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  Work for It

  A Small-Town M/M Romance

  Talia Hibbert

  Nixon House

  WORK FOR IT

  All Rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 2019 Talia Hibbert

  Cover Design: Natasha Snow Designs at natashasnowdesigns.com

  Critical Editing: Kia Thomas

  Copyediting: Zahra Butt

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or within the public domain. Any resemblance to actual events or actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental

  No portion of this book may be reprinted, including by any electronic or mechanical means, or in information storage and retrieval systems, without express written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a review.

  Published by Nixon House.

  About this Book

  For men like us, trust doesn’t come easy.

  * * *

  In this village, I’m an outcast: Griffin Everett, the scowling giant who prefers plants to people. Then I meet Keynes, a stranger from the city who’s everything I’m not: sharp-tongued, sophisticated, beautiful. Free. For a few precious moments in a dark alleyway, he’s also mine, hot and sweet under the stars… until he crushes me like dirt beneath his designer boot.

  * * *

  When the prettiest man I’ve ever hated shows up at my job the next day, I’m not sure if I want to strangle him or drag him into bed. Actually—I think I want both. But Keynes isn’t here for the likes of me: he makes that painfully clear. With everyone else at work, he’s all gorgeous, glittering charm, but when I get too close? He turns vicious.

  * * *

  And yet, I can’t stay away. Because there’s something about this ice king that sets me on fire, a secret vulnerability that makes my chest ache. I’ll do whatever it takes to sneak past his walls and see the real man again.

  * * *

  The last thing I expect is for that man to ruin me.

  For everyone who needed Olu’s story.

  Acknowledgments

  The themes of this book turned me into a weepy mess for weeks at a time, so thank you to my family and friends for putting up with me. Thank you also to Kia Thomas, Zahra Butt, Mina Waheed, Jack Harbon, and Therese Beharrie for invaluable edits, critique, and advice.

  Thank you to Jhenelle Jacas, Rosa Giles, Adina Taylor and Ellen Baier, who were some of the first to hear about this book, and whose excitement made me smile through the more difficult scenes.

  Finally, thank you to the readers who love Olu as much as I always have.

  Contents

  Content Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Talia Hibbert

  Content Note

  Please be aware: this book contains mentions of depression, anxiety, parental death by suicide, past sexual trauma, forced outing, and intimate photographs being shared without consent.

  1

  Olu

  I can’t remember what it’s like to be happy.

  It’s not as though I didn’t see this coming. I have been slightly… distant all my life, so these recent changes are a natural escalation. I don’t feel the things I used to, can’t catch the cold echoes of emotion I was raised on or the flashes of intensity I used to hunt down and leech like a vampire. Which means it’s finally happened; after thirty-eight years of fighting it, I have become an alien species.

  And tonight, like any self-respecting alien, I have left the safety of my flat to study humanity.

  I blame my ludicrous thoughts on the night club’s temperature. This place is hot enough to tease all my anxieties to the surface, like a sauna sweating out toxins—but these toxins don’t come clean. They stick to my skin in a fine sheen of cursed, clammy uncertainty. The club’s high-octane dance music has a drumbeat as loud and constant as my self-loathing, and almost as jarring. All around me, a mixture of gorgeous and average and awkward men scream along to lyrics they wouldn’t know if they were sober.

  I eye the dancefloor like it’s a corpse. Once upon a time I would’ve dived right in, blissfully arrogant and secretly desperate to be touched. Now I skirt the edges of the crowd, jerking away from flailing, distracted limbs. I’m afraid I might give someone frostbite.

  Is that all you’re afraid of, Olu?

  I have years of practice in ignoring errant thoughts. Experience tells me that the key is to focus on one’s surroundings, so when I finally reach the gleaming bar, I lean my bare forearms against it. The surface is cool, sticky, slightly wet in places, and my lip curls. I stand up straight.

  New focus: the flash of the strobe lights, a blinking, toxic rainbow. There’s a mirrored wall behind the bar, partially hidden by shelves of alcohol, and I see myself lit in a wash of deep, nausea-green. It’s strange, looking handsome, when I feel the way I do. But I am—handsome, that is. So much so that people barely notice I’m cold.

  Exhibit A: the man easing his way through carefree bodies toward me, hard-jawed and golden-haired like Captain fucking America. Tall, lean, with the kind of open face that signals a certain lack of complication. He is used to getting what he wants. Eyes like drills and the insistent angle of his body suggest that he wants me. He could choose any normal, messy, human man in this place, but he will take the alien because it looks divine.

  Men, in case anyone on earth has somehow failed to notice, are pigs. I can say this with supreme confidence, since I was a man before I was E.T.

  He draws closer and I steel myself. A shudder wrestles with my rigid spine, trying to take over, but I don’t let it. Emotions are not allowed to rule my body and feelings are not allowed to affect my reality; it’s a game I like to play called Keeping My Shit Together. I try not to lose. Not in public, anyway.

