Detoured by Love

by David Horne

  “Detoured by Love”

  M/M Gay Romance

  David Horne

  © 2019

  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 (2019.04.29)

  http://www.DavidHorneauthor.com

  Special thanks to the following volunteer readers who helped with proofreading: Penny T, Robert Sundin and those who assisted but wished to be anonymous. Thank you so much for your support.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Maggie Ava Taylor looked around her study. The study had been Maggie’s favorite room going on for twenty years now. It contained more knowledge than any other room in the house, more memories than any place for miles. It seemed as good a place as any to die.

  If you had asked Maggie what room in her house she would have preferred to die in, say, a year ago, she would’ve thought for a while before choosing this one. It had a kind of…studious beauty. The study was such a typical one—an ornate, spinning globe stood on a desk that was stacked with unfinished research papers, shelves stacked with books so boring that they would put almost anyone to sleep, dark curtains, brown carpets, an ancient glass chess set standing majestically on a small stool nearby and, of course, perhaps the most important touch of all, mahogany finishings. Maggie had always been of the astute opinion that mahogany was a very studious color. Universities and colleges were always adorned with it.

  The color seemed to just scream the word ‘knowledge’ right at you. The golden sunlight streamed in from the stained-glass windows behind Maggie, lighting up the whole study. Which seemed wrong. Maggie couldn’t explain it, but she was feeling an unmistakable resentment at the way that the sun was shining, the birds tweeting

  Just a few hours ago, Maggie had settled into her favorite rocking chair. Cut ahead to now, and she was still sitting in it. The rocking chair was almost definitely the one thing in the study that wasn’t mahogany. The quintessential old lady dies in the quintessential study in a quintessential rocking chair. How appropriate. All she needed now was some knitting, and a blanket over her knees and the image would be complete.

  Maggie twiddled her thumbs, not because she was nervous, but more out of boredom, across the room, her young executor, Joss Kenla, went over Maggie’s will for what seemed like the hundred millionth time. As he read each word, his dark beady eyes crossed the document, almost like he was scanning it for loopholes. Joss was a young, Australian man with sand-colored hair, a jawline sharper than a scalpel, and a dazzling smile that Maggie knew could melt a young woman from a hundred yards out. In fact, she’d seen it happen.

  He was the kind of man who looked like he had been designed by a nine-year-old girl for a nine-year-old girl. He was the kind of man who would wear flip-flops and Hawaiian shorts on the beach and…well, not pull the look off exactly, no need to go too far. But he wouldn’t look ridiculous. Maggie could definitely see him barefoot on a surfboard.

  To put it plainly, Joss Kenla was far too young and far too cheerful to be handling such grim business. But he was also a paralegal at the farm town’s only law firm, Evans, Johnson & West. He also happened to be excellent at his job. Which was why Maggie had specifically requested him to be her executor. To handle her last will and testament. The same last will and testament that she had put off signing for eight straight months. Not because Maggie doubted the morality or the practicality of what she planned to do, but because the very act of signing a will was in and of itself an admission.

  An admission that Maggie was prepared to accept her death. An admission that the cancer had beaten her. That was a thing that Maggie had been far from prepared to admit, neither to herself nor the family. Now, however, Maggie was more than ready.

  “Well?” Maggie prompted, impatient.

  The briefest look of abashment flashed across Joss’ face, and Maggie felt a slight twinge of guilt that she quickly nipped in the bud. Impatience wasn’t unreasonable. Not on today of all days. She was dying, after all. Maggie had less time to live now than she’d ever had before, and more time to live now than she would ever have again. A sobering thought. But then again, that same saying was true of all people. Another sobering thought.

  While Maggie stewed in the middle of her highly philosophical and existential inner monologue, Joss, however, finished reading the will through and then looked up.

  He casually flipped his head to flick the blonde hair out of his face. “Well what?” he asked innocently.

  “Well, do you approve?” Maggie pursed her lips.

  Joss shrugged. “Would it make any kind of difference to you if I didn’t approve?”

  Maggie would have laughed but she was afraid it would finish her deteriorating lungs off for good. “I suppose not. You’re learning, Joss.”

  Joss Kenla winked at Maggie. Still, even now, he was so cheerful. Ever the fool, as Maggie used to call him.

  “I have to ask, Mrs. Taylor,” Joss said suddenly. “Of all people, why him?”

  Maggie wasn’t surprised at Joss’ confusion, and she’d been waiting for the question. It was a fair question and one that had a practical answer. Out of all the relatives that she possessed; uncles and aunts of her own, step-parents, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, why, of all people, would Maggie have chosen to leave her entire estate, the farmlands surrounding it, and all the horses, cows, chickens, pigs and animals to a young nephew that she’d scarcely seen in years?

