In celebration of today’s box set release of my Character Bleed Trilogy (out now from JMS Books! on sale! 332,890 collected words, all three books, plus new cover art & new Author’s Note, all for around $10!) we’ll make today’s Rainbow Snippet a little teaser from the work-in-progress spin-off book!

(In case you’re not familiar with #RainbowSnippets, check out their Facebook Group – new posts every Saturday (depending on time zones). The weekly pinned post will collect comments from authors linking to their six-line Rainbow Snippet post for the week.)

New Snippet below, after the cover image (so you can scroll down if you want), but I’ll just do the little release-day shameless plug first: the Character Bleed Trilogy is basically…oh, gosh, how to summarize…m/m romance, actors filming a gay Napoleonic Wars drama and falling in love on and off screen…bread-related puns…nerd jokes about reading epic fantasy…that time I dropped a character off a cliff…and happy endings all round! You can buy the individual books (Seaworthy, Stalwart, Steadfast) or grab the whole big box set over at JMS for only $10.39 during the new release sale – after that it’ll go up to $12.99! (This is the ebook – paperback coming soon.) Come order yours at JMS now! (I believe there’s not a separate Amazon link – or if there is I can’t find it – because Amazon already lets you buy all three books as a bundle over here. That doesn’t get you the new cover or Author’s Note though!)

This week’s Rainbow Snippet is from what’s going to be a spin-off duology, with Jason and Colby’s friend Leo getting his own happy ending (and having a bit of a bisexuality discovery!). And possibly also getting a fish. Which is not in this excerpt, just a fun fact. But here’s Leo requesting advice from friends….

~

Leo had just lifted a hand to knock when the door flew wide; Jason, occupying most of the world simply by existing, invited, “Hey, Leo, come on in.” His voice dusted antique English neighborhoods with laid-back California sun, and his shoulders filled up every available inch, as usual. “Colby’s getting dressed.”

“I’m dressed!” Colby flew down the last few stairs and landed in the embrace of one of Jason’s arms. He was indeed dressed, in neat grey trousers and a pale pink shirt under a too-large rainbow-patterned knit cardigan, and managed to transform this collection of color into the next fashion trend just by glowing at the world. His hair fluffed up in defiance of the hand attempting to smooth it. “Leo, you said you needed help, we’re here, what can we do?”

“You said you were decent,” Leo pointed out, kicking shoes off in the entryway. “Not naked. Was naked happening? Because I can come back later.” He would. Colby and Jason had had a hard enough time falling into each other’s orbit; Colby even now did not always have good days, and they’d have the clamor of the press round later too. “Unless there’s collective mutual naked, in which case I’m comfortable if you are. Though that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Colby and Jason looked at each other, then at him, and trailed him out to the living room, which folded tall built-in bookshelves and sweeping windows and long blue curtains around them. Colby and Jason decorated like interior designers with a joint unconcealed love of fantasy maps and steampunk lamps and literature about elves and airships; the flat mingled classic elegance and whimsical accents and Colby’s rather apologetic upper-class knowledge of wine into Jason’s Wizards & Wyverns game manuals and general tidiness, along with some take-out menus for really good Italian places stuck to a pin-board, and a second refrigerator just for holding unusual craft beer and home-brewed mead.

Leo flopped down on their sofa, which embraced its purpose enthusiastically, and announced, “I’m having a moment of distress. Support me.”

“Oh dear.” Colby perched on a sofa-arm, over decorative brass studs and navy-blue curves. Jason took the chair next to him. “Distress about what? I know you’re marvelous with press, so it can’t be this afternoon’s obligations, unless it is, if there’s something you don’t want to have to talk about. And I know it can’t be our movie; you’re splendid in it, which you know, and the premiere went excellently. Except—did it, for you? You left so promptly. And you weren’t at any of the afterparties. Not that we made more than a brief appearance either, but I did talk to Jill this morning. Were you feeling all right?”

