us.”
Something in his manner made me want to trust him. He seemed completely genuine, open, and reassuring. I didn’t trust him, but I wanted to. And it was just a proposal over a working dinner at the best barbecue place in town.
A little voice in the back of my mind said it was only fair to tell him his dinner companion wouldn’t be joining him in ogling the waitresses. I told that voice to shut the hell up, because it wasn’t really any of Jeremy’s business. “Okay, dinner at six.”
“Excellent.” He stood straighter, hands coming out of his pockets. “See you then.”
“Hey, wait,” I said as he turned to go. “Don’t forget your bike frame. If dinner doesn’t work out, it’s yours to keep.”
With a dimpled grin worthy of any movie star, he hefted the rusty frame and stowed it in his van. I stood by my car until he’d driven away. Even if Jeremy only found half a dozen valuables in that sea of junk, his help would be worth it. Worth it to help buy me out of the financial noose slowly tightening around my neck and get me far, far away from Martin Palone.
NO ONE ever expects to spend their thirtieth birthday in a crematorium, writing a check for their last eight hundred dollars, so that the people who took your mother’s dead body will hand it back to you in a little cardboard box.
Happy birthday to me.
It wasn’t quite the last of my money that purchased my mother back. My account still had a paltry eighty-six dollars and twelve cents, plus the four hundred in cash tucked into the zippered pouch in my suitcase. The money should let me rent a room in town long enough to clean up my mother’s property. So to speak. I just wanted the house and surrounding sheds clean enough for a local realtor to be able to put the whole sorry parcel of land on the market.
There was no way, I’d been told over the phone yesterday, it could be sold in its present condition. I hadn’t asked the woman from Connor Realty to elaborate. I had my own memories of my mother’s house to go on, plus the immense deterioration of the last two years since I’d been here. Two years since Dad died of a heart attack. Epic didn’t have enough letters to carry the weight of the fight I had with my mother after his death.
I left, hadn’t spoken to her since, and then she was dead. Her final “fuck you, Cole” came in the form of her will—she gave me ownership of her house and the undeveloped farmland it sat on. It might have been the solution to my own financial woes, if I hadn’t already known the disaster I’d find. Dad had been a mechanic and a collector; my mother was a housewife and a hoarder. Their house, barn, garage, two sheds, and surrounding woodsy property was the result of thirty-four years of accumulation.
I hadn’t driven out to see it yet, and my stomach was already in knots.
The box of ashes went on the backseat of my car, between my two suitcases and a box of cleaning products. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to put my mother. She wasn’t going up front with me, and the trunk was out of the question. Besides the weirdness of it, the trunk was already full of heavy-duty trash bags, packing tape, cardboard packing boxes, a shovel, and a box of books.
Franklin hadn’t changed much as a town, I noted as I drove through it. Same homes and offices and small shops. Same churches and Christmas decorations as I remembered growing up. Same restaurants dotted with cars in that odd, less busy time between breakfast and lunch. An antique store had popped up in the bottom floor of someone’s house, and the hardware store was shut down. A handmade sign hung in the window with Damned Chain Stores scrawled in black paint.
It made me smile.
I turned west out of town, toward the hillier, woodsy area and winding road that eventually led to my old homestead. As a child, I’d loved being out in the woods, miles from town, able to have adventures far from the chaos of my house. As a teen, I’d hated having to ride my bike into town just to hang with the few friends I’d cobbled together. They hadn’t minded my secondhand clothes or my odd mother who wore big straw hats all year long, or that I never invited them back to my house. Friends I’d lost touch with when I went six states away to college, where I discovered acceptance for the first time as a gay man. Then, during my sophomore year, I met Martin and began an eight-year-long nightmare I’d only just surfaced from.
The road curled like an S, and I slowed to negotiate the two turns. A familiar, barn-shaped mailbox came into view a hundred feet farther down. I turned on my blinker, even though the road was clear, and made a left onto a crushed-shell driveway I’d treaded a thousand times, both on rubber and on foot.
