by David Horne
“All in for You”
M/M Gay Romance
David Horne
© 2020
David Horne
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This book is intended for Adults (ages 18+) only. The contents may be offensive to some readers. It may contain graphic language, explicit sexual content, and adult situations. May contain scenes of unprotected sex. Please do not read this book if you are offended by content as mentioned above or if you are under the age of 18.
Please educate yourself on safe sex practices before making potentially life-changing decisions about sex in real life. If you’re not sure where to start, see here: http://www.jerrycoleauthor.com/safe-sex-resources/ (courtesy of Jerry Cole).
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Products or brand names mentioned are trademarks of their respective holders or companies. The cover uses licensed images and are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any person(s) that may be depicted on the cover are simply models.
Edition v1.00 (2020.11.30)
http://www.DavidHorneauthor.com
Special thanks to the following volunteer readers who helped with proofreading: RB, Big Kidd, Alex J., and those who assisted but wished to be anonymous. Thank you so much for your support.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Chapter One
There had been better days. Toby let out a loud sigh, rubbing his face. He started vibrating his lips in a way to make it sound like he was throwing off a raspberry. “Damn it.”
“What?” Another man from the writer’s group looked up from his laptop. He looked like he had just come out of a daze.
“Sorry,” Toby mumbled to himself.
“That’s what we’re here for.” The other guy offered an awkward smile.
The sight of the man’s face made the writer wince painfully. He hated it when that happened. “No ideas.” Toby ran his hands through his dirty blond hair. He was getting frustrated. Well, he wouldn’t use the word frustrated if writer’s block hadn’t shut down his ability to find more descriptive words at that moment.
“God, I hate that.” The other man shook his head with sympathy. It was a known problem with writers. This entire group half functioned as a support group. They were writers that worked together to try to beat those feelings.
“Yeah.” Someone else nodded in solidarity. This was a common problem, a pain that all the writers in the group had shared.
“Sorry to interrupt you guys.” Toby rubbed his face in frustration. He just couldn’t get anything right. No words he put on the paper ever felt right.
“Nah, we’re cool.” The guys waved it off.
“That’s not what we’re here for though. You guys don’t want to just hear me whine because I can’t figure out my next piece.” Toby shook his head. He hated feeling like he owed anyone. He hated feeling weak, even if he felt that way a lot more than he liked to admit.
“Dude.” The first guy spoke up again. “Chill.”
“Did you just tell me to chill?”
“Yeah, I did.”
The other guy piped up. “Yeah, you’ve been here for us before.” The man grinned across the coffee shop at him. “The least we can do is try to talk you through it.”
“I’m not sure if I can beat this.” Toby groaned.
“Now you’re just being dramatic.” The first guy to speak laughed. “We all feel like that sometimes.”
“I mean, I’m trying to write this character, but I don’t know anything about it.”
That was when the suggestions started. “What kind of character is it? Maybe you can shadow or interview someone.”
“I don’t know any professional gamblers.” Toby shook his head. He had already thought of that but didn’t even know where he would find someone to shadow. It wasn’t like he was famous enough to have that kind of influence. He couldn’t just walk up to random people and ask them if they would let him follow them around.
“My cousin is a professional poker player.” The second guy to speak piped up. This guy was named Mercer, and he was one of the oldest members of the group they belonged to. A founding member who had welcomed most of the group into their meetings from the start.
“You think he would let me shadow him?”
“Sure.” The guy shrugged. “But he’s going to Vegas soon.”
Toby thought about it. “I don’t think that I could just take off to Vegas.”
“What’s stopping you?”
Maybe he could do it. He considered for a second before answering. “I’ll have to check my miles.”
“I’m sure something can be worked out.”
Toby thought for a second. He could probably make a trip to Las Vegas work if he were incredibly frugal for a while. It was for his career anyway. He wanted to get better, to improve his writing, and write about new things. The same old thing was starting to get boring. And he knew that new content would impress his loyal audience. It wasn’t a huge audience, but it was his and it made him enough money to live on his own.
It was a nice life. Nothing fancy, but good enough for him to do what he wanted with his life and not have to pull a nine to five job or sell his writing to the highest bidder.
Toby had never really wanted to make it big. He was far more interested in living comfortably without having the trappings of fame around him. He didn’t want anything magical or to be hassled by the press about how he felt about the world. He just wanted to make enough money to not have to worry about paying the bills. That was the dream.