Colby Kent, Leo considered with affection, would never use one word when twenty would do. “I don’t know. Yes. No. Absolutely yes. Orgasmically all right. But then that’s the problem. Maybe I’m not.”

“Er…” Colby slid down from the sofa-arm to a cushion, inching closer. Jason watched him with the eyes of a royal bodyguard on the brink of hauling his prince back from peril. “You went home with—with someone, is that it? And now you’re here…oh, Leo. Are you hurt? Do you need us to call someone? Or would you like to talk? You don’t seem terribly upset…”

“I’m not hurt! I’m fine.” Mostly to make Colby feel better, he melodramatically flung the back of a wrist against his forehead, tipped his head back, and intoned, “I’m simply overwrought, darling,” which made Colby laugh and Jason snort. Leo dropped the hand and sat up more and said, “The person I went home with was a Sam. I mean a man. I mean Sam. I mean my Sam.”

“Oh,” Colby said. “Your…your photographer.” That was polite; they all recalled first meeting Sam and Sam’s camera. “He did come to the premiere, then. Did he like Steadfast?”

“Loved it. You, the writing, the setting, the art design…me, obviously…”

“No,” Jason put in, low and firm. “Not obvious. Not that you’re not fantastic, you are, but you say it like you don’t think it matters.”

Leo shrugged at him. “It’s your movie. You and Colby.”

Jason got a small line between dark thick eyebrows. “Leo, you know it wouldn’t be the same without you, right?”

“My point is,” Leo said, “I had all sorts of sex with a very male person, for the first time ever, last night—and also this morning—and I’m suddenly having a lot of emotions, and you two have definitely also had the sex with men, including whatever you were doing that meant Colby needed to get dressed, and you know about this type of thing, and please help.”

“Er,” Colby said again, “what is it, precisely, you’d like our help…with?”

“I don’t know! Me, life, being a celebrity and being gay, apparently. Got any sex tips?”

Jason rumbled, “Yes. Go back to the being gay part.”

“That’s the first time I’ve said that.” Leo stared at their rug. Plush and shaggy and blue with little white flecks, it stared back. He wiggled green-striped sock-toes in it.

Maybe if he kept looking at his toes he wouldn’t have to think. He liked not thinking. “Out loud, I mean. To anyone. I’m not even sure I am. I suppose what I’m asking is…well, you know I’ve dated women, and I enjoyed that…as far as I’m aware they also enjoyed that, I get on with all my exes, we’re on good terms…and now there’s this…am I in fact gay now? Or some sort of…bisexual sort of word?”

Colby and Jason traded glances. Jason raised eyebrows Leo’s direction. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I kinda already thought you were. Bi, I mean. With the flirting, the comments…and I know Jill’s casting preferences for Steadfast were, well…us, for one…and you got all annoyed when I said you weren’t Colby’s type, that time. Unless those were all just you making jokes.”

“I always thought those were just me making jokes! Or…maybe not. I mean, I do like Matt Grant’s mouth, that was true when I said it, it’s a delicious-looking mouth. And Colby’s adorable, so who wouldn’t—”

“Thank you for that.”

“—and then Sam was so—he’s so—he was nothing like I expected, and everything that I wanted to say yes to, and I think I like him, not just the sex, I actually like being with him, but I don’t even know him. I met him for the second time literally a day ago. I’m very confused.”

Colby and Jason did some more silent communing. Jason asked, “You had sex with him, you said?”

“I definitely did that.” Inarguably so. Wonderfully so. Repeatedly so.

“You said you were confused. But you did it because you wanted to, right? He asked whether you wanted to? And it was good?” Jason, Leo noticed, had a hand holding Colby’s.

He knew why Jason would be the one to ask that. Not all the details—Colby never had talked about his ex-boyfriend publicly, nor what’d happened the night that’d all finally come crashing down—but Leo’d seen the difference. The Colby Kent he’d first met, back during the filming of The Far Cry of Guns, had been young and hopeful and eager to please, self-deprecating and anxious about getting everything right but irrepressibly bubbly. The Colby he’d met several years later at the auditions for Steadfast had grown thinner and quieter, and flinched away from even friendly touch.