A wild lawn sprung up on both sides of the driveway, more closely resembling a wheat field than a yard. Grass, weeds, and wild bushes dotted the landscape between skeletal, leafless trees. It was all at least hip-height and probably hadn’t been cut in years. The lawn jungle hid the worst of the house from the casual passerby. I got a good look at my childhood home when the grass finally parted. Angry, helpless tears sprang up and stung my eyes.
The house was a Craftsman bungalow, two stories, with lots of front windows and a brick fireplace. I used to think it was one of the nicest houses in Franklin, even nicer than some of the homes built in town—until the hoard spilled from the inside of the house to the outside and maintenance stopped occurring with any regularity.
The next thing I saw was a VW bus parked beside the house, without wheels and mounted on cinderblocks, its interior packed with junk. The front porch was listing and the roof collapsing. A blue tarp had been erected over the front door to protect it from leaks, and more boxes and plastic containers stood beneath that, sentries to the front door. All the windows were blocked, either with curtains or boxes. Beyond the house, scattered in piles, were parts and appliances and bicycles and things I just didn’t recognize for the rust and weeds.
It was both better and worse than I’d expected.
The structure seemed sound, but I hadn’t seen the interior of the house yet and I dreaded it. I pinched my nose and dispelled the tears, unwilling to cry over this mess anymore than I already had, and got out of the car. It was warm for December, but I zipped up my coat anyway—for mental protection as much as physical. I already had on a pair of boots, jeans tucked in, and three pairs of rubber gloves stuffed into my coat pockets. I snapped a pair on as I trudged up to the front door.
I had a key, but it wasn’t necessary. The police had broken the front door down to get at my mother’s body. The door leaned in its frame, barely held up by strips of police caution tape.
My mother hadn’t died of any particular illness or malady, beyond her own mental disease. She’d tripped one day, hit some boxes, and they fell over on her. Trapped both her legs, and being both sixty-two and overweight, she hadn’t been able to get up or get them off. She died of dehydration twenty-four hours before the mailman noticed she hadn’t collected in a few days and called the sheriff.
Her cause of death had been my worst nightmare come true. Even worse than discovering, at this critical time in my own personal life, that she’d willed her entire mess to me. And why everything I owned was in two suitcases in my car next to my mother’s ashes.
The smell hit me when I reached the tarp. Pungent, sweet, cloying—the odors of death and decay and of rotting things. My rational brain knew the stink had existed long before my mother died on the floor, but it didn’t stop a flicker show of images from assaulting my mind. Images of Debbie Alston, my mother, dead and bloated, lying in her own waste in the same sea of rot she’d lived in for more than three decades.
That wasn’t quite right. The rot didn’t really happen until I went away to college, escaping their hoarding problem by disappearing into something else—something that became much, much worse. Then the dishes stopped getting washed, the refrigerator stopped being cleaned out, and no one could be bothered to haul trash bags to the town dump. The first time I returned to visit during Christmas break at college, freshman year, I cleaned and hauled trash. Then again during spring break. Between freshman and sophomore year, I stayed in Michigan for the summer, working and taking classes, so I didn’t see them again until the following Christmas. It was the last visit before I met Martin.
After that I didn’t go back until Dad’s funeral two years ago. I just couldn’t stand the memories, even if I’d thought it was safe to come to a place Martin could track me to. Home was gone. A disaster had taken its place.
I couldn’t walk under the tarp. And I really didn’t want to go inside that house.
Tires crunched up the seashell driveway, and I spun around, heart pounding. I wasn’t expecting anyone. The only people who knew I was in town were Penny Connor, the realtor, and the very grumpy woman at the crematorium.
“Oh God,” I said to no one. Martin had found me—he’d been trying for six months. He knew where I grew up. If he’d seen the obituary somewhere, he’d put two and two together, and he’d know where I was. My guts clenched.
