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Hey! I’ve decided to do a big giveaway for the end of the year. This is both for haremlit and erotica. These titles are free through the 29th. (With one exception, Haven 2 stops being free at the end of the 28th.)
HAREMLIT
EROTICA
Hopefully you can find something and enjoy among the list, happy holidays and, hopefully, we’ll have a good 2024.
Here we are, at the end of 2023. Feels like we got here kind of fast all of a sudden.
This will be a short newsletter, as I’m saving the bigger, broader stuff for next month and my The Year Ahead post.
So, as you can see, Beneath the Ashes is here! If you’re confused about why the cover art here looks different than the cover art over on Amazon, this is because cover art swapping is a technique used to help boost sales and visibility. I’m probably going to indulge in it a little more in 2024 because it’s basically just leaving money on the table not to do it. Sorry if it’s frustrating, it seems to bug some people, but this is the reality Amazon and the silent majority of readers are forcing on us.
I was hoping to arrive here with Our Own Way 3 ready, but that ended up not being the case.
I’ve been having difficulties recently. Insomnia, stomach problems, low energy in general. It makes doing things hard, and it’s largely a side effect of being in winter. Given the fact that winter is only just starting, and we’ve got a solid three more months of it to go, um…December is probably going to be a not productive month.
As for specifics, I intend to:
Finish Our Own Way 3 and get it out. (There will be no short between 3 & 4 because 4 picks up immediately after the end of 3.)
I want to get the bulk of Goblin Girls II written. Ideally it’ll be out sometime in January.
I also would like to get the bulk of Beneath the Ashes 2 written, but we’ll see how that works. Also has a January release date, probably late January. (I’ve also opted to forgo bonus content for Beneath the Ashes.)
Raw - The Complete Series is going to drop around Christmas. It will have no new content. I waffled for quite a while on whether or not to write more and ultimately decided that I like where I ended it and adding on anything else might not be such a great idea.
I’ll try to get at least a chapter for Shelter From the Storm out.
That’s what I’ve got for now. I hope it’s a good month for you.
Here we are at the beginning of the third Our Own Way novel.
Chapter Two can be found here for 1$/month Patrons.
Future chapters will be posted here for 3$/month Patrons.
I hope you enjoy!
“Don’t say it,” Gabe murmured as he finished clipping his nails.
“Say what? And how did you even know I was here?” Ellen replied, stepping into the doorway behind him.
“I can hear you. Both in general and your thoughts,” he said, studying his nails, then replacing the clipper. He stepped in front of the mirror again and studied himself. “You know I never used to do anywhere near this level of prep before,” he added quietly.
“I believe it. Most men don’t,” Ellen replied, stepping into the bathroom and putting her hands on his shoulders. “Trust me, it’s appreciated. And I wasn’t thinking anything.”
“Right. You weren’t thinking ‘he really needs to relax’ or anything like that.”
She laughed softly, then grew a little more serious. “Actually, I genuinely was not thinking that. You’re pretty relaxed. Or, maybe relaxed isn’t the right word. Confident. Calm. You don’t seem worried.”
“Well, I am,” he said, “although admittedly not as much as I’d be if this was a week or two ago.”
“Four days ago you were doing this exact same thing to go take a cougar on a date. You were more nervous then.”
“It’s not quite the same,” he murmured. Finally, he looked up at her reflection. “So what were you thinking, then?”
“That I was right. When we first started talking, my assessment of you ultimately ended up being that beneath your...cautious exterior was a mostly untapped reservoir of confidence.”
“And you tapped it, huh?”
“Oh yes. I very much tapped it. And Holly has helped a lot. You are more confident now, Gabe.”
“I guess it’s finally catching up.” He looked down at himself once more. “Should I do more?”
Ellen opened her mouth, then paused, closed it for a moment, and smiled. “What do you think?”
“I think...no. I think I’m good.”
“Why?”
“Anymore and it starts heading into try hard territory, I think, for Chloe. Any less and I worry about heading into ‘I’m too good for you’ territory, which isn’t the message I want to send for obvious reasons.”
Ellen’s smile grew and she looked very satisfied. “That’s basically what I was going to say.”
“Interesting.” He turned around and looked up at her, settling his hands on her broad hips. “That being said, I would like to know if I’m missing anything obvious.”
“Hmm.” She looked him up and down. “No. Wait! Yes. One thing. Put on your cologne.”
“For real?”
“Yes. Trust me. You want to give her a scent to associate you with, a good one. And that cologne is just...oh my. So good,” she replied.
He thought about it, then nodded. “Yeah, that tracks. Although what if she’s already been around someone who uses this?”
“That’s just a thing we’ll have to risk, and this seems kind of obscure.”
“It had better be,” he muttered as he sprayed some on. “After spending two damn hours hunting it down.”
“Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad. And it was...ah, mmm. Yeah. So very worth it. That is actually making me horny right now. Because I smell it and I think of you.”
“Well...good for me then.”
“Very good for you. Now...I do have one piece of advice.”
“I’m listening.”
“Chloe is a ten out of ten. She’s kind of the definition of a big titty goth girl and she is a gamer. She’s a smoke show. She is obviously, to some extent, aware of this fact. And you feel like she is out of your league. Stop me if I’m wrong.”
“You aren’t wrong,” Gabe replied.
“So then, I advise that you...put this out of your mind. Which I know sounds like advice I always give, but this time it’s a little different. I think Chloe wants to go on a date with a guy who won’t worship at her feet, but also won’t make her feel like she should be lucky for the opportunity...pretty much, what you were saying earlier, but applied to the whole thing.” She paused, then sighed and shook her head.
“Okay, I’m a little high right now so it’s a little harder to hold onto my thoughts. Um. Okay. Don’t laugh at me!”
“I’m not!”
“You’re smirking. That’s like laughing. Anyway. Basically, be yourself, treat her like you treat us, and uh...fuck it. You know what to do. Go treat that girl to a good date. She needs it,” Ellen said.
“I can do that,” Gabe replied.
Ellen looked at him for a moment, then hugged him. “I’d make some quip about how you’re all grown up but I think that’d be kinda weird given our relationship...unless you’re into that.”
“Uh...no comment,” he replied.
Her eyes flashed. “Wait what?”
“What’s going on?” Holly called from the bedroom. “What’s Gabe into?”
“Nothing that I feel like discussing,” he replied firmly.
“Boo! I wanna do weird, freaky shit with you!”
“Oh believe me,” he said as he and Ellen stepped out of the bathroom and he poked his head into the bedroom, “you will. Now that things are finally settling down a little, we are going to start experimenting with the part of you that enjoys being held down.”
“Really?” she asked, setting her laptop aside and sitting up.
“Oh yes,” Ellen agreed. “We’re going to do a bit more than hold you down.”
“When!?”
“Soon,” Gabe replied. He began to say something else and then Holly shifted and the blanket fell away from her, revealing her considerable and bare breasts. He stared at her for a moment before sighing. “I have to get out of here or I’m never going to leave.”
“Oh really?” Holly asked, grinning at him. “You want little old me over your shiny new goth girlfriend?”
“First of all, I love you. A lot. Second of all, she’s not my girlfriend and you are. Third...um…”
“Third is that he’s distracted by whatever tits are in his face,” Ellen said. “And you’re right, Gabe. You should go because if you don’t you’re going to pull us into a threesome because we have such a hard time saying no to you and you’ll make Chloe very grumpy.”
“I wouldn’t want her grumpy at me,” Holly murmured.
Gabe laughed. “Yes you would.”
Holly crossed her arms. “No, I wouldn’t. She’s not into girls. Which is fine, just...disappointing. She’s so fucking hot. I’m kinda jealous.”
“Same,” Ellen agreed.
“Okay, okay, you both are right.” He marched over to the bed, leaned down, and kissed her on the mouth. Then hesitated and cupped one of her big, pale breasts.
Holly giggled and rolled her eyes. “Gabe. Come on,” she murmured. “Don’t start what you can’t finish.”
“Dammit,” he whispered. “I love you.”
She smiled and touched his cheek. “I love you too, Gabe. Now go have fun.”
“Yes, dear.”
Holly laughed and shook her head, then picked up her laptop as he straightened back up. He could tell from a glance at her screen that she was working on her pictures again. She hadn’t just gotten into the world of photography, she’d dived in headfirst and happily, and he couldn’t be happier for her. She was obviously enjoying herself immensely.
Gabe rejoined Ellen and they walked into the living room. He started getting into his shoes.
“What are you gonna do?” he asked.
“I am going to get a little more baked, and then I am going to marathon a cartoon from the nineties that I used to be very, very into it, completely forgot about, and just recently rediscovered. Now that it’s official and I no longer have a job and I have actual time for myself, I’m catching up on a lot of media that I had to abandon or ignore. So I’m making a pizza and bingeing that shit,” she replied.
Gabe pulled his hoodie into place and gave her a hug and a kiss. “Okay then. Have fun and I love you. Let me know if you need or want anything.”
She smiled that smile of hers. “So if I want a foot massage or something…”
He sighed. “You know what I mean. And you know better.”
“Do I?”
“Yes, you do.”
She laughed. “Yeah, don’t worry, I’m not going to fuck with you. Go pound a hot goth girl.”
“Hopefully. I’m not sure if she wants sex or not.”
“I’m pretty confident she wants it, but yes, that is a possibility to keep in mind. I love you too, babe. Have fun.”
Gabe kissed her once more and then headed out to his car. As he did, he glanced at the sky and sighed heavily. He could see his breath on the air. It was already pitch dark now, the stars coming out. It was five in the afternoon.
Shaking off the bad feelings that were trying to worm their way into his skull, he got behind the wheel, set his GPS to Chloe’s apartment, and started driving.