Leo had never previously wanted to hit anyone in anger, had no clue how he’d even go about it in non-filming life, and nevertheless had imagined putting his fist into the face of the man who’d done that. He would’ve tried, if Colby’d ever indicated any desire for revenge.

Everything had changed again when Jason Mirelli had gently bought cinnamon bagels and asked permission before touching Colby, on set and off, with those large callused action-hero hands.

Colby looked at Jason as if perpetually amazed that such kindness had landed in his life. Jason looked at Colby the exact same way, only maybe with even more sunshiney awe, Leo decided.

He said, “I absolutely wanted to. He did ask. I said yes. And it was spectacular.” It had been. And he wanted to reassure Colby, and by extension Jason’s muscles. “I would like to do it more. But I do still quite like women. Or I think I still do. Should I find a friend who’d be willing to test the hypothesis? We didn’t say anything about being exclusive. Except I don’t want to have sex with anyone else at the moment, even if she is a friend. I do want to have more spectacular sex with Sam. And only Sam. Am I properly gay, then? Or is this some sort of thirty-three-year-old bisexuality crisis? Should I feel awakened or enlightened?”

“Do you?” Colby inquired.

“I don’t know. Should I have slept with you, ages ago, to help figure it all out? Except your type is human Mount Everests and I wouldn’t’ve known what I was doing, so it likely wouldn’t’ve worked at all and I’d’ve ended up thinking I was in fact straight.”

Colby was outright laughing now.

Jason, with a hint of protectiveness but also pleasure because Colby was laughing, rumbled, “You’re still not his type. And being bisexual doesn’t have to be a crisis. I should know.”

“It feels as if I’m having one,” Leo pointed out dolefully. “Shouldn’t I at least be allowed one graceful swoon onto a fainting couch? Colby, do you own a fainting couch? If not, can I buy you one so that I can bisexually swoon onto it?”

Totally forgot to do this over the weekend, but...would you all like the opening to the Magician prequel story? It's called "The Twelfth Enchantment," it's definitely m/m romance, and it's set about two hundred years before Magician...

~*~

The goats of the Magicians’ School had eaten all the cabbage again. Two of the prospective students had, without explanation, vanished like dandelion-fluff with the spring breeze. And the ice-house refused to stay cold. Garrett Pell, Second Sorcerer of the Middle Lands, rubbed the spot between his eyes exhaustedly and pondered the desirability of a hermit’s life. In a cave. On a rock spire. Without a ladder.

“You said to tell you,” Jennet said, “about the ice-house. Because we should eat the cheese. Can we eat the cheese?” Short, golden-haired, pretty as an illustrated manuscript, she’d been selling dreams and charms and fortunes that came true more often than not, down in the Dark Quarter of Averene’s capital city, when the Grand Sorcerer had wandered distractedly by and swept her up into his wake.

“Cheese,” Garrett echoed. “Yes. Fine. I’ll be right there.” He had been attempting to catalog the nine scrolls Lorre had unceremoniously dumped on the table, histories of magical herb-lore which Garrett was fairly sure had been stolen from the Royal Library in Kiersk. One of them had a Library seal, which Garrett had pointed out. Lorre had said, shrugging, “Magic belongs with magicians, and they weren’t using these,” and Garrett had opened his mouth to explain private property yet again, and had watched his Grand Sorcerer turn into a dragonfly before his eyes.

The breeze, with some sympathy, whirled through the arches of the open window. The window was open because it had no glass as yet, because Lorre had promised to do that and hadn’t.