Over the sea of grass, I spotted a blue work van heading toward me, growing larger by the second. I dashed back to my car on shaky legs and grabbed the keys out of the ignition. The keychain had a small can of mace attached, and I tucked that end carefully into the palm of my hand. Instinct told me to hide. I had plenty of places to burrow into and disappear, but I couldn’t seem to move.
The van parked perpendicular to my car. A door opened and shut, and a man came around the front. It wasn’t Martin Palone. My entire body felt lighter, like someone had lifted a wet blanket off me and let me breathe again. But this man was still a stranger on my land, and I didn’t let my guard down. He was in the neighborhood of my age, a little taller than me, with a shock of dark-brown hair and wide, thickly lashed eyes. He wasn’t handsome, exactly, but had a boyish charm to him, especially when he smiled. It released a pair of dimples that were incredibly appealing.
“You must be Cole Alston,” he said. His voice was lightly accented but not local to this part of North Carolina. It was more northern and hard to pinpoint on only five words.
“Yes, I am,” I said.
“Jeremy Collins. I own Lost Treasures Antiques in town.”
I shook his outstretched hand, tempted to relax a bit under that beguiling smile. Tempted, but I didn’t. He seemed like someone perfectly at ease in his own skin, which made me all the more self-conscious of the mess in and around me. “Nice to meet you.”
“I’m sorry about your mother. She came into the store sometimes. She was… a nice lady.”
His hesitation made my lips twitch. “She was definitely interesting, and thank you for your condolences, but I’m sure you didn’t drive out here just to offer them.”
“No, you’re right. I wasn’t sure how long you’d be in town, and I wanted to talk to you.”
“About?”
“This.” He waved his hand at the hoard, and his eyes lit up. He didn’t see the tragedy in it, or the horror.
“What about it?” I waited for the insults, for the inevitable slew of “how could you let this happen?” tirades I knew were waiting for me. I’ve heard variations on them my entire life.
“Like I said, I own an antique store, and I’ve come out here a few times trying to buy things from your mother.”
I burst into laughter, unable to help myself. Trying to buy something from my mother, whether it was a diamond tiara or a bag of rotten apples from the Big Bag grocery, was like trying to pan for gold in the Atlantic—pointless.
At least Jeremy seemed to see the humor in it, because he never stopped smiling. “Yeah, exactly. But folks in town still talk about your father and what a keen eye he had. There are treasures on this property, some things that could make you a decent pot of money, and I want to help you sell them. For a commission, of course.”
“I was just going to have a yard sale or something.”
“You could do that, but I’ve got connections to dealers in three states. Depending on what we find, you could get a lot more money for the antiques by going through me.” He cocked his head to the side like we were buds sharing a joke. “You can still yard sale the other stuff.”
I studied him; he seemed sincere in his loose jeans and cowboy boots and brown cotton coat. The solution to one of my biggest problems had just driven up in a big blue van. All I had to do was ask the Wizard for my courage and trust Jeremy not to screw with me.
Not an easy task, considering I’d spent eight years being screwed with on a daily basis by someone who was supposed to love me.
“What kind of money are we talking about?” I asked.
“I’ll show you.”
We walked through the weeds to a pile of machinery near the barn, twisted and rusted, and I didn’t see much to be saved. Jeremy tugged on a pair of work gloves, reached in, and spent a few minutes wrestling something out of the mess. He produced a bicycle frame, missing its seat and chain and tires, but otherwise intact.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked.
“Enlighten me.”
“It’s a Columbia from the 1950s. Intact, it would be worth a lot more, but some collectors will shine up parts and restore them. This frame alone could get you a hundred dollars.”
I stared at him. “For that?”
“For that. And this is only the first thing I saw. Who knows what else we could uncover in that barn, or those sheds?”
I saw the hunger in his eyes, the desire to go hunting for other treasures. It made him seem almost boyish, a kid on the verge of a trip to his very favorite amusement park. I just saw the dollar signs and an extra pair of hands getting me out from under this hoard.