Although it had been ten days since he’d last seen Chloe, (and first made love with her), it felt like longer. He knew some of that came from the fact that it had snowed lightly a few more times, prompting them to pretty much just chill out in their house.
Besides hanging out with Ellen and Holly, and working on his next project, the biggest thing of note he’d done was go on a date with Isabella a few days ago. Spending the night with a recently divorced cougar who was amazing with her mouth had been a study in unusual but blissful wonder.
The whole experience had been odd, but in a good way. For being very smart, very accomplished, and very attractive, Isabella had been surprisingly lacking in confidence. But Ellen had made a really good point when she’d told him: Imagine being with the same person for twenty five years and then suddenly breaking up and trying to date again, even casually.
Overall, it had been a great time, and he was hoping that she would ask him on another date. He was reluctant to ask mostly because she was so busy, between being a surgeon and dealing with the aftermath of her divorce as she tried to get her life rearranged.
In truth, Chloe had been on his mind more than anyone or anything else. (Outside of his relationship.)
He hadn’t seen her once since they’d had sex and they’d been texting a little. Mostly he’d been giving her space, because that’s what she wanted. He was also wondering if maybe they’d gone too far too fast. Not even just that they’d fucked, (twice), but that they had fucked in front of about half a dozen people, all of them mostly strangers to Chloe.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time, and so far nothing she’d said or done had actually strongly indicated that she was freaked out by what had happened, but he was still paranoid. He was a lot less so right now, though, and he felt a bit of weight lifting as he drove through the dark, frigid city.
Chloe had called him up half an hour ago and pretty much out of the blue said she wanted a relaxing date night with him because she was incredibly stressed out. Given he’d been practicing a lot lately in helping women manage their stress levels, and the fact that he wanted to see her again, he’d immediately agreed to come over.
He found himself thinking back to Ellen’s assessment as he pulled into the apartment’s parking lot. It felt...off.
It didn’t seem possible that he could have had this level of confidence back when they’d first met, let alone before that.
There was a parking spot. He supposed this was something he was going to have to wrestle internally with later.
He began to pull out his phone but as soon as he parked, the front door to Chloe’s building opened up and she started walking over. She was wearing a long, dark coat and a dark beanie and what looked like heavy dark boots. As she approached, she paused once and squinted into the window, then walked over and got into the passenger’s seat.
“Hey...how you doing?” Gabe asked, because he could tell immediately she was in a sour mood still.
Her text had been: Come save me from my anger before I break something. Or someone.
“I’ll just warn you right now that I’m feeling extra bitchy and not in a fun way,” she replied, staring out the front windshield as she dug around in one pocket. Finally, her hand came out with a USB stick. “Can we listen to this? It will calm me down.”
“Sure,” he replied, pulling his own out of the radio.
“Thank you. Seriously,” she muttered, reaching forward, then hesitating. “Don’t make fun of me for this.”
“I won’t,” he replied.
“...thanks.”
She put the USB in and then fiddled with it for a moment. Instrumental music soon began playing. It struck him as very fantasy sounding.
“Where are we going?” he asked, his phone out.
“There’s a place called Slices I would really like to go to right now,” she replied.
He punched it into his GPS and then showed her the most likely result. “This?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then.” He set it up and then started backing out.
This is gonna be a short update.
Most of my October was spent trying to write two novels at the same time, and I managed to do it!
Goblin Girls Do It Better, my take on the goblin girl craze that has swept haremlit, is out now! It is to be the first in a planned trilogy. I’m hoping to get the sequel out before the end of the year, but more realistically it’ll be sometime in January 2024. And then a few months after that the final sequel will come out.
Audiobook versions of Goblin Girls Do It Better are officially confirmed.
The other novel was Beneath the Ashes, my subterranean post-apocalyptic novel with more emphasis on action and adventure and a bit of horror. It’s done and I have handed it over to Royal Guard. We’re currently talking about things but I will definitely let everyone know as soon as we have any kind of idea on a release date.
I also finished putting my backlog back up, so that’s nice.
As for audiobook news…
The final individual Haven audiobook is out now.
Haven - The Complete Collection Audiobook, which will include all bonus shorts, should be coming out soon.
Raw VIII audio may come this month.
A Warm Place 8 will probably be early 2024.
Our Own Way 2 will ideally be out sometime this month.
That’s what I’ve got for audiobook news. Things have always been a little unpredictable but it’s been a bit more unpredictable lately. Such is life, especially in a creative industry.
Now, as for what’s coming up this month?
OUR OWN WAY 3. This is going to be my primary focus for the month of November. I doubt I’ll finish the novel this month, (they’re averaging about 40% longer than my other titles), but it probably will come in early December.
Soon I’m gonna write a bonus short set between Goblin Girls Do It Better I & II, but that only really matters to the people who are doing my 10$/month Patreon.
I’ll try to get at least a couple of chapters out for Shelter From the Storm.
I’m also going to try and get at least one short story out for either Haven or A Warm Place for the Patron of the Arts 10$ Tier on my Patreon. I want to try and get a little more going now that I’m not so slammed.
That’s what I’ve got for now.
Here we are, in probably the best month of the year.
Let’s get down to business.
First thing, what I managed to get going last month.
All the other big release stuff that happened last month all relates to my Patreon.
In short, I gave it a big overhaul. Mostly it was cosmetic stuff, it looks better now, but I also added a new tier. 10$/month gets you early access to bonus shorts that I normally write and keep secret until releasing them with the collections. I also will probably be writing new bonus content for already finished series. (Like Haven for example.) Ultimately, the bonus shorts for collections will have to come down, but I’ll probably keep the extra bonus shorts up there.
The other big thing is that Patreon has finally reorganized and added a feature called Collections. In short, it’s an easier way to organize posts, and what this means for me is that I will be organizing my early access chapters into Collections. It has also prompted me to experiment with something: posting chapters to a story I’m writing in the background. Typically speaking, I post chapters to my Patreon only when I am very actively working on a title, and the release date isn’t all that far off. This time around, though, I’ve got some content written for a story that I’m a bit more uncertain on. I keep coming back to it, so I decided finally to just release chapters for it to my Patreon, partly to get feedback and partly to help bulk up the 3$/month Tier offerings.
That being said, here are links to the titles I have in progress.
10$ TIER
I also organized all my nude art into collections as well. Basically there’s three eras.
OLD SCHOOL: This contains a bunch of art that, as far as I know, is no longer available anywhere else. It’s all art you can view if you are a 1$/month Patron or over. It’s from 2017-2018 era when I was first getting art drawn for my backlog.
CLASSIC: Also available to all tiers of my Patreon. Same deal, a lot of these aren’t available elsewhere, and that’ll get more true as I continue updating my art. There’s also a few bonuses in there, like the original versions of the Raw covers, some extra characters I had drawn, and one bonus character for an early version of Beneath the Ashes.
MODERN ART: This is all 5$/month Tier stuff. It’s where I will be putting my new covers and holds all the modern era stuff. Again, I’d like to reiterate that this is an early access program. Basically, nude cover art goes up here for one month, then gets released to my website, where you can view it for free.
I’ve had to lean into my Patreon a bit more, especially this year, but I’m still ultimately kind of leery of it. Obviously I’m grateful that there are people who want to go the extra distance, and I want to try and give those people something back for their support, but I’ve never really been a fan of paywalls. Unfortunately for me, this is my whole career and how I make money, so I’ve had to give some ground on that, and I probably will have to give more ground in the future given the way society is going.
I think that’s everything about Patreon.
Let’s wrap this up with a quick discussion of in progress works.
BENEATH THE ASHES: This is I’d say about halfway written now (though not halfway posted). Gonna try to have this wrapped up before November, but after that the ball will be in RGP’s court and I’m not sure how long the process of publication might take.
GOBLIN GIRLS DO IT BETTER: Maybe a quarter written right now. I’m going to try and have this written and out before November as well. I kind of want to get this done and kicked out the door. I’m committing to at least a trilogy. I would like to have Goblin Girls Do It Better II out before 2024 and then wrap up the trilogy in early 2024, but that seems pretty unlikely.
OUR OWN WAY 3: Ideally I will begin writing Our Own Way 3 this month and have it out sometime in late November, early December, given these books are tending to be much longer than usual. Given we’re heading into winter, it kind of feels like all bets might be off. It’s a tough time, traditionally. I’m hoping that the writing of Our Own Way 3 will go as smoothly as the previous one.
SHELTER FROM THE STORM: So yeah, this one I’m just working on in the background. No idea when I’ll wrap it up. A whole month might go by between updates.
BACKLOG: Previously I mentioned that I was going to try and do Hellcats 4 and Wanderlust V and probably a few more. Uh…yeah I gotta say now that it’s not happening. I actually sat down and started working on Hellcats 4, but it pretty quickly became obvious to me that my heart isn’t there, and if my heart isn’t in it, then there’s basically no reason to do it. Sorry to get your hopes up if you were hoping for this. Pretty soon I’ll have all my backlog back up, with updated formatting, etc., and then I will be extremely grateful when it’s all done and up. I’m sure I’ll swing back in the other direction sometime next year, thinking ‘gee I miss my backlog, maybe I should take another look at expanding it…’, but I’m now feeling very ‘focus on the new stuff, stop looking back’.