He was at that point now, but he still wanted to make it just a little better. Just enough that he didn’t have to worry about the budget so much and so that he could afford the occasional trip to shadow someone. And he knew that he could do that if he could get a few more works self-published.
That was how he worked. He self-published his works, mostly romance novels.
Romance novels were a unique business that didn’t try to be literary classics. Instead, they were simply something that people enjoyed in their spare time. It was an art form that was often treated with derision, but the truth was that he loved it. He loved working in the business and working with the contacts he had made in the business.
It was ironic that Toby wrote romances, considering how unlucky in love he had always been. He had to put a lot of his wishes for the future into his art, but never any of his long-term truth. He had only borrowed a few romantic moments he had shared with people who never ended up sticking around.
He had never had a boyfriend who stuck around for very long. It was just one of those things he had come to accept in his life. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been trying for all that time, but it was hard to keep people around.
He had always just let them slip through his fingers.
&n
bsp; Maybe it was his fault, but all those hours spent in self-contemplation failed to identify what was so repulsive about him. He had his flaws, he wasn’t so egotistical to think that he didn’t have flaws, but he didn’t think he was that far out of the norm.
“Let me shoot him a text.” Mercer was still talking as he pulled out his phone and started to send off some texts to a man who Toby had never really met.
“Cool.” Toby went back to staring at his screen while he waited for more information. It wouldn’t do any good to bug him.
“He’s not answering right away. I’ll let you know when I get ahold of him.”
“Sure, sounds great.” Toby nodded. “I don’t want to bother him really, especially if he’s got life stuff going on.”
“Nah, he probably just lost his phone.” Mercer laughed. “I don’t know what’s going on with him, but if he’s neck-deep in online poker, he won’t answer texts right away.” Toby’s friend was laughing as he explained the situation.
“Oh, does he do that a lot?” Toby chewed on his lip. He was a little worried about this guy. Maybe there was a certain sickness in being a professional gambler, something that pushes them to create a world for themselves that no one else can pull them out of until they’re ready to emerge.
“Not really, just enough to make a living. There’s a lot of math and statistics that go into his job and he treats it like a job. He’s not an addict or anything.”
He made a note on his document to ask about that sort of thing. To ask what it was like for him to be ‘in the zone’ as people say. And to ask if that zone has ever cost him more than it won him.
He sighed heavily and tried to focus on what he was writing, but the words weren’t coming along easily. He usually was able to do a lot better than this.
He was developing a storyline for a romance novel about a professional gambler who left the business because he fell in love with a gambling addict.
Toby didn’t know much about either side of that equation. He probably should have done more research or picked a different topic. He started to tap away at the keyboard again, trying to focus on the paper instead of waiting eagerly for some kind of answer. He was eager, but he wasn’t willing to let his entire life shut down while he waited for a response that was unsure.
He stared at the screen again, squinting in the bright light that the laptop threw off. He rubbed his eyes. After so long staring at the screen he found himself struggling to focus on it, the words swimming on the bright white of the screen.
The first guy to speak, the one that wasn’t Mercer, walked over and glanced over Toby’s shoulder. “It’s still not coming along, is it?”
“Nope. I’m working on it, though. I have to do it.”
“You can’t be too hard on yourself. It happens to everyone.”
“I usually put out books more regularly than this.”
“I know, but stop giving yourself such a hard time.” The man clapped a hand on Toby’s shoulder.
Toby squinted his brown eyes at the man who had just said that to him. “You say that as if it’s an easy thing to do.”
Toby’s statement was followed by a hearty laugh. It was almost an inside joke in the writer’s group at this point. “I know it’s not.”
They shared a small laugh, the noises twinkling between all three members of the group. They all knew that words were a lot easier than actually putting them into practice. Everyone could tell someone how to beat writer’s block, but it never worked until writer’s block was ready to let one of the techniques work to fix it. At least that was how it felt to Toby, and he knew many writers that agreed with him. “At least I’m not trying to write the great American novel.”
“Why aren’t you?”
“What?”
The other guy shrugged awkwardly. “I’ve seen you, you’re good enough to write some big life-changing novel. You could do it, but you don’t.”
“I don’t like being one of those stuffy writers of classics. These books are so much more accessible to other people. It makes their lives a lot better.” Toby explained slowly. “I guess it’s just the fact that I can put these ideas into romance novels and have a wider reach than something that’s only read by intellectuals.”
“Hmm, never thought about that.” Mercer looked up from his phone where he had been tapping away steadily. “He got back to me. He’s willing to meet up with you and talk to you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry about anything. You guys are just going to talk about possibly shadowing him.”
