About Allspice: Recipe for Love
by Sean Michael
49 pages / 12300 words
ISBN: 978-1-61040-204-0
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html, lit, Adobe and Sony optimized pdf, prc, epub
Jack's life is already on a downward spiral when his teenage daughter
Rache shows up on his doorstep, and she’s pregnant out to here. When he
takes her to confront Billy, the boy who knocked her up on her last visit,
he discovers boy's uncle, Dan, who is not just a fine baker. He’s a real
stud.
Much to his surprise, it looks like Billy is going to step up and assume his
responsibilities with Rache. Now that he's met Daniel, could it be that the
rest of Jack's life is also looking up? Of course there's the small matter
of Daniel not knowing that Jack is actually gay...
Sample
Jack was sleeping hard when the doorbell rang.
One of those deep, hard-core sleeps where the ringing of the doorbell read
just like a fire alarm in a dream that featured a muscled-stud wearing chaps
and painting the wall of that weird little club on Fifth and Gardener.
It wasn't until the doorbell rang again, then again, that he managed to wake
himself up, get himself stumbling across the apartment floor. "Just a sec!"
He tripped on one of the piles of clothes, bouncing off a set of unpacked
boxes, went down hard, his entire body jostling. "Fuck."
He wasn't unpacked enough to figure out where the fuck things were. Shit, he
wasn't sure what Chris had fucking given him when he'd gotten thrown out. He
sure as shit wasn't ready to answer the door at o-dark-thirty and...
He scrambled up as the doorbell rang again. "I'm coming, for fuck's sake!
What on earth is the..."
He tore the door open, blinking into eyes the same color green as his own. "Rache?"
Those eyes filled with tears, his teenaged daughter nodding. "I.... Hey?"
"Hey." He blinked at her again. Rache lived with his ex-wife in Boston,
eleven hundred miles away. They spoke once a week and she came for a couple
of weeks in the summer, maybe, and it wasn't fucking summer. Hell, it was
cold and she was pale, eyes dark and shadowed.
"What..." Surely she wasn't here for Christmas, right? Surely he would have
remembered that?
"I. I came on the bus. On the bus. Daddy, I messed up. I messed up so bad."
"Did you kill someone? If you did, was it your mother?" He'd always thought
he'd enjoy that job.
She shook her head, opened her coat. She was wearing a Boston College
sweatshirt and the little garnet necklace he’d given her for her sweet
sixteen, and… Oh.
Oh, fuck him raw.
"Is that? Tell me you just got fat."
"Jesus, Daddy!"
"Sorry. It's late. I'm... I was dreaming."
She arched an eyebrow, tilted her head.
"Right. Sorry. Come on in. I'll make coffee. You are just eighteen, right?
You didn't turn thirty and get married without warning your old man?" Maybe
jokes would stop the tears.
"I didn't. I don't know... Daddy, I'm so scared." He found himself with an
armful of wailing, shaking girl and suddenly it was more than a decade ago
and he was still the hero.
He blinked at the clock. Three fourteen a.m.
Wow.
Right.
Coffee.
Possibly a beer.
Definitely Excedrin.
Then he'd try to wake himself up again.