Garrett exhaled, found a stone to anchor the scrolls—the would-be magicians’ library had many rocks, at least, left over from the raising—and in doing this accidentally knocked his pen off the table, and then swore silently and creatively for several seconds while picking it up. And then made sure that his expression was perfectly composed when he looked back up at his hovering apprentice. “Is Quen around? Because if he’s not busy—”

“He’s clearing out the water,” Jen supplied. Her fellow apprentice, one of the four who hadn’t vanished, had aquatic gifts, to a degree. “Because the ice melted.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me before it got this far—no, never mind.” That wouldn’t help. “How’re your dreams? Are you sleeping well enough?” They emerged from the room that would be the library into the long shaded walk with old-fashioned columns, one of the bits of work the Grand Sorcerer had done himself when raising the half-finished School. Garrett, not for the first time, brushed a hand against the closest column, basked in the resonance of polished curving stone, the sun, the heaviness.

“Better,” Jen agreed. “With your shields on top of mine. It’s helping.”

“Better isn’t perfect. I’ll see what else I can do. Glimpses of the future are confusing enough when they’re not tangled up with dream-logic. There might be something in one of the histories of wild magic.”

“It’s really almost all under control,” Jen said, with an expression that suggested that she thought her Second Sorcerer should not add yet another apple to his metaphorical teetering apple-cart. “Really.”

Sunlight flickered in and out through the columns, across the lapis-lazuli blue of the pool Lorre had made in the central open garden, surrounded by what would eventually be four stone wings. The north and east sides were finished, enough for students and workrooms and the beginnings of the library; the other sides waited, bare, unroofed.

The School, or what would be the School, two months into its construction, stood on a low curving hill outside of the capital city of Averene, near enough to make some of the merchants and farmers and nobility uneasy, far enough to keep most messy magic at a distance. The site glimmered green and misty on spring mornings, beside the river that flowed down through the heart of the wealthiest of the Middle Lands kingdoms. The stone, which Lorre and Garrett had called up together from the bones of the earth, glowed white as pearl, as a beacon.

Lorre had wanted that brightness, that symbol: both the beckoning and the hint of power, as the School kept itself clean and sharp. Garrett, who’d grown up with the tumble of imported indigo-carmine-sapphire silks, the tastes of cinnamon and black pepper, the glow of carved jade statues and the glint of gold-flecked tapestry-weavings that filled his family’s merchant storehouses and caravans and private home, kept wanting to hang a burnt-umber drapery or put an ornamental silver box on a bare shelf.

Something, at least. Anything.

He loved the School, though. He loved it in his soul, his heart, his self. When he and Lorre had stood on the hill, and all the magic in the world had swept up and through them, Lorre’s crackling crescendo of rainbows answered by Garrett’s own slow unfolding earthwork of power, the steady solid presence of rock and heat and mountains and old places of the earth—

Magic left him breathless, quickened, alive. He touched the second column in line, brown fingertips over white stone. He’d given birth to it, after a fashion. He wasn’t Lorre. But no one else could be that, certainly no one else alive in this present-day sixteenth century. Garrett, entirely human and not made of half-wild magic, did the best he could. He hoped it’d be enough.

As he followed Jennet past the side arch, where a road—also half-finished—would lead down the hill, a lean wry figure detached itself from lounging against the pale curve. “Sorcerer.”

“Unless you’re here to help with the cheese,” Garrett said, “go away. No, wait. Do you know anything about goats?”

“Why would I know anything about goats?” Alexandre de Berri, youngest and prettiest of the King of Averene’s eight grown sons, fell into step beside him. “Why do you need me to know things about goats?”

“I don’t. Need you to. What does your father want?” At his side, Jen made a tiny squeaking sound with regard to this manner of speaking to a prince. Garrett, who’d got to know Alex over the last two months, had no regret.

“I can’t come to see you out of my own personal interest?”

Garrett considered his own grey-streaked brown hair, ink-stained fingers, worn boots, occasional lapses into earth-thick silence, versus the prince’s aristocratic height, velvet coat, smoky amber eyes, amused laugh-lines, ability to make duchesses and mage-apprentices swoon with a glance. “No.”

“What was happening with your cheese?”

“The ice-house melted. Our answer’s still no.”

“Father would like to be on good terms with you. Some donations—money, artisans, materials—we could help raise walls, offer tapestries, gold plate—”

“And we’d owe the King of Averene a favor.”

