“Always been yours.”
“Do you think we’d have picked up rings to give one another tonight if the dogs hadn’t made such a mess of everything?”
He couldn’t have planned anything like it. Wouldn’t have had the guts to if he was being honest. Peri though…Peri had enough guts for both of them.
Peri nodded sleepily against his shoulder, then rolled on his back to sign. Felt like we were meant to tonight…You were asking me all evening…you just didn’t use words.
Echo’s breath caught, and he swallowed. Was that what he’d been doing? Yes, you silly sod. The dance, the suits, the stars, all of it.
Too many emotions swamped his brain, he didn’t want to think anymore, he just wanted to feel. He leaned down and Peri met his kiss halfway, buried his hands in Echo’s hair.
You let me know you. It’s how I know you love me like I love you, Peri signed pulling back. He swiped his thumbs under Echo’s eyes, smiling as Echo mirrored the gesture.
Always, Echo thought, knowing that was what Peri was thinking too.
The truest things between them had always happened without words.
Echo hoped they always would.
The End
Peri’s Hot Chocolate Recipe
Per mug (Peri says, please don’t worry about being too exact)
Mug of Milk (dairy/non-dairy)
Splash of Double Cream/Coconut Cream
Couple of drops of Vanilla Essence
One and a half dessert spoons of Coco Powder
Few squares of Chocolate (your favourite, milk or dark)
Tiny pinch Salt
A dessert spoon Palma Violet Syrup
In a pan, warm the milk and cream, whisking as you go. Don’t boil (unless you get distracted and forget what you’re doing, then don’t worry, it’s okay). Add the other ingredients. Hot chocolate is ready when the chocolate chunks have melted. Yum.
Meet Suki Fleet
Award Winning Author. Prolific Reader. Lover of angst, romance and unexpected love stories. Genderfluid. She/he/they. Suki Fleet's first novel This is Not a Love Story won Best Gay Debut in the 2014 Rainbow Awards, and was a finalist in the 2015 Lambda Awards. Foxes won Best Gay Young Adult story in the 2016 Rainbow Awards.
Website - sukifleet.wordpress.com
Newsletter: sukifleet.wordpress.com/newsletter
Taken from my Roads series. Set after the end of the third and final novel in the series, Circle. Preceded by Slide, and Rare. Secondary characters can also be found in Only Love
As long as they’re together, love always wins
Taken from the Roads series (Slide, Rare, Circle). Ash and
Pete have made it home from the trip of a lifetime. Recovering from surgery has taking its toll on Ash, but with the magic of Christmas in the air, and his love and desire for Pete stronger than ever, it doesn’t matter where they call home, as long as they’re together, love always wins.
No Place Like Home
Copyright Garrett Leigh 2020
Editing: Donna Meadows
No Place Like Home
Pete
“What are you doing?”
I glanced up at Ash, who was supposedly dozing on the couch. “What does it look like?”
“It looks like a massacre.”
“Harsh.” I winced and turned my attention back to the mess of gifts, paper, and ribbons spread out on the rug. “I’m trying to help.”
“By rolling all our gifts in blood-colored foil and bouncing them down the street?”
“Blood-colored? This is the only paper we have.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It’s not?”
Ash sighed. “Where did you even find that shit?”
“In the closet. Where you keep the giftwrapping crap.”
“Which closet?”
“That one.” I pointed across the room to the only closet in the apartment Ash would allow to remain in a state of permanent chaos. “I saw you put it in there last year.”
“Yeah, because I hated it and I didn’t want to see it again.”
Oh. That was the other thing about the messy closet. It stayed that way because Ash never went in it—because it was crammed full of stuff that inexplicably gave him the creeps. And I shoulda known, really. He’d always been weird about the color red.
“Okay.” I tore the garish foil off the only gift I’d managed to wrap with any success and balled it up. “Where’s the good shit?”
“Downstairs.”
“Downstairs?”
“Yeah. Glenn picked it up from the studio for me yesterday, but he hasn’t brought it up yet.”
“What were you planning on doing with it when he did?”
At my sharpened tone, Ash shot me his best idiot glare. “What do you think?”
“I think the goddamn obvious, but that’s not gonna happen, fucker. You just had surgery. You’re not camping out on the floor with this crap. Why do you think I was butchering it in the first place?”
Ash chewed on his lip and sat up slightly. “I think you were trying to be nice, but it’s probably better if we wrap everything in newspaper than inflict your color-blindness on our friends and family.”
It was probably the meanest thing he’d ever said to me, but I couldn’t deny he had a point. I could wrap anything with clinical precision, but that didn’t make it pretty.
I stood with a sigh, gathering the offending red paper and ribbons and dumping them in their box. “There’s a stash of newspaper by the log burner, or do you want me to go downstairs and get the real deal?”
Ash frowned, considering the question with far more seriousness than I possessed at this point. “I don’t know. What do you think?”
He genuinely believed I had thoughts on this beyond how long it would keep me from the dish of Danni’s eggplant rigatoni in the refrigerator. “Um—” I searched for words to prolong the fantasy. My brain took me back in time and dropped me in the cozy cabin we’d just left behind in Oregon. “I think Max and Jed would appreciate newspaper wrapped gifts, but everyone else would think we were nuts.”
“That’s pretty standard.”
“You want the newspaper then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Right.”
A silence stretched out between us while he went back and forth and I wondered if we had any of the bomb olive oil left from Thanksgiving. When I got bored with that, I let my attention drift to him. With the earnest frown on his face, he was fucking adorable, but it didn’t hide the strains of the past week. Our trip to Oregon had been life changing in ways I didn’t have the energy to contemplate right now, but our return home had been marred by Ash collapsing with appendicitis on the plane.
Surgery and wrangles over pain meds had swiftly followed, and though it had played out as simply as we could’ve hoped, I still totally fucking frayed. And however distracted he was by my useless attempts at gift wrapping, Ash was exhausted.