  Yes, it has occurred to me that I make an alien of myself. But now is not the time for Introspection Hour.

  When the stranger reaches me, I am perfect.

  “Hi,” he shouts into my ear. “Come here often?” His easy grin says that he believes he is being ironic. Kitsch. Uniquely corny. His hand curls over my hip, his breath spreads over my cheek, and just like that, parts of him are clinging to me like slime. Something in my chest cringes and shrinks away, and I’m disappointed despite myself. It’s always like this, now. Before, strangers were my sexual bread and butter. Now, they terrify—

  Now, they disgust me.

  “Hi,” I mouth, giving him a nod, knowing I should pull away and go back home and write. I’m no longer sure why I came here; my old tactics haven’t worked for over a year. Other peoples’ bodies are not my safe, exchangeable shells anymore. It isn’t too late to make a healthy choice, to head home without hurting myself, to pour meandering rubbish into my smallest journal, the one labelled with an F that I can’t admit stands for Feelings. Yes. That sounds wonderful—or maybe it sounds like weakness. Like I don’t want to test my battered boundaries again, because I’m afraid of the fallout.

  Alright. A compromise, then.

  I lean close to the stranger and holler over the music, “Come home with me.”

  He is a little bit surprised, a lot satisfied, and a touch smug—because I look the way I do and I’m still gagging for it. He’s the cock of the walk and this is his due, so he doesn’t question, even for a moment, why I would immediately want such a thing. As far as this man is concerned, he deserves to put his hands on me.

  The strobe lights flash and my expression in the mirror is android-blank, but I am still handsome.

  His name is Mick, or so he tells me in the taxi. By the time I drag him home and slam my front door behind us, the cracks are starting to show—not in him. In me. When he presses me up against the wall and puts his tongue in my mouth. I slide a hand toward his arse, grab his phone from his back pocket, and put it on the sideboard.

  He jerks away, and my horrified heart rate slows in relief.

  “What are you doing with that?” he asks, privately annoyed but willing to be amused. He wears a smiling frown, the warning shot of human expression.

  “Don’t want to smash it when I rip your clothes off,” I tell him, and he sniggers and returns to the matter at hand. I don’t want to say that he kisses me again. When I’m like this—when disgust seeps from my pores like ectoplasm—words like kiss seem wrong. If I were writing this down in my journal, I would call it a happening. Like the title of a horror story.

  We stumble through the flat, just like desperately aroused people do in films, both of us breathless for different reasons. I tense my stomach muscles to stop the roiling in my belly, wishing his tongue weren’t jabbing past my teeth so I could clench them. I don’t know if he tastes sour or if it’s simply how I feel. We fall onto my bed and I resent it when we land.

  I’d thought taking him to my flat would help; that the disgust might not follow me here the way it follows me into hotel rooms and nightclub toilets. But that was a grave miscalculation on my part: I had Jean-Pierre at home, too, after all. I had the bastard everywhere, and he still so
ld pictures of our intimate moments for nothing more than a small mountain of coke. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Jean—I would’ve bought you the coke.

  I doubt his high lasted half as long as my current low has.

  After five more minutes of heavy petting, revulsion succeeds in strangling me, and I am forced to admit that taking Mick home is a bust. Quelle surprise, as Jean would say. I tell Mick that I’ve changed my mind, and when he pretends not to hear me, soldiering through my pesky ‘No’s, I punch him in the balls. Even that, his soft, vulnerable flesh crushed under my knuckles, makes me feel disgusting. But I maintain my composure, staring blankly at the shadowed bedroom ceiling, while he yowls like a wounded animal—goodness, the melodrama—and curls up like a woodlouse at the foot of my mattress. The presence of his weight makes my stomach squirm. His jerky, gasping sobs make me want to shudder. So I shove his body clean off the bed and I have no regrets.

  Faster than I would prefer, he recovers enough to stand and catches his breath enough to tell me what a disgrace I am. “Fucking nutter,” he mumbles, snatching up his shirt, stabbing his legs into his jeans, hiding his tear-stained face from me. “What’s your fucking problem?”

  “My problems are myriad and varied,” I drawl. “So are yours, I presume.” Lounging naked on the bed in front of this creep is making my skin crawl, but I’ve decided to stay nude anyway in a show of dominance. Olumide Olusegun-Keynes does not scrabble about on the floor for clothes; my middle name is Dignity. And besides, I look incredible.

  Mick gives me a poisonous glare with a hint of uncertainty, as if something about me disturbs him deeply—mission accomplished. I think he’s unnerved by the fury in my eyes, in my voice, rushing hot through my veins and smoking all around me. He doesn’t know it’s been simmering for months, ever since my first failed one-night-stand. He’s probably worried I could snap at any moment, that I’ll hack him into tiny pieces and hide his cubed remains in my freezer. It’s always the pretty ones; isn’t that what they say?

  I’m silent and still for a moment. Then I whisper, “Boo.”