“We’d never ask for anything that wouldn’t benefit our mutual relationship, of course.”

Garrett stopped walking. “The School and the Court don’t have a relationship.”

Alex stopped too. His hair tumbled to his shoulders, fashionable, bedroom-loose, in dark waves. His eyes, beautiful, were amused and—surprisingly—tired. “Ah, yes. That would be why you and the Grand Sorcerer chose—without asking, might I add—to place your school here. In Averene. With us.”

“We’re not,” Garrett said tightly, “with you. We’re outside the Isle of Averene. Technically the province of Variennes never surrendered its independence.”

“No. Because the baron’s line simply died out. Which is why the land’s ours.”

“Because your father decided it was?”

“The way Lorre did?”

Garrett, though he tried not to, flinched. “I have ice to deal with.”

“And goats.”

“And goats. And scrolls. And incomplete windows. And two missing apprentices. And a missing Grand Sorcerer. Please leave before I have to turn you into a hedgehog.”

“Could you? I’d be adorable.”

Garrett began walking again. The prince could just keep up. “Hermitages. Caves. Deep woods. Islands. No hedgehogs allowed.”

Alexandre said nothing for a moment, unusually so for someone who’d never stopped trying to convince Garrett to attend a royal supper, a private audience, a hunt, a play. Their footsteps echoed soft over stone; water rippled in the background. Jennet said, “I’ll go and tell Quen you’re on the way, and see how the drying-out is going—” and whisked out of the tension in the corridor, darting ahead.

Garrett kept walking. Alex, with longer legs, kept up perfectly fine, and stayed quiet.

The sun lay warm against Garrett’s arm, the side of his face. Almost too warm; he shut his eyes for a moment, as heat burned red behind his eyelids.

Shade landed. Cool, darker, less fierce. Garrett opened both eyes: Alex had moved to that side, between him and the sun, height transformed into a shield.

Awash in pale grey twilight, the fields of Dun Nas were utterly desolate: wilted, depressed patches that had once been productive, now limp and brown and pathetic. The crops were clearly dead; Aric was in no respect a farmer, but he could tell devastation when he saw it.

Emrys looked at it all, made a face, and wandered in what seemed like a distracted fashion across ruined ground. Aric watched for a moment, partly to see if Em would beckon him and partly because Emrys from the back, in whatever the shape of the day might be—at the moment male, sometimes female, sometimes someplace in between, enchantment in motion and glitteringly luscious—was worth watching, focused and capable and graceful as fairy-mounds at dusk.

Em didn’t wave him over, though, so whatever’d captured that intent attention, it hadn’t been urgent. That being the case, Aric went back to gloomily contemplating smudges and smears and gastropod grease. Glistening trails stretched back behind the village, toward the lake, which also happened to be the direction Em had gone.

Aric scuffed one of the shining patches experimentally with a boot. They were indeed large. And sticky. “They come out at night?”

“In the early morning.” The young councilor eyed Aric’s boot, and then eyed Aric’s sword, and then blurted out, “Is that the Stormblade?” in the manner of someone who’d been trying very hard not to ask ever since first setting eyes on the hilt.

Aric lifted both eyebrows at him. “What do you think?” The answer was, like most things, complicated. And probably not what the young man wanted.

“Er…”

“You’ve been listening to bards, haven’t you?"

“Reading chronicles?” The boy—he wasn’t, but his voice sounded like one, just then—had evidently decided that asking questions outweighed any trepidation about actually speaking to two legendary mercenaries. “And all the stories talk about you and the Stormblade and how you defeated the ogre of Sant-Micheline and the way the lightning came down and how your witch took it and—”

“Witch?”

“Sorry!” The young man bit his lip. “Was that wrong? I know in some places it’s—"

“Not as polite? It’s not. But Em’s not a witch.”

“Oh. Then what…a mage, or an alchemist, or…something else?”

“Oh…let’s go with something else.” Aric glanced at Emrys, and the lake, again. He had learned long ago that it was best not to try to explain. “Have you seen where your snails come from? Or where they go? By the way, what was your name?”