  Maggie gazed around the study. The last time she had seen Lewis had been in this very room, a few years earlier on her birthday. The first time that she’d met Lewis’ fiancée. Maggie frowned. What was his name again? Harold, or Harry or something?

  Anyway, if Maggie had known that Lewis was going to bring him, she would have advised him against it. Whether or not Maggie agreed with homosexuality was not
the issue. She loved her nephew and accepted him. But not everyone in the family was so liberal. Specifically, Douglas, Maggie’s eldest son. Douglas had ended up saying some very unsavory things about homosexuals, and Lewis and…Hector? Had both stormed out.

  Later that night, Maggie had learned that the two of them had broken up. She didn’t know if they’d managed to patch things back up, but she had learned one thing - she loved her family, but they were ignorant, small-minded pigs at the best of times.

  “Trust me, Joss,” Maggie said with conviction. “Lewis is the right choice. He always has been. I knew it a month ago, and I know it now. Out of all of us, he’s the only one who’s never at the family gatherings.”

  Joss frowned. “Okay, you’ve lost me. I don’t understand.”

  “I know you don’t,” Maggie smiled wryly, more for her own benefit than anyone else’s. “You’ve seen them all. The family. I’m not exactly rich, Joss, but they’re all hanging around me, like vultures waiting for a wildebeest to die so they can descend over the carcass and squabble over the carrion. In case you didn’t get the metaphor, the carrion is my inheritance. Only instead of the decaying flesh of an animal, it’s a farm.

  Joss nodded. “Yeah, I got that.”

  “You may think I don’t notice what my family is like, but trust me - I notice,” Maggie said forcefully. “I say, none of them are getting a penny! Now sign the damn thing, Joss, or you’re fired.”

  Joss smiled. “Your last act would be to fire me?”

  Maggie cracked a smile in spite of herself and surveyed Joss over the top of her bifocals. “You think I wouldn’t?”

  “Oh, I don’t think you wouldn’t,” Joss said, half amused. “I know you wouldn’t.”

  Joss reached into his inside jacket pocket and removed a silver ballpoint pen. He reached up and curled his hair around his ear. He was cute, Maggie supposed, in the way that a high school lifeguard would be. After pausing for a moment, Joss deftly clicked the pen before placing it against the paper. He paused to make eye contact with his client for the briefest of moments.

  Maggie nodded firmly.

  Joss scrawled his signature in the box provided before offering Maggie the pen and paper. She took them. Maggie couldn’t resist giving the legal document yet another glance, as though she hadn’t seen it before. Then she scrawled in her signature.

  Suddenly, Maggie spasmed and convulsed as she was wracked by a fit of coughing.

  Joss frowned. Maggie knew that he was uncomfortable being so close to a dying woman. She could see it on his face. That was why she appreciated his presence all the more.

  “Can I help?” Joss offered, even though something told Maggie that he already knew the answer to that question.

  “Sure. You got a cure for lung cancer?” Maggie quipped.

  The two shared a quick smile.

  “Oh, dang it. Wouldn’t you know, I just gave away my last one this morning,” Joss said.

  “It’s too late for me,” Maggie said. “It has been for a while now. But…I hope the family isn’t too hard on Lewis.”

  The doctor had said that the cancer was accelerated. A month ago, he’d given her six months to live. Now, he claimed she had hours, a day at best. All that there was left to do now was sit and wait for death to claim her.

  Chapter One

  Aunt Maggie was dead.

  The news still hadn’t hit Lewis properly, he was convinced of it. Aunt Maggie had easily been Lewis’ favorite aunt when he was a young boy. She hadn’t talked down to him like the rest of the family. Lewis supposed that one could say that the two of them had a special relationship, not like the one Lewis had with his parents.

  Lewis loved his parents, and they him, but that didn’t mean that they always had time for him when he younger. Aunt Maggie had always had time for him. More often, she was the one who was at home waiting for Lewis when he came home from elementary school. She’d listen to him talk about his day, and she’d look sympathetic when he told her how hard calculus was, or how mean the other kids could be.

  Of course, when he got older, he realized that she was pretending to be shocked and appalled, but that only made it more meaningful to him.

  When Lewis had gotten a bit older, Aunt Maggie had started coming through for him in much bigger ways. Like when he’d finally admitted to himself that he was gay, and when he had his first boyfriend, Aunt Maggie had supported him in a way his parents never did.

  One of the last times that Lewis had seen Aunt Maggie was the day he’d left for boarding school. Incidentally, that was the day that she’d finally sold her apartment in Seattle and moved nearly 2000 miles to her family’s farm out in the Midwest countryside. She’d been talking about the move for months, and she’d timed it with the start of Lewis at high school so that they didn’t lose out on any time together.