  He actually flinches. “Fuck you.”

  “Cheerio.”

  Thirty seconds later I hear my front door slam.

  As soon as he’s gone, I’m opening my bedside drawer, fumbling through its contents for the little journal marked F. I stay on the bed as I crack it open and write, trying to make the unclean clean again. I stay naked too, as if I hope to reconnect with my strange body: here is the soft smell of leather, the sweet rasp of fresh paper beneath my fingertips, the ache in my knuckles as I clutch my pen too hard. The loss of time as I look down and see my own words crawling, sprawling, sprinting across the page, ink staining my skin. Dark, pure, pushing away the slime. Wishing I didn’t have to.

  I know it’s perfectly fine, normal, healthy to not want sex. I know that. But it certainly isn’t fine for me to feel sick at the prospect of my favourite thing. It isn’t fine for my F journals to have gone from I wish it wasn’t so hard to find a connection to I touched a cabbie’s hand as I passed him the fare and almost vomited. I know it isn’t fine, but I don’t know what to do about it. So I write.

  I’m not sure how long it takes me to finish, but when I’m done, when the night is nothing more than a story, I feel a little better. The fact that I feel at all makes me want to smile.

  Then I put my journal away and lie down to sleep, and hear my father’s voice in my head. This is what you are, he tells me. A half-thing tied to pathetic survival techniques. Emotional. Weak.

  I already know that. I’ve always been arrogant, but not so arrogant as to believe that my handwritten ramblings mean anything but failure. I tell the voice that I’m aware I was a disgrace tonight, and it settles, satisfied. It lets me rest.

  For now.

  Olu

  In the morning, nothing has changed; shit is simply brighter in the sunlight.

  I wake up to texts from my sister and devour them.

  Isaac took a picture of the sunset for you this morning.

  Come down and we can all watch it together tomorrow.

  I know you’re not busy Olu! Don’t test me.

  She’s happy, and she doesn’t need me, so I put the phone down without replying. I refuse to give Lizzie my frostbite; she’ll have to wait until I’ve gotten myself under control.

  But after last night, progress is non-existent, and my Elizabeth is not a patient woman.

  I sigh, stand, find my pyjama bottoms. God, my head aches, and I didn’t even drink last night. As I wander into the living room, eyeing the ink on my hands, I accept that in the case of my disappearing humanity, urgent action is required. I’ve become a storm cloud, misery and electricity rolled into one, and soon, someone will notice. It might be my baby sister, or my perceptive best friend Theo, or my nosy friend Aria. In the end, it doesn’t matter. None of them can learn about the problems I’ve been having, because when everyone around you is living out their dreams, burdening them with your bullshit is simply a crime.

  So what, exactly, should I do?

  My laptop is sitting on the coffee table, where I left it yesterday afternoon. I open it without examining my own thoughts too closely, log into my browser, and begin a search. Long minutes pass while I cling to denial: I’m not backsliding or abandoning the people who need me, I’m simply searching for somewhere to go, somewhere to visit, a little trip to take.

  Anywhere but here.

  The urge to run is an old one. I haven’t exercised it since everything changed last year, since I was forced to come out of my very comfortable, handmade, bespoke closet. Back then, I roamed the world so I could be myself with men who barely knew me. I don’t have to do that now. Last night proved I can’t do that now. I keep typing anyway.

  I need to disappear for a while, that’s all. Just while I fix things. Just while I fix myself.

  I am an expert at last-minute disappearances to interesting places, so my search starts with confidence—but this time, I have some unfamiliar limitations. For one thing, I’m no longer as wealthy as I once was. For another, my sister is pregnant. I’m not leaving the country. It’s spring, so I decide to look for somewhere disgustingly English and twee, somewhere that will be rife with apple blossom and flat-cap-wearing locals who give me a wide berth.

  For almost two hours, I scour forums and fall down rabbit holes and mix up questionable keywords. I know how to find out-of-the-way destinations no tourist would ever hear of, but when I stumble upon the strangest jackpot, even I am impressed with myself. The blog post is on the website of some popular cordial brand that’s currently pride of place in Waitrose—the latest sober, hipster, health-based smash everyone will spend the summer choking down, regardless of whether it’s good. I’ve never tried the drinks, but they have ridiculous flavour combinations that I assume taste hideous. People adore the unusual for its own sake.

  But that’s none of my concern. What catches my eye, at first, is the website’s photography: it shows the sort of pastoral, rolling hills and lush, verdant plant-life I didn’t think this grim little island was still capable of producing. The brand’s logo is surrounded by drawings of daffodils and daisies and tiny white flowers. According to the blog post, those flowers need to be plucked.

  ELDERFLOWER HARVEST, reads the headline.

  Fernley Farm is nestled at the heart of Fernley, a tiny village filled with generous and hardworking people. Every harvest season, the locals help us gather flowers and berries by hand, the young and old all chipping in together. That’s why Fernley Cordial tastes like home and heart.