Also, there’s ONE other thing that I wrote. It’s a short incest erotica fan fiction, set in the Dragon Age universe. It’s called NO ONE ADMITS IT, and it takes place before the first game, featuring one of the theoretical protagonists. If you have no idea what Dragon Age is, that’s fine, you don’t need to for enjoyment of this story. All you really need to know is: It’s a fantasy universe, the protagonist is a twenty-something noble, and he bangs the ever-loving fuck out of his mom when she comes onto him. And, just so there’s no confusion, it’s his bio mom, not his stepmom. I fired up Dragon Age again and just sort of got overwhelmed with the idea and figured I might as well just write it, and so I did. I might do a sequel, with his mom and his aunt.
I hope you enjoy it!
That’s it. Now I’ve got a shitload of writing to do.
Okay, here we are with the goblin girl story!
Chapter I is below.
Chapter I & II are here for 1$/month.
More chapters will be posted here for my 3$/month Patrons.
Enjoy!
Lucas was just beginning to hunt for a place to make camp for the night when he heard the scream.
It was high-pitched, almost certainly coming from a woman, and was the kind of short scream that conveyed immense, and unpleasant, surprise.
He was just cresting a small hill when it came to him, and though he could not see the person who’d screamed, he saw the chipped dark brickwork of a ruin peeking at him through the trees off to the southeast. Though he had never seen the dark masonry with his own eyes until just that moment, he knew what he was looking at.
Lucas sprinted down the hill, making for the treeline.
He’d like to say that he did it for the sole reason of wanting to save someone from a potentially dangerous situation, but the truth of the matter was that he was feeling impulsive. Perhaps dangerously impulsive.
Hitting the base of the hill, he ran on, booted feet pounding the grass, trampling flowers and breaking through small bushes as he tried to get an idea of what he might be facing. He had a vague sense of motion somewhere in front of the dark structure, and when he hit the forest, he saw the sparks of clashing metal.
Someone was definitely fighting.
“Incoming!” he shouted as he drew his blade.
Both figures seemed to be rather short but that didn’t really matter. What did matter was that one of them was noticeably bonier than the other. He burst through the treeline and into a small clearing in front of the crumbling ruin.
He was greeted with the sight of a goblin woman in a traveling dress fighting a losing battle against what seemed to be a fully armed and armored dwarven undead. She shrieked and ducked under a huge battleaxe as it came for her face.
Lucas considered the situation for about two seconds before he began running forward as fast as he could once more. He screamed an inarticulate battlecry, which caused the dwarven zombie to twist in his direction.
He launched himself feet first directly into the creature.
The goblin woman shrieked again, this time in what he swore sounded like delight, as his boots made contact, dented and then broke the old rusted armor, kept going, and smashed the skeletal thing into its base components.
Lucas landed with a heavy grunt on his back, then groaned as a bone hit him on the forehead. He rolled, twisted, and scrambled back up onto his feet. Where there was one undead, there were almost certainly more.
But as the bones and old armor finished scattering across the clearing, a few clattering against the front of the old structure, he saw and heard nothing.
“That was amazing!” the goblin woman cried, shattering the silence.
Lucas turned to face her and was struck by two things: her lack of armor and her incredible beauty.
The third thing he noticed was the way she was looking at him. Her eyes were wide and she had a massive smile on her face.
“Thanks,” he replied, brushing at his blade before sheathing it. “You...look very out of place here.”
“Because I’m a goblin?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“No, because you’re wearing a...dress,” he murmured, trailing off as she shifted and one of the straps came loose and he saw most of her chest.
“Oops,” she said, smirking and putting it back in place. Then she sighed in real frustration as she realized that it was cut through. “How in the three hells did he even do that!?” she snarled, trying fruitlessly to get it back in some semblance of working order.
“That was a really close call,” Lucas replied, feeling a lot of very specific things as he watched her work.
Whoever she was, this goblin girl was very...blessed, in certain areas of her body.
With another sigh, she abruptly regained her smile as she snapped her eyes back to him. She twisted so that her shoulder was closer, presenting it.
“Can you help?”
“I can definitely help,” Lucas replied, coming over and leaning forward. She had to be over a foot shorter than him, but that made sense given her race. “Who are you?”
“My name is Izzy,” she replied.
“Izzy…” Ellasandra had told him of a best friend named Izzy, but how many goblin girls had the name of Izzy? Probably a lot. “Good to meet you,” he said as he finished tying the torn strap back together and putting in place. He straightened up. “I am Lucas Mead-Slayer.”
“That sounds familiar,” she muttered.
“My name has...gotten around,” Lucas replied.
“No, I don’t really know any famous humans,” she said, frowning in concentration. “I don’t actually know any humans, but I know of a few humans. And–” Her brilliantly pink eyes widened. “Are you Ellasandra’s human!?”
Lucas chuckled. “Yeah, you could say that...I can’t believe you’re that Izzy. I’m looking for Ellasandra. What in the gods’ names are you doing here? My map tells me Blackstone Forest is still a day or so away.”
“It is,” Izzy replied, eyeing him much more closely, with a great interest, now. “I’m coming back from a journey. A failed one, I might add. And that’s actually why I’m here.” She turned to glare at the dark stone structure. “I was hoping to recover something useful from this old pile of stone.”
“You have to know these old dwarven ruins are almost always guarded or infested by undead, right?” Lucas replied.
She heaved an annoyed sigh. “Yes, Lucas, I know that. Not all goblins are stupid.”
“I didn’t say–”
“I’m good at sneaking,” she continued, and he could see a very specific smile creeping slowly onto her beautiful green face. “And I thought maybe I could get in, grab something, and get out before any of the creepy bastards were the wiser. Only this one was right past the door.”
“Uh-huh,” Lucas replied.
A moment passed. A wind gusted through the trees, making them dance and sway. Somewhere, a bird called loudly, and another answered.
A mating call.
“So…?” Izzy asked, and he saw that she had not only leaned forward, exposing her already well-shown cleavage even more, but now she was swaying slowly back and forth.
“So what?” he replied.
“You gonna help me?”
“You don’t even know me,” he said.
“Hmm. I guess that’s a good point. You could just be lying about knowing Ellasandra...oh! All right, pull down your pants.”
“What?”
“Let me see your left hip,” she said.
That resonated in his head for a moment and abruptly he latched onto why. “Ah...she told you about that.”
“About your thigh scar? Yes. Lemme see and I’ll know it’s you,” she replied, smirking now.
He sighed, undoing his belt. “All right.”
Izzy stepped much closer as he pulled the left side of his pants down. She knelt down and studied his thigh. He waited. She kept studying. He could feel her breath against his bare skin.
“Well?” he asked.
“I’m not sure yet,” she murmured. He heard her shift and suddenly felt her hands digging in between his pants and his leg.
“Izzy!”
“What!? I need to be sure!” she replied, tugging on his pants, then she laughed.
He sighed and, with a tremendous amount of restraint, he pulled up his pants and belted them again. “You sure now?”
“Yeah,” she murmured, still on her knees.
She looked up at him, and expectant smile on her face, then she looked disappointed when he asked, “What now?”
Izzy sighed and got to her feet. “Well, Lucas, Slayer of Mead, would you be so good as to accompany an innocent, defenseless goblin girl into the big scary ruin so that I don’t come back completely empty-handed?”
“You are not innocent,” he muttered.
“What was that?” Izzy asked immediately, trying, and failing, to stare him down.
He stared back at her, then smiled. He couldn’t help it. There was something about her, something that Ellasandra had complained about many, many times, that brought out what some might call the worst in him.
“You aren’t innocent, Izzy. Not after all I heard about you.”
“What absolute nonsense did you hear from Ella about me!?” she snapped.
“All the tricks you played on her. The pranks and the goofs. And all the time you spent ensuring that Kora was clean,” he replied. Ellasandra had told him that a lot too.
Izzy immediately stiffened and then reddened in the face. “Yeah, well, I won’t apologize for any of it,” she fired off eventually.
“I wasn’t looking for an apology. That being said, I believe you about the defenseless part,” he said.
Her expression immediately changed into one of excited challenge. “I could kick your ass. Any time, any day, human!”
He almost, almost, challenged her then and there. He knew she’d take it, she wanted it, and that he wanted it, too. But he felt certain he knew what it would lead to before too long of them rolling around in the dirt together.
And this was an unsafe place.
“Don’t tempt me,” he said finally.
“Oh please, please be tempted,” Izzy shot back, grinning more broadly than ever as she leaned forward again.
He actually felt himself tremble. How long had it been? He knew exactly how long it had been. Nine months and almost one day.
Way past way too long.
“I am,” he said as he got control of himself, “but this isn’t the place for it.” Izzy stared at him for a moment longer, then something inside of her actually seemed to agree with him, and she lost her lusty look. It was replaced by an annoyed and vaguely angry one.
“You’re right,” she muttered glumly.
“Are you serious about going in there?” he asked, looking again to the stone structure.
Now that he was closer, he saw that it was built fairly deeply into a hillside. The earth crept up along its side and over its roof, and where it ended, vines crawled along the brickwork and clung like lifeless snakes. Though the structure still seemed sound, cracks and decay were obvious all over its face.
He’d still never heard a sure answer about the true age of these places.
“I am serious,” she said. “I don’t want to disappoint Ella more than I’m already going to.”
“Well, all right. I know I can handle zombies, especially if they’re this far gone,” Lucas said, nudging the nearest bone with his boot.
“Perfect! Let’s go find some treasure!” Izzy declared.
“Wait, you should probably stay out here.”
“No! I want to go inside!” she replied, surprisingly petulant. Although Lucas had to admit, he was hearing exactly what he’d heard from Ellasandra on her worse days, when what she called her ‘inner goblin’ escaped more easily.
“Izzy–”
“You don’t take me seriously! I can defend myself!” she snapped.
“I’m not saying that you can’t, Izzy. I fought alongside Ellasandra for a year, I know what goblins can do. I’m saying you have no armor.” He paused. “You also appear to have no traveling pack. And no weapon.”