  Yeah, Aunt Maggie had been Lewis’ favorite by miles.

  Ever since he’d gone to school, however, Lewis hadn’t managed to keep in touch like he had always promised her, and promised himself, that he would. For the first few months that he was in high school, the two exchanged phone calls and letters almost every day. Letters where Lewis shared long anecdotes of what it was like to be away at a mixed boarding school. At first, he clearly remembered hating every minute of it. The teachers were all dicks, the fraternities were unbearably stupid and pointless, and Lewis couldn’t stand the site of the school motto plastered everywhere.

  But at some point, during Lewis’ first year, seemingly out of nowhere, he had suddenly learned to love it. Suddenly, the teachers weren’t all dicks, the frats weren’t all stupid, and the motto, habitus decernit altitudinis—attitude determines altitude—suddenly wasn’t so dumb after all.

  When Lewis had put all this in one of his last letters to Aunt Maggie, she’d found it highly amusing and claimed that he was experiencing something that happened to “the best of us”. Something that simply couldn’t be helped. Lewis was simply growing up. Soon after that, the contact between them got thinner and thinner and thinner until it dissipated altogether. He had thought nothing of it. The hole that Lewis’ Aunt had filled in his life, the hole caused by the absence of his parents, was now being filled with friends, and classes, and homework, and girls and all kinds of things that are commonplace in the life of a teenage boy.

  He’d forgotten her.

  When Lewis graduated, he went onto college, majoring in behavioral psychology. He was good at it too. It wasn’t long before Lewis was packing his bags and moving to Hoboken, to start his own practice in New York as an occupational therapist. But Lewis had known, better than most, that life is hardly ever consistent except in its unpleasantness. He couldn’t explain the feeling that he’d felt during those years in New York, couldn’t hope to put into words the feeling of excitement mixed with impending dread.

  Then one day, it came. The cold slap of reality that Lewis had been waiting for. Life was ready, once again, to show who was boss and who was not. Psychologists and therapists and psychiatrists, they all had the delusion that, because they treat the human mind, that that made them some kind of God, or that meant that they shaped or changed reality in any way. The core, desperate belief behind that idea was that humanity can learn to have some measure of control in this uncertain world.

  That’s all it was, a desperate belief. The sooner one woke and smelled the coffee, the better. Nothing in Lewis’ years of expertise, nothing he learned in university, no part of his degree prepared Lewis for what awaited him in the plain manila envelope that he’d found on his doormat one June day upon returning home. Having been on the phone, he’d tossed the envelope aside dismissively, intending to check it out later.

  That evening, as Lewis ate dinner, he’d suddenly remembered it. The envelope. Sitting on his desk. Burning a hole through the wood. Lewis had sliced it open and unfolded the sheet of paper. It was handwritten, which surprised him. Nobody got handwritten letters anymore, especially not in manila envelopes and wax seals. It had Lewis’
name on it, but no address and no stamp. Which meant it had been hand-delivered.

  It took Lewis a while to recognize his cousin Douglas’ slanted handwriting, but once he did, Lewis stopped chewing. His heart skipped a beat as he read the first word.

  Dear Lewis,

  Mother passed away.

  It happened last week. The lung cancer finally got her. It was really peaceful, I’m told. The family was busy, her lawyer was the only one with her. At least she didn’t die alone. I’m taking the time to write this letter because I know she was closer with you than she was with anyone, even me, her son.

  The funeral is set to be in two weeks’ time. We all know that you don’t always get along with most of us, Lewis, but we all want you to be there. And I know how I acted last time, but I’ve changed since then. Even your parents say they want us all to put our differences aside and do this, for my Mother. I might not have known her as well as I could have or should have, but I know that that’s what she would have wanted.

  We were also thinking maybe you could write something for the eulogy. I’m not sure what, but I know you’ll make it touching. We really hope you decide to come to the wake, but we’ll understand if you don’t. In case you don’t, I asked Mother’s lawyer if I’m allowed to talk about the last will and testament and he said yes. No one expected her to, but she left you everything. The farm, everything. I guess we should’ve seen it coming. You were her favorite, after all, it’s not like it was a secret.

  Anyway, I hope to see you in a few days.

  Your cousin,

  Douglas

  Lewis sat at his dining room table, knuckles bone-white as he clenched the letter in his grip. Lewis held it so tightly that his thumbnails were cutting tiny crescents in the paper. Lewis blinked, and two lone tears hit the paper, dripping across the page and making the ink run. It was information overload, being dumped with all this all at once. Aunt Maggie was the strongest person Lewis knew, How could she be dead?