“That sounds great.” Toby was starting to get more excited now. He couldn’t believe that all of this was happening to him. He was getting so lucky, and a bit of luck was exactly what he needed to accomplish his goals. He wanted to write something different. And to do something different he had to know something different. “Writing what you know gets kind of limiting. And I think I’ve done all the theoretical research that I could do on the subject.”
“This should help you out a lot.” Mercer nodded.
“Thanks.”
“Let me get you the number.” Mercer jotted down the phone number on the back page of a notebook before ripping out the page.
Toby got up and walked over to where Mercer was sitting to take it from him. He glanced at the number, it appeared to be a local one. “When’s a good time to get a hold of him?”
“He’s a night owl, so don’t contact him before three in the afternoon. You’re likely to wake him up and that puts him in a mood.”
Toby nodded. “That makes sense, yeah.”
“Have a good time.” Mercer laughed. “He does know how to party, just to let you know. Expect a lot of fun.”
“A party boy?” Toby got a few red flags that went off in his head.
“At least from what I know.” Mercer shrugged. “I can’t honestly say much about his private life. He tends to ‘play it close to the chest’.”
“Really?” The third member of the group rolled his eyes. He was named Eric and liked to pretend he was physically injured by the puns that sometimes started to fly around the coffee shop they had lovingly named their personal writer’s room.
The other two members of the writing group laughed at the antics that were going on in the room. It was nice to be in a room of his peers and soon they were right back at work, settling into the comradery that they had shared every single week that they had been meeting like this; a place where writers could get together and get social interaction. It was so easy to go hide in cavernous offices and basements and never see the light of day when inspiration struck hard, leading to bad habits that made one content to keep hiding like that.
Toby knew how bad it could be. He was like that, always at risk of losing his place in the world. That’s why he needed guys like this who would drag him out of his shell. He needed a group like this. It was his lifeline. And this time it had saved him even more, getting him an inside look at the world of professional gambling.
Chapter Two
Pete threw the shoebox his boots were stored in into his bag with a frustrated grunt. It felt like his gear grew every time he went on one of these trips, but his bag grew smaller. It was harder to fit everything in. He tried to shove it in then gave up on that idea. He was just going to have to do the right thing and pack it properly.
Another sigh escaped his lips. This was beyond frustrating. He hated packing and he did it at least once a month. One would think that it became easier over time, but that just wasn’t the case.
He got to work, rolling up each article of clothing and slipping his toiletry bag into the proper pocket. He knew that everything fit in there, he just hated taking the time to pack it properly. He was going to meet this guy at the airport, and they were supposed to fly out together. They had booked seats themselves, so there was no way to know if they would be sitting next to each other or not.
Maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was what his cousin had talked him into. He was taking a writer
along. He hadn’t had a chance to meet with the man, but they had talked on the phone. It wasn’t like this Toby guy had seemed so bad, but the truth was he didn’t like feeling like some crazy puppy was following him the entire time he was doing his job.
But for some reason, he had agreed to this. Maybe it was because he had a soft spot for his cousin. Mercer had helped him out countless times and even came to check on his apartment whenever he had to leave town. And he had to leave town a lot.
He would deal with it, then it would be over and he could go on with his life. A writer following him around. A lot of guys would consider it an honor and there was a part of him that felt that way, but most of him was simply frustrated with the fact that someone would be cramping his style. And a small part of him was frustrated with the fact that this guy was going to see all the intimate parts of his ritual and life. He wasn’t sure how anyone would take seeing that sort of thing.
Granted most of his peers would be excited by that prospect, but Pete liked his privacy. He liked being free and not bothering with anyone in his life. No one to report to or deal with.
It’s why he lived a wild and free single life. At least that was what he let his fans think. Not that he had many fans. He wasn’t the most famous card player in the world, but he still had a small following of people that were interested in the things that he did.
That way no one had to know what his real issues were. It was just easier than having to explain why he didn’t want to be around people.
He glowered as he finished packing his bag and called for the rideshare service that would take him to the airport. It wasn’t a pretty look on him, at least that’s what everyone had told him his entire life. That he didn’t look good when he was pouting about the way his life had turned out. And it wasn’t like he had much to complain about. That’s what everyone told him at least. He made good money doing what he did. He also had a bit of a following in his field. He wasn’t one of the big characters that everyone talked about, but he did well enough for himself to attract at least some attention from the crowds.