“Oh. Um. Yeah,” she murmured sheepishly. “I...lost my travel pack yesterday.”
“How?” he asked, genuinely curious. That was a fairly big deal for a traveler.
She giggled awkwardly. “I was climbing a tree. For...reasons. That aren’t important. And one strap on my pack had already broken, so it was laying awkwardly, and then, well, it fell off me. Into a ravine. With a river.”
“Uh-huh. And how about you weapon?”
Here she stopped meeting his eyes, blushing again. Though, he imagined, for a different reason. “I got angry and threw it...down another ravine.”
“...all right, wow,” he muttered.
“Shut up!” she growled, crossing her arms.
“Fine, fine. I won’t say anything. I guess I’ve done some pretty stupid shit when I was pissed before. I am suggesting it for your safety, though. I will go inside and investigate.”
Izzy gave him a calculating look. He waited. His experience with Ellasandra, and a few others, had taught him that goblin trust was hard won. Though they were often quick to trust each other, too often in his opinion, the opposite was typically true for outsiders. And humans most certainly counted as outsiders.
Which was why he was honestly shocked that Izzy was talking to him in such a familiar, open manner.
Ellasandra must have told her a lot about their time together and really imprinted a sense of trustworthiness on his image.
“I still want to go inside, but not because I think you’ll rip me off, but because I...have reasons,” she said, not quite looking at him again.
“Reasons, huh?” he asked.
“Yes! Reasons! Lucas! Can I have my reasons!?” she snapped.
He chuckled. “Yes, Izzy, you can have your reasons. All right. Just...stay behind me, run if there’s real trouble, and do as I say.”
“Make me,” she replied. He began to sigh and she quickly cleared her throat. “Sorry, I’m, uh-that just slipped out. I’m listening, I’ll do as I’m told.”
“Thank you. Now let’s do this.”
This is probably a bit of a surprise. I’ll admit it kind of was to me too.
So what is this?
Being an author, I sometimes am struck by ideas. Sometimes they seem incredibly potent for about a day or two, then fizzle out. Sometimes they unfold like a galaxy in motion, intricate and perfect. I’m better about telling which is which nowadays, but it’s still tough.
Back in May, this idea came to me. This idea of a war hero living in a post-apocalyptic future where his side is trying to put the world back together after a brutal fifty year war overthrowing a fascist, dystopian government. The first thing that I knew about this character was that he was suicidal and full of self-loathing and he was very tired of being alive, but didn’t really want to die. I knew right away this would be a terrible idea for the protagonist of a haremlit novel. Basically every author I’ve spoken with about it has told me the same thing.
And yet.
And yet as I began sketching an idea of the plot, I simply could not remove these aspects of the protagonist. They seemed intrinsic to the narrative. And then I started writing, and the first few chapters just sort of vomited out of me in the way that stories do sometimes in the beginning. It’s a great experience, honestly one of the ones I as an author lives for.
But I had other responsibilities. Finishing Raw. Launching Our Own Way. Getting started on Beneath the Ashes. Absolutely panicking over the Amazon thing.
Somehow, though all of that, I managed to put together about five chapters of content and a vague outline. And then it went dormant for a while. I didn’t even look at it for like a month at least. Then, just recently, I took a look back over everything I’d written on a whim, and still felt a strong sense of having something, and I started writing a bit more. By coincidence, Patreon finally created their Collections feature, which allows you to more effectively collect chapters of a story into a single, coherent location.
Finally, I decided that I might as well begin posting this, even though it’s going to be in the background, and I might go weeks or longer without getting a chance to update it. Partially I made this choice to help fill out the 3$/month Tier, and partially because I want to experiment with it. It’s very possible that having an audience for a title while it’s being written might help motivate me more. And I mean in a different way than I already do with how I write. So far, I’ve only posted stories as I’m writing them when I’m positive I’ll be finishing them within a fairly small window of time. This has no real end date.
Which is good, because it’s a passion project. I imagine this will not have mass appeal. That being said, it is functionally a haremlit story. There’s a guy, running missions in a post-apocalyptic world, falling in love with at least three women. There’s really nothing different there. Honestly, in some ways, it closely resembles most of my other works. But I’m going to be leaning a lot more into my miserable protagonist than ever before. I also will say that this is probably the most personal thing I’ll have ever written. If it isn’t obvious by now, I have problems. Mental health problems. Even medicated, educated on the subject, and with a few years of therapy under my belt, my mental health still often gets wrecked by my depression and anxiety problems. They are lifelong tormentors. In some way that I cannot articulate, writing Shelter From the Storm seems somehow…necessary, to me personally.
For obvious reasons this isn’t going to be a blow-by-blow of my own mental health problems. Clearly I’m not a war hero living in the shadow of taking down a dystopian, fascist global government. But a lot of my troubles went into this. What and how much? I’d rather not say. My primary goal for this is to help both myself and, ideally, other people. I don’t know if it will be cathartic or helpful in any conceivable way for people who are also suffering under the tyranny of depression and anxiety, but I can hope.
Anyway, here’s chapter one.
You can read chapter two here.
And future chapters will be posting here if you are a 3$/month or above Patron.
It was raining when I finally found Harper Station.
Given the fact that rainstorms had a fifty-fifty shot of drilling a migraine deep in the dark depths of my skull, I took this as something of a mixed blessing.
It had been nothing but me and the bramble and eighty goddamned pounds of gear for seventy goddamned miles.
Not exactly what I’d call a hike.
I was just starting to think I was lost again, half-prepared to hurl my cracked compass into the nearest pond, when I finally crested one green hill that looked like pretty much any other and suddenly there it was.
What had, up to this point, been nothing for me beyond a scribble on a faded, coffee-stained map, was now in my field of vision. I took a moment to check the immediate area for signs of what we argued over whether or not to call ‘life’ and also get my breath back.
Even with all my training, all the exercise required to stay alive in an apocalyptic hellscape, this had still been a damned long walk.
I was alone, though, and Harper looked desperately inviting.
For a moment I just stared at it. From this far away, it was little more than a dozen buildings, few of them larger than a shack, placed within four fifteen-foot walls. They were good walls. I could tell that even from this distance.
Big and sturdy and gunmetal gray, scratched, scored, and scarred by life this far out in the bramble.
I could just barely make out some shapes moving among the structures. I pulled my scope from its slot and put it to my eye. I studied the people that the vague shapes resolved into. My knowledge of Harper was slim at best. Before booting my ass out here, my former commanding officers had been reluctant to give me much hard data.
Couldn’t blame them. After fifty years of almost total, constant warfare with a dystopic nightmare of a state, paranoia was going to be a way of life for a long, long time to come. The big men with the iron fists and the gasmask armies were dead now, finally, but even five years later, we were still living in the shadow of their industrial conquest.
If I was very lucky, my grandchildren might possibly live to see the Earth of old, back before the haze and the monsters and the weather.
The great battle scars that had ripped the land asunder in some places, salted the earth in the others, and, in the worst of cases, irradiated it all straight to hell.
My rangefinder found one particular face standing atop a second story deck, issuing orders to a few others down on the ground.
Hmm. This was almost certainly Commander Caspian. She looked sure and stern enough in her smart gray outfit, black hair pulled into a simple but neat ponytail. She looked up and I saw that she had one glaringly white eye.
While I was trying to determine what her other eye color was, she suddenly looked dead at me.
For a moment we were locked, staring at each other from across a good half-mile of open space. I wondered what she’d do. She knew I was coming, we’d spoken on the radio on my way here. Only twice though, thanks to interference from the shitty weather.
Suddenly she was moving, ducking back halfway into an open door behind her. She came out with a sniper rifle and had it to her shoulder, scope to her eye, in a blink. I just managed to drop back down before a round came scorching over my head.
Way too close.
Damn, she was a good shot.
Slipping my scope away, I tapped my radio mounted in my eye, two short, fast taps to the temple, and it reached out to the frequency she was supposed to be using.
“This is Sergeant Gideon West to Harper Station, that’s friendly fire,” I said, then sighed as another round shrieked out and buried itself in the other side of the hill I was now laying on. “I say again, Harper Station, friendly fire. Stop shooting, you’re wasting rounds.”
I waited. Silence befell the area. No more shots.
Somewhere, a bird called, long and lonely.
Finally, my radio crackled.
“I need that confirmation code, Sergeant,” came a familiar voice.
I sighed. “Right. Confirmation Code: Delta Nine Delta Four Delta Six.”
“Confirmation Extension ID?” she asked.
“Tango Hotel Six One. Something happen?”
“Nothing more than usual, but you don’t survive to the ripe old age of thirty eight without being paranoid nowadays, Sergeant.”
“...you’re thirty nine.”
“How the fuck do you know that?” she asked, sounding somewhere between amused and annoyed.
“I had a look at your file. The nineteenth was two weeks ago,” I replied.
“...shut up and report to the front gate.”
“Is that my first official order, Commander?”
“Yes, Sergeant Smartass. Double time it. Out.” She cut the link and I chuckled despite myself.
Wiping some rainwater from my face, I got back up and began following a trail that would take me down the hill. The rain was light at least.
As I picked my way down the trail and then across the last portion of the bramble, moving between monolithic redwoods, I questioned myself on the intelligence of screwing with my new commanding officer before actually even getting to meet her in real life.
The rest of me answered the same way I always answered myself nowadays: did it really matter?
Maybe I was looking for trouble.
Maybe I was looking for a bit of pain.
I just grunted and kept on hauling that ruck through the rain. Nothing new there.
Habit made me grasp my rifle hanging from its sling as I approached the door. I double-tapped my radio again, automatically stepping to the side so as not to make a big appealing target when the door in the wall opened.