“Er…Gildas? And, well, we don’t entirely know. But we’ve had guards posted.” Gildas looked over at the lake, too. “They come up out of the water. And go back into it, when they’re done. But if anyone tries to follow, they’re just gone.”

“So you haven’t been able to find a source.”

“No. And that land is treacherous, on the far side. Bogs. Sinkholes.” Gildas paused. “Places where both my younger brothers managed to break their ankles, daring each other to explore.”

Aric, whose own younger brother had gone down to Ambrosium to work—profitably, given Berd’s artist’s hands and painter’s eye for color, and a bit of starting-out money from Aric’s own earnings—as one of the new capital’s architects and mappers-out of city streets, said, “Mine once tried to pierce his own ears with a sewing needle, because he’d seen a bard with earrings and liked them.”

Gildas laughed, a bit wistfully. “Family. But that’s why we need you, you see. It’s all our families, here. Oh—should we warn your…your partner?...that that ground’s unstable?”

“Emrys will be fine.” Aric poked a clump of slime again, with caution. “I take it you’ve tried salt and sage?”

And Gildas now looked very surprised. But he chose to answer as if he’d expected a mercenary fresh from the Highland feuds to know something about little country magics and herb-lore. “Yes. Some of the snails died, but more just kept coming. As if they didn’t even notice.”

“Or like something’s driving them.”

Gildas’s face became a portrait of utter tragic despair. “There’s something else?"

“It’s a theory.” In the distance, Emrys turned and began heading back, steps as soundless and precise as ever. He’d found something, Aric guessed, from the angle of his head, the light tension in thin shoulders. Wind tugged his hair upward briefly, a few short black strands standing up in spikes.

Aric appreciated that for a moment. His own hands knew the way that shining halo of hair felt, gathered up; his skin knew the brush of it against his shoulder, stomach, thighs.

He made himself stop thinking about that. Not the time. Even if it would fit in well with the whole powerful virile mercenary reputation. Or at least the stories about devotion between the Storm-Wielder and the Shadow, which’d been the names bestowed on them by a grateful bard the year before. They’d heard that ballad for the first time in a tavern in Caer Moranth, a few weeks after that rescue.

Em had, with complete delight, paid the minstrel to sing it three more times that night, and then had asked gleefully, up in their room, whether Aric could in fact shake their world with thunder.

He’d done his best, naturally.

He said, “Do you have someplace we can stay, for the night? Your inn, maybe, preferably with food?” They’d left the horses, Em’s short but fleet-footed filly Starlight and his own reliable solid mare Ginger, at the stables attached to the inn in question; it’d looked well-tended enough, and Emrys had said the other horses in residence felt contented. He hoped no one in Dun Nas took enough exception to mercenaries to declare that there’d be no rooms available.

He and Em could sleep on the ground; they’d done it before, and would again, most likely. He’d been looking forward to a bed, though.

Gildas’s whole face lit up, a beacon. “Of course you can stay! And thank you!”

“We haven’t done anything yet.”

“But you’re willing to try!”

“No promises.”

“It’s more than we had before you arrived.”

“We might still leave.”

“We won’t,” Emrys said, arriving. He—and it was he, at the moment; that was generally the case when venturing into a new town—ran a hand through his hair, making it stand up more; he’d rolled up both sleeves, and mud splashed his boots. Just now he looked more human than not, and entirely adorable, if the word could be said to apply to someone carrying that many knives.

Gildas looked at Aric, with much the same expression as a puppy begging for a scratch behind the ears.

“Oh, well, in that case,” Aric said. “Fine, yes, we’ll see what we can do.”

It’s Rainbow Snippets time! This week, here’s the beginning of a story I’m working on (pretty much done, I think) for a trick-or-treat themed submission for JMS Books! It’s tentatively called “October by Candlelight,” for now.

