Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 69895 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69895 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
“Are you enjoying Garnet Run?” Zachary asked, a concession to politeness that he felt would be enough to make a good impression before he never spoke to this man again.
But instead of the pat answer that Zachary had come to expect from most people, a shadow crossed Bram’s handsome face. It was much more appealing, the shadow.
“Yeah, I... I was living in Sundance Junction for a few months before I came here. Me and Hemlock.”
He scratched the dog’s ears as he spoke, and the lab’s eyes closed in ecstasy as her mouth lolled open.
“It was... Well, I just had to get out of Olympia. But I miss it. My family. I’ve never lived away from them before. It’s been hard.”
Zachary wished that his knee-jerk thought was what it usually would be: Okay, Captain Overshare, I didn’t actually need your life story. See ya never.
But the sadness in Bram’s eyes, the loss that he clearly felt at being separated from his family, was undeniable.
Personally, Zachary couldn’t relate. But it was clear Bram’s family was nothing like his own.
“Why’d you leave, then?”
Bram looked over Zachary’s shoulder toward the mountains that rose behind.
“Just...couldn’t be there anymore.”
He opened his mouth like he was about to say more, and Zachary felt it happen: the cringing squirm of self-consciousness that he used to feel often—when the other kids teased him, when they stared at him; when confronted with someone he thought was attractive.
But it hadn’t happened in a long time. Because he wasn’t a schoolkid anymore. And because long ago he’d begun to avoid the people that made his knees go weak with attraction. Besides, it turned out that a lot of super-hot people? Were also mega-assholes. Correlation might not have been causation, but correlation was enough to want to stay the hell away from them.
But here was Bram, handsome as the day was long, and seemingly not incapable of human kindness.
Damn it.
“I gotta go,” Zachary muttered, more to himself than to Bram.
He straightened his shoulders, drew himself up to his full (admittedly not very great) height, and said with as much ceremony as he could muster, “Good day, Abraham.”
“Bram,” Bram corrected, and Zachary had no idea why he’d decided to call the man by his full name when he’d introduced himself as something else. Only a total asshole doesn’t call someone what they want to be called, speaking of assholes.
“Excuse me,” Zachary apologized.
“No, I just mean, it’s not short for Abraham.”
“Oh?”
Zachary was itching to get away from the embarrassing turn of this conversation.
“Nope. Bramble.”
“Pardon?”
“Bram. It’s short for Bramble.”
Zachary blinked and took in the person before him.
“Your name,” he clarified, “is Bramble Larkspur?”
A sober nod.
“Are you perhaps visiting Wyoming from the court of the Fairy Queen?” Zachary blurted.
Bram grinned. Was it a fae grin? Who knew? They could walk among us unobserved—well, unless they went around calling themselves things like Bramble Larkspur.
“My parents,” Bram said by way of explanation, but trailed off before explaining. “At least I’ve got a normie nickname. You should meet my siblings.” He grinned.
Zachary braced for all kinds of embarrassing names, but as quickly as the grin had come, it was replaced by a soft, fond smile.
“Actually, their names are pretty cool,” he said. And he may as well have said I love them.
“All right, then, I have to get to work. Good morning, Bramble Larkspur.”
For no reason he could account for, Zachary tipped the brim of his hat to his new neighbor. Only he wasn’t wearing a hat, so actually he made an awkward movement in front of his own face, almost poked himself in the eye, and dropped his vintage Fangoria in the process.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
Bram scooped it up before the words had even left his mouth.
“Horror, huh?”
“It’s vintage.”
Bram raised an eyebrow.
“A collector?”
Zachary squirmed. He needed to get inside if he was going to have time to brew his tea and set up his table to begin work at 8:00 on the dot. But horror movies—and his adjacent collecting—were his favorite topic of conversation.
Bram opened the magazine carefully and began flipping through it. His broad shoulders shook in a shiver and his eyebrows drew together.
“Scary,” he said.
“Well. Horror,” Zachary replied.
“I’d have nightmares if I watched these kind of movies,” Bram said, shivering in the warm morning sun.
“Not all of them are quite as visceral as—” he glanced at the caption under the photograph Bram was looking at “—Midnight Monster Maul.”
“Still.” Bram shook his head. “What do you like about them?”
The words rushed out of Zachary without pause.
“Horror is a genre about extremity. The extremity of the world, of what people do to one another. The extremity of what people are capable of and the extremity of what the human mind can contemplate. It has the power to render perfectly banal household objects terrifying because of their proximity to horror or turn the most harrowing experiences into character-building journeys of strength and self-discovery. It has some of the best scores out there, and artistically it’s unrivaled in terms of the expansion of our sense of the body, architecture, creatures, and camera angles. It—”