My old drill master’s voice was still in my head even now, a decade later: No area is friendly until you’ve made damn sure of that yourself.
It had saved my ass more than once.
“Present at the front gate, Commander Caspian.”
“Wait one.”
It was so ironic, I thought, that survival instincts and training still kept you alive, regardless of whether or not you actually wanted to survive.
The door began to slide open, and I saw that familiar one-white-eye face appear slowly. And then the door stopped, and something spat sparks.
Caspian lost her composure slightly and growled. “Sergeant West, one of the first things you can put on your list of things that need fixing,” she grunted, and then delivered a swift, hard kick to the door.
More sparks bled and then it finished its path.
I stepped in through and hit the close button with my elbow, listening more closely now as it closed.
After a moment, I grunted. “You got some servos that need replaced.”
“You have a good ear,” she murmured.
“Hard not to after...everything,” I replied.
“Quite. Come with me.”
Her other eye was blue. She was downright gorgeous up close, and it looked out of place on her in the way it always did when a very traditionally attractive woman ended up in a tough leadership role. Sometimes people just looked like they belonged doing something else.
Some people just looked like tech nerds.
Some people just looked like soldiers.
Some just looked like models, if we had those anymore.
I still didn’t believe the stories, although I’d seen a billboard once that was still surprisingly intact, and there had been a very attractive woman posing in not a whole lot on it so hey, maybe there did exist people for whom their entire career was to look good.
The only reason I looked like I belonged in my given career was because the word ‘combat’ had been placed in front of it. I got a lot of ‘you don’t look like a technician’, with the big scar down the right side of my face and the buzzed hair and the cold gray eyes, but then they went ‘oh, that makes sense’, right after I said ‘combat tech’.
Sometimes I said field tech, depending on the company.
“You have our gear?” Caspian asked as she led me towards a long, low, windowless structure.
“I do,” I replied. “All of it.”
“Thank fucking God,” she muttered. “We need it.” Stepping up to the structure, she pushed open the door. “This is the workstation, it’s where all of our gear and tech is stored, as well as are tools and spare parts and whatever else we can think of. You can stow it here for now.”
“Yep,” I replied, stepping inside.
The place was packed. Tables, desks, and shelves pretty much covered the perimeter of the room, all of them absolutely scattered with bits of metal, tools, nails and screws, bits of technology, circuit boards, and way more other junk, some of it truly esoteric.
I even saw an ancient, dirt-covered doll sitting up on one of the tables, staring one-eyed at the workstation.
The center of the building was also packed with tables and shelves, leaving a narrow path of space between the two areas.
“And that’s your new partner,” Caspian added, pointing to the lone figure standing about halfway down the structure.
I saw a slim blonde in a stained, faded blue jumpsuit with an absolutely massive amount of zippers across it standing in front of the tables. She wore a pair of big pink headphones that sported what for the life of me looked like cat ears.
She was staring at something with a small but powerful flashlight mounted on her headphones, a magnifying glass in hand.
I saw a spot of space where I could stow the gear for now not far from here. I began heading for the spot. My new partner looked busy so I figured I’d just drop it off and keep going with Caspian. She had something she wanted to say and I already knew what it was, but I couldn’t avoid it.
As I set it down, she began turning towards me and suddenly shrieked when she saw me. She leaped back, tripped, and fell on her ass. Her headphones fell off her head and she stared at me with shocked eyes.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said mildly. “Sorry.”
She looked past me, no doubt at Caspian, and seemed to relax.
“W-who are, who is this? What’s going on?” she asked.
“This is Sergeant West, Cat. The one you’ve been waiting for so...impatiently,” Caspian replied.
Her expression changed completely as she continued staring at me. She looked at me with something like...hope?
“You’re the combat tech?” she whispered.
I stepped closer to her and offered her a hand. “I am.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered, for a moment just staring at me still.
Tentatively, she reached up and took my hand. I pulled her to her feet. She kept looking at me, and then suddenly hugged me. I stood there for a moment, a few different emotions running feebly through my head, and, more out of habit than anything else, I hugged her back.
“Thank you.”
“Cat, you’re being weird again,” Caspian said.
“It’s fine,” I replied. “Hugs from beautiful women are always appreciated.”
Cat pulled back and looked up at me from where she’d been resting her head against my chest. For a second we just looked at each other, then she opened her mouth to say something, only nothing came out.
All at once, she backed away from me. She tried to speak again, failed to, cleared her throat.
“Uh...sorry. I’m not trying to be-uh, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Cat Hopper. And I’m-um, just, I’m-it’s good to meet you.”
“You too, Cat,” I replied, then shook her hand when she awkwardly offered it again.
“Come on, Sergeant.”
“Thanks again!” Cat called as we headed back outside.
“Yep,” I replied.
“You will have to forgive Cat,” Caspian said as she led me to the largest structure in the base, what I had seen her standing atop earlier. “She is currently our only technician, which means she is a field tech by default. And she is...nervous about leaving these walls.”
“I don’t blame her,” I replied. “I take it that means I will be assuming all field tech duties?”
“Yep,” she said.
“All right.”
She took me into a dingy dining area where a man with gray hair and sad eyes prepared something behind a counter. We locked eyes briefly.
There was grief and guilt in his gaze.
I wonder what he saw in mine.
“This way,” the Commander said.
She led me into a narrow stairwell that was almost hidden from sight, tucked up into the wall on the other side of the hall. It brought us up to a second-story office that looked not all that dissimilar from other CO offices I’d seen.
A big desk and a swivel chair. At least one big window with a view. Bulletproof glass, of course. A shelf covered in random things. Sometimes it was books, sometimes it was old printed out photographs, sometimes framed medals. And a big terminal in one corner.
The desk, near the center of the room, was more for the human side of the job.
“Sit,” she said as she walked around the desk.
I considered telling her I preferred to stand, but then I sat.
The more time I spent around Caspian, the more it felt like I knew her already. I was sure I didn’t literally know her, (she had a distinct voice with a slight twisted lilt of an accent that I’d be able to pick out in a heartbeat if I’d heard it before), but I knew her type.
She an air of calm, almost friendly authority. She was welcoming, but I knew there lay a cold, hard steel somewhere in her soul that she was not just willing to pull out and use if she had to, but very able.
Looking into this woman’s mismatched eyes, I knew she had sent men to their deaths.
Hundreds of them, maybe.
And not because she didn’t care, but because it was either lose a hundred men here and now, or lose a thousand people at some settlement somewhere.
So I took that seat. I’d been in those shoes before and just from her demeanor already, I could tell she was a tougher nut to crack than I was, and I respected that.
Tough was easy.
But tough, competent, and still human?
That was a saint.
“Let me be the first to officially welcome you to Harper Station. You’ll get the full tour after you and I have had a few words. First order of business, though: did you encounter anything of note out there, Sergeant?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I ran into a Phantom about five miles back. Killed it. I also saw an old refinery maybe six miles northeast of here and marked it on my map, since I didn’t see it marked on the old chart. Though it hadn’t been updated in a while.”
“We haven’t heard of a refinery so far. Good eye. About the Phantom...you were coming from the southeast, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Hmm. That’s the third Phantom we’ve seen in that directly...something to consider,” she muttered as she scribbled something down on her desk. She tossed aside the pen after a moment and looked at me with stern eyes. “Nothing else?”
“Nothing else, Commander.”
“Fine. Let’s talk.”
For a moment, Caspian just stared at me, her hands clasped together in front of her on the desk. She was frowning, just a little. Unhappy, but thoughtful, and even compassionate.
I thought of telling her I already knew what she wanted to talk about, and what she was going to say, but didn’t.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I didn’t know what she was going to say.
I felt wrong more lately.
“Your previous CO told me about the...conditions under which you were transferring. To be completely honest with you, Gideon, I didn’t think we’d ever see you. Seventy miles through the bush, alone, delivering some cargo...it seemed like a suicide attempt.”
“It might have been,” I admitted.
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
“...I understand. But you did make it, and you are here, Gideon, and…” She hesitated, then she sighed heavily and looked out the door that led onto her deck.
Out at her outpost. Her base.
Her home.
Without looking at me, she said, “We don’t have many people here, and everyone here isn’t very stable. We all want to stay alive, much as a struggle as it might be, and lead for a last meal looking appetizing is just as much a threat as a Phantom sneaking up on you.”
Here, she looked back at me, right into my eyes.
“I won’t have you threatening us or what we have here, Gideon. Gloom is infectious, and we’ve all already got some. One look at you tells me you’re the type to keep your mouth shut through it all, no matter how bad it gets. And believe me, I know the appeal. It’s seductive in its stoicism. But we are not stoic, even now, even after everything that’s happened. Tragedy is in our blood. All of us. We’re here to help each other. If you’re having problems, talk to someone.”
She looked at me dead in the eyes for another long moment. I let the silence play out, mostly because I wasn’t sure what to say.
“Understood,” I replied finally.
She let out a tiny sigh, clearly convinced she hadn’t gotten through to me. Abruptly, she stood up and then came around the desk again. “Come along, let’s get to that tour.”
Here it is, my post-apocalyptic subterranean harem! This is the first chapter.
The second chapter can be found here.
I will be posting the rest of this chapter-by-chapter on my Patreon for the 3$/month Patrons. This one will be going a bit slower as I’m taking more time on it.
The Passageway that connected Refuge to Wayport was said to be difficult to traverse, but not necessarily dangerous.
As the vast, dented front wall of Wayport finally came into sight at the far end of the Passageway he had been enduring for the past forty hours, Ethan breathed an immense sigh of relief and reflected bitterly that it was not just difficult and dangerous to move through, but also devastating.