#

“You bought what?” Wes said, coming in, setting down keys and laptop bag and mountain of student papers he’d have to grade later. The entire house smelled like nutmeg and brown sugar and cozy spice; when he’d opened the door he’d thought Finn must’ve been baking.

He’d been looking forward to that, despite having consumed a decent amount of sugar at the university’s reception for the day’s guest speaker. Finn’s cinnamon-sugar pinwheels beat out mass-produced chocolate chip any day.

Finn said again, apologetically, “They’re candles. Sorry.”

Rain hummed in the background, a low musical counterpoint. October doing its best, even in Southern California. Cool steely skies and pumpkins appearing on porches. The leaves-and-wheat-and-berries wreath Finn had hung on the front door. The polished dark wood floors and large fluffy furniture they’d picked out together, at the moment adorned with couch-pillows in themes of harvest and corn and gourds and spiced lattes.

And the scent of warm spiced baked goods all through their house, tantalizing. “How many of them did you light?”

“Only two? I’ll experiment with molasses gingerbread if you want, just give me a sec—”

“Weren’t you reading a script? Don’t get up.” He bent over the back of the sofa to kiss his boyfriend, deeply and thoroughly. Finn tasted like tea—also autumnal, some sort of pumpkin and ginger blend—and reached up to tug him down closer.

Wes loved kissing him. Loved tasting him. Loved everything about him, from floppy brown-gold hair to the sparkling blue-green eyes that’d once upon a time made Finn Ransom a teenage Hollywood heartthrob. Finn always kissed as if taking every sensation seriously: paying attention, completely devoted to the moment, taking nothing for granted. Wes knew why, and loved that too, understanding how much Finn trusted him to see it.

That made it feel real, an answer when this all occasionally didn’t: himself, Wesley Kim, ordinary historian and professor, hand in hand with someone whose name he’d known a decade ago, because everyone had known Finn’s name a decade ago.

That was still true, if less so. Years out of the spotlight would do that.

Though these days Finn’s name was out there again, and the parts were coming, if not a deluge then at least a steady river. Which made Wes’s heart skip a few beats, at times, for different reasons.

“I’m fine.” Finn moved the script, making space on the sofa. In plaid pajama pants and one of Wes’s old grad-school shirts, wrapped up in an orange-and-brown blanket a co-star had knitted for him, he looked younger than he was, all hair and big eyes and dimples. It was entirely possible, Wes considered, that Finn could still play a teenager, on camera. At least a college student. A precocious and precious one.

He was in fact thirty-one, seven years younger than Wes; nobody, from friends to casting directors, ever believed that without looking it up to confirm. Wes, whose hair had started sprouting flecks of silver around the fourth year of his PhD, suspected that if ageless fantastical elves actually existed, his boyfriend definitely was one.

He sat down. Tugged Finn’s legs into his lap. Ran a hand over that left knee, over the knit of the blanket. “Really fine, or fine in the sense of, last week was awful and today’s not quite as awful?”

The last week had been awful. Finn had been working, filming a historical drama, a World War One period piece, right up until the day before his flight home from Ireland. He’d gotten off the plane—private, because airports were hell for multiple reasons—and all but fallen over into Wes’s waiting arms. Wes, heart in his throat, had shoved his boyfriend into bed, ordered him not to move for a week or possibly a month, and called both Finn’s usual doctor and his physical therapist on the spot.

Finn made a face at him but relaxed into the touch, legs lazy and trusting. “Somewhere in between? I can totally get up and bake something if you want. Cupcakes? Banana caramel? We have bananas.”

“We do, and maybe later.” He’d begun rubbing the usual worst spots, no intense pressure, but enough to ease any gathered tension. Finn practically purred, and even shut his eyes, a contented brown-and-gold striped tabby-cat melting into the sofa.

Wes inquired, hands not stopping, “So you wanted candles?” He could’ve made a detour. Found a store.

“Mmm.” Finn opened one eye, then the other. “I got them delivered, I didn’t go out in the rain, don’t worry, just keep doing that. How was the guest lecture? Ancient Mesopotamian princesses and priestesses, you said?”