The Green's Hill Novellas Read Online Free PDF

crotch and the tatters of his ill-advised plan of killing himself and making the world sorry lying around his feet.
    Somebody thought he was beautiful. Somebody thought he was worthwhile. A beautiful somebody—a somebody beyond the dream of anybody’s imagination.
    And Charlie had just paid that somebody back with a fistful of pain.
    Right there, standing in that wonderful, miserable dawn, Charlie made a particular resolution: never again would he take the good and give only the pain. He’d rather be the one eating the pain before that happened. He couldn’t bear that he’d hurt a kind, funny, generous person because he’d been stupid enough to think a gun in an empty field was a way out of a painful decision.
    He went home, took a shower, and told his parents he was gay.
    They didn’t take it well. But they didn’t throw him out, either. He still got to live at home. His college money was still there. His mother was going to be a weepy mess and his father might not talk to him for a year or two, but all in all, it was a hell of a lot better than lying dead in a vacant field. The lying dead part had been his plan before he’d looked up and seen this mesmerizing, beautiful, amazing… creature walking toward him in the light of the sliver moon.
    And then that creature had turned out to be Whim. He was aptly named—he was sort of like a crazy uncle or a child with ADD. Getting the guy to stick to one topic had been impossible, so Charlie had been content to follow his thoughts like a playful breeze. It had been fun. Entertaining, insightful, and unexpectedly sweet.
    It had been worth the weirdness and anxiety of living in a house where he was suddenly gay (at least to his parents). Of going off to school where he didn’t even have a small, tightly knit peer group to retreat to. Of allowing himself the luxury of smiling at other boys and flirting with them, too, when he’d been afraid for his life in high school. Of touching another boy’s hand and feeling his body respond.
    That conversation alone had been worth turning some of those boys down, just so he could let Whim be his first.
    He studied art and music and acting and settled on acting. After hours, he studied sex. He studied grooming, hygiene, and technique, and experimented on his willing, panting body as often as he could get in his dorm room alone. He decided he liked sex very much—and would like it even more when someone else participated.
    He really wanted his first someone to be Whim.
    He had no illusions after that, really. Whim had made it clear that he’d only be found in that clearing on Litha, and as much as Charlie would like to indulge in the fantasy that Whim would come to that clearing one day and take him away from his life and to some magical place where creatures like Whim were commonplace and where they cared for each other the way Whim had seemed to care for Charlie on sight, he was realistic.
    He might only ever have one other night with Whim; he wanted to make it count, dammit. If an elf was going to come out of nowhere and steal his heart, every blessed moment of the theft was going to be fucking magical. With only the slightest emphasis on fucking. Honest.
    So Charlie learned how to flirt and taught himself how to come and allowed his heart to ache for the shortest night of the year. The night came, hot and muggy, and found him waiting in the clearing by the woods with what he deemed to be the essentials of the encounter—a picnic blanket, a sleeping bag, a basket of fruit, bottles of water, a pocketful of wet wipes, a box full of condoms, and a jumbo-sized bottle of lubricant.
    The one thing he’d learned best from college was the value of coming prepared.
    Still, that didn’t mean his smile wasn’t uncertain when he saw Whim ambling along the railroad tracks in the light the oppressive clouds let in from the half moon. But Whim looked up and saw him, and suddenly he smiled—and he literally glowed. Literally. He cast a shadow