He peered back the way he’d come and grit his teeth sourly as he spied what was very likely a trading caravan in the distance. Where had they been all this time? Where had anyone been all this time?
Up until now, Ethan thought that perhaps he had awoken to another apocalypse, this one inflicted on the subterranean world he and all other survivors of the first called home. He turned back to face the gate and began making his way towards it, careful to stick to the light, keep his weapon down and his movements slow.
Gate Guard could be a harrowing job and it wore on a person’s nerves. Back at home, he’d nearly shot some poor trader or traveler more than once because he was convinced one of the many lethal creatures that lurked in the shadows had come around for a visit.
How wretched would it be to survive everything that he had over the past two days, only to finally get to where he was going and end up with a bullet in his head from a nerve-worn, paranoid guard?
The great wall that sealed off the Passageway and separated Wayport from what some men and women referred to simply as the Vast or the Void, sometimes both, was riddled with bullet indents and had a few doors and windows built in.
Ethan got within about fifty feet of the wall before one of those windows opened up and a long gun barrel poked out.
“All right, that’s close enough! State your name and your business! You’re unscheduled!” a voice called out.
“My name is Ethan Lumos! I’m from Refuge! I seek sanctuary!” he called back.
A long pause. Though the barrel of the rifle remained unwavering, he imagined a frantic conversation happening on its other end.
“Is it true then?!” the voice called back. “Is Refuge gone!?”
“Yes!”
“And you’re the lone survivor?!”
“As far as I know!”
Another pause, this one even longer than before. Ethan felt more fear boiling around in his gut than any other moment over the past two days. There was absolutely nothing that said they had to let him in there. Theoretically, they could turn him away, and there wasn’t a single thing he could do about it. And anything might prompt them to.
If the gate guards were in a bad mood, if they’d had some kind of disaster or emergency of their own, if they were feeling especially paranoid, or any other of a dozen reasons why a bastion might decide to impose a quarantine, he could be screwed.
And the next nearest bastion was a hell of a lot farther away than Wayport was from Refuge.
He’d survived the underground due mostly to luck and whatever skills he possessed and it had gotten him this far. Unless he had some massive stroke of luck, he wasn’t going to make it to the next safe haven and what began in Refuge would catch up with him.
“All right, come on! Nice and easy!” the voice called suddenly, and then the rifle disappeared and the window closed.
Ethan let out a heavy sigh of relief and began walking again, this time moving a little faster.
He wasn’t out of danger yet, although that was more or less true at all times. Danger came in degrees with life today, but he was at least out of the Vast. There were any number of ways he could get screwed over, injured, or straight up murdered within Wayport, but he was too tired to care. All the tension and anxiety had exhausted him.
He reached the huge steel wall and came to stand a careful distance from the much smaller door that had been cut into it. It opened up as he approached and a pair of grim-faced men with machine guns waited for him.
“Come on,” one of them said.
“Thank you,” Ethan replied as he hurried inside.
“Don’t thank us yet,” the other said as they sealed the door back up, “Captain wants to talk to you, and he’s been in one of his moods lately. Little piece of advice: best behavior for Captain Donovan. He tends to take things personally.”
“Noted,” Ethan muttered.
Great.
Now that he was beyond the entrance wall, Ethan took the opportunity to have his first look at Wayport. Being that Refuge was perhaps a quarter of the size, (less now that he was actually here looking at it), and being that Wayport was the nearest bastion for quite a ways, he had often heard of it.
Typically there would be a journey to Wayport about once every few months. The braver and more seasoned souls would form a caravan and take the most valuable things the handful of scavengers who lived among them had discovered in the tunnels or been holding onto, finally ready to give them up, often out of desperation.
They came back with, among other things, stories.
Given how entertainment was a bit sparse in the modern day and humans had largely reverted back to telling each other stories as a primary form of it, Ethan wasn’t sure what to expect now that he was actually here.
The place sure seemed busy enough, and big enough, but he could tell right away some of the rumors he’d heard were outright fabrications.
Or maybe they had been true years ago.
“You got hearing problems, kid,” the gate guard asked, forcibly returning Ethan’s attention to him.
“What?” he replied.
The man’s hand was out. “Gun.”
“Oh.”
He thought of trying to explain that he was basically dead on his feet after surviving out there in the tunnels, but the man didn’t look like he’d actually care to hear it. Gabe reluctantly passed his pistol over to the guard.
The man inspected it, then slipped it into his belt and seemed liked he was considering something. Probably trying to shake him down for more. Something decided him against the idea though.
“Come on,” he grunted, and he began leading Ethan on.
The ingress point let on a large, busy area within the vast cavern that Wayport was built into. The area was clearly a marketplace and it made sense that they would keep it so close to the entrance. In the decades that had passed since the great destruction overhead, humans had only become more insular, and outsiders were only reluctantly let into settlements.
Beyond the marketplace, he could get a sense for the size and rough layout of the bastion. Two general pathways drifted away, one to the left slanting down, the other to the right slanting up. Beyond that, he saw tiers in the earth, rings of structures built on higher ground running most of the periphery of the cavern.
The concept seemed simple: the higher the tier, the more influence the people had.
Or at least that was his impression, given the higher up houses and buildings looked of much nicer and sturdier make.
Ethan was being led towards what looked to be a reinforced pillbox structure to the immediate left of the gate. Atop it were a pair of old but very functional looking machine gun nests, just one of them being manned by a bored-looking bald guy.
He was brought to a heavy metal door set in the center of the bunker-like building. The guard banged on it twice and a slit snapped open.
“What, Murph?” someone groused from inside.
“New meat the Captain wanted to see,” the guard replied.
A grunt was the reply and the slit snapped shut. There was a heavy clank and then a squeal of metal as the door opened up. Like meat, Ethan was transferred from one guard to the next. This man was older, half his face scarred from what looked like a fire, and he seemed about as irritable as he was intimidating.
He said nothing as he led Ethan across a small entryway, through an open door at the back, down a dimly lit corridor all the way to its end, where he knocked on another, thinner metal door.
“Come!” came the reply.
The guard opened the door and stepped back. Ethan walked in and the door was shut firmly behind him. He found himself in a cramped office mostly taken up by a desk scattered with a random assortment of objects, a few chairs, and a shelf also packed with items. A healthy-looking rat was crawling around on the topmost shelf.
The man behind the desk looked somewhere in his fifties, grizzled and gruff like most everyone else. His head and face were buzzed, covered in a layer of graying stubble, and he had a scar down one cheek.
“Have a seat, son,” he said.
Ethan sat in front of the desk and for a long moment the man seemed to be taking a measure of him. Ethan waited and tried not to fall asleep in the chair.
“I’m Captain Donovan,” he said finally. He spoke with the ease of an authority not used to being questioned. “For all intents and purposes, I’m the one who says whether or not you get accepted into Wayport. My men tell me you came from Refuge. That true?”
“Yes, sir,” Ethan replied.
“What happened? We lost contact, but that’s nothing new. Had a merchant come through yesterday who said it was gone.”
“It is. Raiders attacked while we were sleeping. We fought them. That drew the attention of a big group of Strays. That escalated the fighting, which in turn started a fire. When it became obvious that the situation was screwed, we who were still alive ran through a back tunnel. We came back a few hours later, to see what could be salvaged, but all the chaos triggered a cave-in,” Ethan explained, seeing the horror replaying as he explained it listlessly.
“I see,” Donovan murmured quietly. He leaned back in his chair. “And the others?”
“They didn’t make it. Some died from their wounds. Most died in the attack and the fire. I did what I could to help with the others. We formed a group trying to make it here, but we kept running into problems on the way. Another Stray attack killed two. A Hornet killed another. And we ran into a Death Bot. I was the only one to make it out of that one.”
Donovan looked unhappier with each thing he said. “What’s your name?”
“Ethan Lumos.”
“Lumos...I think I remember your father. Peter?”
“Yes, sir.”
Maybe that’d buy him some points in his favor. Nepotism seemed to be just about everything. A connection to someone like Donovan, even a thin one, could be a significant boost. He waited in the quiet office while Donovan chewed over the information, at one point picking up a tablet and activating it. As he navigated it, the rat scurried down the shelf, across the floor, then up the desk and onto the man’s shoulder.
He reached up and pet it absently with his fingertips in between navigating the tablet.
“What can you do, Ethan Lumos?” he asked finally.
“What most other people can, I imagine,” he replied. “Cook. Clean. Move things. Harvest plants. Stand guard.”
“Nothing special?” Donovan asked after a pause.
Ethan shifted uncomfortably. “I’m good at staying alive out in the tunnels,” he admitted reluctantly.
“I can see that, if you made it here on your own with the way things are nowadays.” Donovan paused and lifted himself up a little, studying Ethan. “You made it here without a gun?”
“No, I had one. Your man at the gate took it.”
“Did he now? What was it?”
“Silversmith.”
“Six or eight?”
“Six-shot.”
“You must be strong, those have a hell of a kick.”
Ethan shrugged. “I did a lot of hard labor digging out a new tunnel.”
“Well, we could always use another tunnel crawler. There’s a lot to be done and a lot more to be found out there,” Donovan said.
“I appreciate that fact, but in truth, I’d much rather find work within the bastion if it could be helped. I’ve...really had my fill of it out there,” he replied uncomfortably.
Donovan let out a bitter chuckle. “I can’t fault you for that. Did twenty years as a crawler myself. It’s brutal out there.” He lost his half-smile and checked over his tablet again, his grizzled face bathed in its pale blue glow. With a sigh, he shook his head. “You’ve come to Wayport at a bad time, I’m afraid. Times are tough and we’re in a rough patch right now. I appreciate your situation and your father once saved my life.