“Okay.”
He blinked. “Really?”
“Yes, okay. We’ll need to arrange some sort of contract, though. I don’t want any confusion over your commissions or labor or whatever.”
“That’s fair. Why don’t we hammer it out over dinner at the Sow’s Ear.”
“Dinner?”
This was my first dinner offer in years, and I had no clue how to take it. No one in this town knew I was gay. I hadn’t come out before I left for college, and I hadn’t told anyone on my occasional visits since. Not even my parents. Martin had been a “friend from school” and then “my roommate.” And Jeremy didn’t strike me as being particularly queer.
Then again, I’d spent the last decade perfecting the art of not looking, so my own personal gaydar was pretty damn inaccurate.
“You do eat dinner, don’t you?” Jeremy asked.
“When I can afford it” very nearly slipped out. Instead, I said, “Yes.”
“Good. It’ll give you time to decide what you need me for, and I can make some phone calls. I know a few guys in Ohio who’d love to come down and pick through—”
Panic set my heart fluttering. “Wait, no.”
His eyebrows arched. “What?”
“Look, I don’t… this is all, um—”
“Overwhelming?”
“Shameful.”
I couldn’t believe I’d just said that. Out loud. To a stranger.
Jeremy nodded, more thoughtful than anything else. At least he wasn’t blatantly judging me for my family’s awful secret. “You don’t want a lot of strangers poking into your personal life.”
I didn’t know if he was really that observant, or if he’d seen hoarding shows on television. All that mattered was he got it—even if he didn’t know the comment extended far beyond the hoard in front of us. “Right, I don’t.”
“This is a lot of stuff for one person to haul out on their own.”
“Welcome to my world.” I jacked my thumb at the house and the countless hours of work waiting for me inside.
He slipped his hands into his rear jeans pockets and rocked back on his heels, head tilted to the sky. “How are you going to haul all of this to the dump on your own?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it.” Truth—and something I didn’t know how to solve without more money in my pocket. Some of those bags would be filled with rotten food, and they weren’t going anywhere near my car.
“Then meet me for dinner at the Sow’s Ear, at six o’clock, and I’ll have a proposal for you.”
“Jeremy—”
“If you don’t like my ideas, you won’t hurt my feelings. Promise. Just give me a chance to make this work for both of us.”
Something in his manner made me want to trust him. He seemed completely genuine, open, and reassuring. I didn’t trust him, but I wanted to. And it was just a proposal over a working dinner at the best barbecue place in town.
A little voice in the back of my mind said it was only fair to tell him his dinner companion wouldn’t be joining him in ogling the waitresses. I told that voice to shut the hell up, because it wasn’t really any of Jeremy’s business. “Okay, dinner at six.”
“Excellent.” He stood straighter, hands coming out of his pockets. “See you then.”
“Hey, wait,” I said as he turned to go. “Don’t forget your bike frame. If dinner doesn’t work out, it’s yours to keep.”
With a dimpled grin worthy of any movie star, he hefted the rusty frame and stowed it in his van. I stood by my car until he’d driven away. Even if Jeremy only found half a dozen valuables in that sea of junk, his help would be worth it. Worth it to help buy me out of the financial noose slowly tightening around my neck and get me far, far away from Martin Palone.
A.M. Arthur was born and raised in the same kind of small town that she likes to write about, a stone's throw from both beach resorts and generational farmland. She's been creating stories in her head since she was a child and scribbling them down nearly as long, in a losing battle to make the fictional voices stop. She credits an early fascination with male friendships (bromance hadn't been coined yet back then) with her later discovery of and subsequent love affair with m/m romance stories. A.M. Arthur's work is available from Carina Press, SMP Swerve, and Briggs-King Books.
When not exorcising the voices in her head, she toils away in a retail job that tests her patience and gives her lots of story fodder. She can also be found in her kitchen, pretending she's an amateur chef and trying to not poison herself or others with her cuisine experiments.
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