“I can’t do much to help you, and what I can do is going to cost you. There’s a shack I can set you up with. It doesn’t have power or water right now, but you’ll have to talk to Smith and Wexler about that. As for jobs, unfortunately, if you aren’t willing to crawl, there’s not much that can be done. We’ve got a strict three-month waiting policy for new residents. You go three months without causing problems and then you can start being considered for work in the power core or hydroponics or patrol,” he explained.
He finished up what he was doing on the big tablet and then switched over to a smaller one, typed rapidly on it, then passed it to Ethan.
“Fill this out. Accurately.”
Ethan just nodded and did as he was told, feeling relief tentatively beginning to take hold within him. He was being let in. He was being made a resident and given a place to live. He answered the questions as they appeared on his screen.
His name. Birth date. Physical dimensions. Skills. Knowledge.
He passed it back when he was done and Donovan looked it over, grunted once, and typed something into it.
“All right, now comes time for resettlement fees...I’m afraid I’m going to have to clean you out in exchange for entry into the bastion and a place to live. As I said, times are tough.” He tapped a relatively clean spot on his desk. “Everything you got but your clothes.”
Ethan repressed a sigh as he got to his feet and began emptying the pockets of his survival suit. He’d found it, and a few other things, out there in the tunnels. He set down a handful of bullets, a combat knife, a blue crystal, a canteen mostly empty of water, a few nutrient bars, and a handful of coins.
“Thought your people didn’t use currency?” Donovan muttered, picking up a silver coin and studying.
“We don’t. Found those in the Passageway,” Ethan replied.
“You understand how it works?”
“The bigger they are, the more they’re worth is what I heard.”
Donovan laughed softly. “Yeah, more or less...this is it?” he asked.
“This is it,” Ethan replied, patting his pockets. “Everything I had on me.”
Donovan looked at him for a moment, then passed him back the silver coin. Ethan took it tentatively. “Wex is going to give you some shit when you ask him to turn on the water. He’s supposed to give new residents alpha level rations, which isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing. If he does, hold out for a bit, then bribe him with that.”
“Thank you,” Ethan replied, unsure of what else to say.
The rat hopped off the man’s shoulder and landed on his desk as it sensed him preparing to move more significantly. It scurried around a bit as Donovan stood and walked over to a battered old locker. Opening it up, he rummaged around inside until he came up with a metallic card. He sat back down and passed it to Ethan.
It had a faded 26 on it.
“That’s how you get into your shack. Don’t lose it. It also serves to prove you’re a resident of Wayport. There’s a board in Market Square where jobs get posted. You’re flagged as an alpha level resident, and that means shit jobs unless you want to crawl,” he said, adding a bit of emphasis to that again.
Ethan simply nodded, not wanting to respond.
He really didn’t want to crawl in the tunnels again.
“Your shack is left of the Market. Down. In the pit.” Donovan regarded him as Ethan stood up and pocketed the coin and his card. “Don’t expect any help beyond this...good luck.”
Ethan just nodded, thanked him again, and left the office.
August was nowhere near as exciting as July was. Sort of a gift and a curse kind of situation.
I had hoped to arrive here with Our Own Way 2 in hand, and if sleep problems and frankly shockingly potent depression hadn’t struck, I would be. But that’s the way life goes sometimes. Or my life at least.
Anyway, the good news, a few things came out at least.
For those curious, the Monster Girl Inn Trilogy audio does include Time Together. Now that we’re beginning to transition into Collections, as far as I know, they should have the bonus content recorded for all of them going forward.
As for Snowed In, I originally wrote this earlier in the year for a different project that ultimately fell through, so I opted to get some cover art made and post it. I’ve always been kind of curious about posting little follow-up shorts to finished series, but I have to admit that I was kind of surprised by the poor response to this title. I knew it wasn’t going to be a bestseller but man were the sales abysmal. I haven’t even gotten out of the red for the cover art yet. I don’t really regret writing it because now it’s there and it’ll always be there for those who want to look, and I know it’ll make some people happy, but it’s made me reconsider returning to any of my series beyond basically any capacity but a passion project.
On that note, I’ve begun the process of resurrecting my backlog yet again. Here’s a quick list of what’s back up.
SEX & SURVIVAL TRILOGY
LIKE A FINE WINE SERIES
ALIEN HAREM DUOLOGY
DESIRE SERIES (New 9,900 word epilogue)
EXPLORATION
AMAZONIAN’S LOVE
Except for Desire, there’s little that has changed. I’ve remade all the cover art to be more in keeping with my current aesthetic and everything has been reformatted to be much more readable (smaller paragraphs, shorter chapters). Also, Exploration & Amazonian’s Love now have the bonus content paired with them. I figured it’s the best way to handle it. Also, just in case you missed it, I wrote a 13,000 Epilogue for Like A Fine Wine that is now packaged with The Complete Series.
For now, the only thing left coming is Hellcats and Blind Date. Blind Date won’t change, but I’m still intending to release Hellcats 4, which will be a blend of the bonus content I wrote for it over the years and new content written to serve as connective tissue between the shorts. How it will play out, functionally speaking, is sort of like Time Together. You’ll see roughly a year of time after the end of Hellcats 3 pass in chunks and it’ll show their life coming together. If you’re wondering why am I bothering with this after what I just said about Snowed In? Three reasons that sort of blend together: part passion, part long-term investment, part aesthetic. To me, one novel is more appealing than 9 short stories, at least in this regard. The Life, the most recently written story, will still remain a bonus epilogue packaged with The Complete Series.
I won’t be able to post much else until near the end of this month, and that’ll be from the Fantasy Universe. I’m still intending to do a Wanderlust V and a Lust & Adventure IV. I’ve got a bit more invested in the Fantasy Universe, as I still intend to do a big epic rewrite of Demoness in the future.
The rest of the content will get posted sometime in October and then I’ll be done with all the reposting.
Okay, next thing.
Dead Drift. This is the project I was mentioning with Lara X. Lust. For the record, no, this is not the Sci-Fi/Horror project I’ve been referencing. This is completely new content, independent of anything I’ve ever spoken of before. In short, this kind of just happened. I had a heavy hand in plotting and writing it. A new episode should be coming out once a week, I believe over the weekend, until completion. You can check out this page for direct information on what’s out.
To clarify, it is haremlit. It’s basically about survival in a post-apocalyptic galaxy where undead monsters are everywhere.
Now, finally, we’ll wrap up with the most pertinent data, which I of course have placed here at the end.
OUR OWN WAY: This should be done relatively soon. I’ve been pushing through this as fast as I can, but these stories are longer than anything else I’ve written. From where it stands now, there’s a decent chance Our Own Way 2 will actually be longer than the first one. Also, as part of an experiment, I’m going to be bumping the price to 5.99$ for both titles. In truth, I don’t expect this to do too much, given people tend to read everything I write through the KU, (which is totally cool), but I’m beginning to suspect that people aren’t taking 4.99$ titles seriously. I know it sounds ridiculous and I wish I didn’t have to fuck with this kind of shit. I just want to write stories and sell them to people, easy as that, but unfortunately I, like Robert Rodriguez, am a ‘one person mariachi band’. (Mostly, obviously I’m grateful to my artists.) After Our Own Way 2 is wrapped up, I think I need to take a little break before getting started on Our Own Way 3. I don’t want to go too fast and screw up the writing.
UNDERGROUND POST-APOCALYPTIC STORY: Still working on this one in the background, but I will begin posting it to my Patreon this month. Once Our Own Way 2 is finished, this is going to get primary focus until it’s done. Unlike my other titles, though, I’m not sure when this one will come out. That’s going to be up to Royal Guard.
GOBLIN GIRLS: Okay, so…the Amazon problem seems to have largely smoothed itself out. Behind the scenes, they made a change that really took the pressure off. This is good. It means I can reassess all my plans. Again. Which I have done. (I still don’t trust Amazon at all, though). I’ve never really been what you can call a trend-chaser, mostly because the things that end up getting really popular are not things that I care about or, in some cases, could even see myself writing about. That being said, it’s very obvious that goblin girls are the next big thing. Everyone wants them, and I know for a fact that there’s like half a dozen authors in the haremlit field jumping on the goblin girl bandwagon. Several people have encouraged me to do the same and initially I was reluctant. But some time passed and an idea finally came to me. I’ll be working on the first book in the background and if we are very lucky, I will have it out next month. What I can say about it now is it takes place in a fantasy setting and it will involve adventuring, surviving, and the breeding of horny goblin girls.
Basically everything else will have to wait while I deal with these three.
And that’s it.
Here’s the first chapter of Our Own Way 2!
If you want to read the second chapter, you can do so right here on my Patreon.
More chapters are coming to early access for my 3$/month Patrons.
“We should probably discuss what organizing our new life together actually looks like,” Ellen said as she slipped her robe on.
It was one of the few things she’d salvaged from her previous life.
“Yeah,” Gabe agreed, belting his jeans and then grabbing his t-shirt.
Their excitement had naturally led to a different kind of excitement and they had just finished showering from that.
He pulled his shirt into place. “What does it look like to you?”
Ellen laughed and then sighed, tying her robe belt just above her broad hips. “Of course you ask me first. I don’t know. And the problem is that I’m still too...I don’t know, I’m still recovering and mired in my job. I feel like I’ll have a better capacity to really dig into it when I finally get fired. I know it has something to do with visual design. I like art.”
“Is there a reason you don’t want to quit?” he asked.
“Yes. Absolutely. When you get higher up into salaried positions with a bit more security, traditionally, if a company has to let you go or fire you, they typically like to protect themselves from any sort of repercussions. And in my experience, the chances of that happening go up if they treated you like shit. Which they have.”
“So...what, they’ll bribe you not to start shit?” he asked.
“Essentially, yes. Typically in comes in the form of a ‘severance package’ that you must sign a legally binding agreement to get. And that agreement says: I won’t sue you.”
“Could you sue them?”
She pursed her lips. “Possibly. There’s definitely some shit they’ve pulled. But in truth, I don’t want to deal with a drawn out lawsuit and lawyers and all the fucking hassle that the American ‘justice system’ entails. It’s a gamble anyway. They have very good lawyers, and they can afford to wait me out.”
“Huh. Interesting. And depressing. But all right, that makes sense. So, you want to get fired, take a vacation, and then, once the mental and emotional dust finally settles, you want to reexamine yourself and your life to determine a path forward.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Okay.”
He was still formulating his own response, because there was a lot to consider, or at least it felt that way, when she frowned and sat down at the foot of the bed.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Mostly, just...are you really okay with this? I mean, are you truly okay with having an out-of-work girlfriend?”
Gabe resisted his instinct to immediately say yes and really thought about it for a moment. Was he? He sure felt like that. They had money, in that Ellen had a fair amount of money, and they were in a living situation that they could sustain theoretically for years.
Half a decade even. That was a really long time.
“Unless I’m missing something really obvious: yes, I am okay with that. I’m happy with it,” he replied. “Are you comfortable with it?”
“I...mostly am? The problem is the fear. I know that some of this is me just being terrified of the idea of going against what is essentially my core ideology. I feel like I’m trying to leave a cult. Which I guess I kind of am? We basically worship jobs and work and careers and overachieving and working yourself to fucking death.”
“That’s true,” he muttered.
“And I’ve been doing it since I was in high school. You’d think it’d be easy to just stop, but I’m afraid. I’m not even sure why I’m afraid.”
“I think you’re worried that you aren’t sure how much of you will be left after you remove this massive part of yourself you’ve been building for two decades.”
She looked up finally, staring at him, almost startled. “I...yes. That actually makes a lot of sense. Which sounds horrifying and stupid. Why is so much of my identity wrapped up in my goddamned job?”
“Because you, like most of the rest of us, were forced into it. People roll their eyes at phrases like ‘capitalist propaganda’ but we are literally indoctrinated with actual, real propaganda designed by real people and blasted twenty four seven at us since birth. We are indoctrinated into worshiping hard work and money and status. They’re capitalizing on a biological impulse, several of them, and twisting them into something seriously fucked up.”
“Is it that bad?” she murmured.
“Yes! When the average job is treated as: ‘you should be thanking me for the opportunity to be abused and exploited as you work yourself to death while surviving on the most minimum possible resources’, yes, that is absolutely screwed beyond belief.”
“...yeah. That makes sense. And the fact that people actually defend that...yeah.” She shifted uncomfortably. “I just don’t want you to think I’m a lazy bitch who’s only with you for money.”
“How could I possibly think that?! I mean, first of all, you have all the money.”
“Yeah, right now. But that will change naturally as time goes on. If I’m not bringing any in, and you are, then you’d end up being the one making financial decisions because you’re the one with the money. And I don’t know the statistics of how likely you are to succeed at writing, but I think the odds are in your favor.”
“Maybe. We’ll see about that. But I don’t think that, and I won’t. Even if we end up in a situation where I’m bringing in loads of cash and you’re bringing in nothing, it’s not like I’d make all the financial decisions with an iron fist.”
“Why?” she asked. “You’d have absolute power in that situation.”
“I wouldn’t because this is a relationship, as in a partnership. I mean, even practically speaking I know that you are smarter than me. In general, but very specifically with relation to finances. Why wouldn’t I get your advice? But more significantly, I don’t want to just make unilateral decisions in the relationship.
“Not unless it falls under something you just don’t want any input on. We’re still separate people and, to a certain degree, we still have our own lives, but we are now making the decision to entwine our lives together. What I do affects you and vice versa. Trying to make huge decisions, let alone huge financial ones, without your input, would be not just stupid, but cruel.”
Ellen stared at him for a long time, not saying anything. He waited, wondering if he’d hit some nerve or crossed some line without realizing it.
Finally, she blinked a few times and gave her head a little shake. “Wow.”
“What?” he asked.
“I’m just...it’s actually coming to me just how different you are from everyone else I’ve dated or really known. I don’t think any man I’ve ever dated before would even be able to successfully articulate that, let alone actually tell it to me. The best I’ve ever gotten is: let’s keep our finances separate. You do you and I’ll do me,” she replied.
“That’s not a terrible idea.”
“No, but it’s safe. In a very individualistic way. It’s safe from the other person. I don’t want to be safe from you, Gabe. I want to be safe with you. And I want you to feel safe with me.”
“I do.”
“I know...and I feel the same way. But it’s just-this keeps happening. I keep realizing that you’re not just a great boyfriend but an amazing one. And I keep looking back and wondering how the hell I ended up in such awful relationships…” She sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment, closing her eyes, then dropped her hand and took a deep breath.
Letting it out it, she opened her eyes back. “But we need to focus. What I was saying is that I’m frightened of the future. If I get fired from my job and I don’t go seeking another one pretty quickly, I could be destroying a career that I’ve been building for over a decade now. Because let’s say I stop working and everything goes well for a decade, but then we get screwed over and I need to find a job again. I can’t just go back to the level I’m at now, almost certainly. A ten year gap in employment? I’d be virtually unemployable.”
“And that’s terrifying,” he murmured, sitting beside her now.
“Yes. It is. What if I’m throwing away everything on a whim? I could theoretically fuck myself over for the rest of my life.”
“I think…” He hesitated, looking down at the floor between his feet.
“What? You might as well just be real with me.”
“All right. I think this is coming from a place of fear. Which you’ve admitted, but I think this is coming from a place of irrational fear. Or...more to the point: not-quite-rational fear. I think you aren’t necessarily wrong about this stuff, but I do think you’re making it out as worse to be than it really will be. I think you’re smart enough and motivated enough that if it came down to it, you could and would find some way to make it work.”
She chuckled a little grimly. “You sure that’s not just coming from a place of worship? You called me an apex predator of a girlfriend and a goddess more than once. Clearly you’re biased.”
He laughed, rubbing the back of his neck. “Yeah...I am. But I say that with as much lack of bias as I can. Maybe this will help, though: whatever happens, I think we can make it work. Five years from now, ten, twenty, fifty, we can figure it out.”
“Man, fifty? Sounds like you’re proposing to me,” she murmured, putting her hand over the back of his.
“I, uh…”
Ellen laughed. “Wow that really threw you just right off your game, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I was just teasing. But you’re right. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I believe in us. And I need to remember that, especially in the face of terror.” She was silent for a moment, contemplating. “You’re right. I should trust myself, and I should trust you, and us. It’s a leap of faith, but I’m willing to take it. And I shouldn’t not take it just because I’m familiar with a certain level of misery. Now, you go. We’ve established I’m a mess and I will be until I get fired. Your turn,” she said, turning to face him more.
“All right. Obviously, I want to tackle my job harder and take it more seriously. Produce more, faster. And you have offered to help, and I want to take it. You offered to give everything a more serious edit and also to help me with the cover art. Are we still on for that?” he asked.
“Very much so, yes. What I’ve done so far has been fun. So, give me all the most recent versions of all your work that is finished and I will give it a serious, more thorough edit and send it back. I will also start putting together cover art for you. I have ideas and we can work together on that.”
“Perfect. Thank you. It is deeply appreciated.” He paused, then grinned. “I never really thought I’d have a girlfriend who would actively participate in my writing.”
“I am very happy to.”
“So am I. Okay, next thing. I need to sit down and actually make more of a plan for the future. Figure out what I want to do. But basically, I know I want to keep doing this. I want to keep writing erotica and romantic stuff and publishing it myself. I want to set up more of my own little corner of the internet, but that’s what I want to do,” he said.
“Perfect,” she replied.
“You don’t think I should be more ambitious? Have backups?”
“I think those things would be smart but...I also think you should live your life how you want and within your means. And right now, our means are very forgiving. Three hundred bucks a month plus gas and groceries and internet? We can survive on probably five hundred a month if we really have to. That’s amazing. I think we should work on whittling down our debt as fast as we can, but that can wait for now. And I think we’ve pretty much nailed down the pertinent facts. And…” She smiled suddenly. “I think I want to go on a date with you today. We haven’t really done that. Unless there’s something else you want to do.”
“We haven’t really done a traditional date,” he replied. Gabe smirked suddenly and slipped a hand along her thigh, beneath the robe. “There is something else I’d like to do…”
“Gabe!” she cried, laughing and grabbing his hand. “Oh my God-how are you this horny? We just did it!”
“I’m dating you,” he replied, opening up her robe a bit, “I mean just look at you.”
She sighed heavily and blushed, pulling her robe closed. “I appreciate it but-seriously! How are you this horny? After what we did, and everything you did with Holly!?”
“I have a lot of catching up to do,” he replied with a shrug.
“Fine. Fair enough. But I’m serious, let’s have a date. And we can end it with some more personal fun in this bed. Not before, though. I need...a little break.”
He kissed her forehead. “All right. What do you want to do?”
She pursed her lips in consideration for a moment, then her eyes lit up abruptly. “You know what? You decide. That’s what I want. I want you to make this date happen.”
Gabe thought about it for a moment, wondering briefly, almost instinctively, if this was a ‘you’d better guess what I want’ situation, but he passed that out of hand.
Ellen was not that kind of woman.
“I’ll make it happen.”