Angelfish by M. King
ISBN: 978-1-60054-478-1 (ebook)
Cover art: M. King
Length: novella / 22,000 words
Published by: loveyoudivine alterotica (2010)
Kelly McClintock has spent years trying to outrun his family.
Unfortunately, he is the son and heir to the family business and, after a blissful period of personal freedom spent studying in England, he is remanded home to New Zealand to take up his company role.
The hired help–in the form of hunky landscape gardener Craig, and his interesting tattoo–offers a distraction, but when Kelly’s mind starts wandering to more than biceps and well-packaged jeans, he begins to fear for his sanity.
Excerpt:
© M. King 2010
England had been as close as he’d got to a home for the last four and a half years. He hadn’t wanted to come back, but he couldn’t realistically spin his education out any longer. His father had addressed the issue last Christmas, on the golf links.
So, graduation this year.
Yes, Dad.
A hot day, even for a Kiwi January, and Kelly’s father had wiped his brow on a monogrammed handkerchief before lining up for the putt.
You’re, er, not really going to carry on with this silly business about postgraduate study, are you?
Kelly hadn’t been sure what to say. ‘Yes’ obviously wasn’t the expected reaction, but he didn’t want to lie.
Well, I have got the place. And I thought you wanted me to get my qualifications, not just come in as the boss’ son.
Yes, but…you don’t really need anything more than the degree, do you? It’s Cambridge, after all, his father had added, with just a little hint of something that—if Kelly hadn’t known better—he could almost have mistaken for pride. You’ve got the cachet, and the bit of paper. No need to go overboard with it, is there?
Kelly fiddled with his putter and mumbled, and knew that he wouldn’t get away with prolonging his absence. England had been a boon—a wonderful, carefree, amazing place—but he’d be expected to give it up. Over and done with. Time to move on, relinquish the freedom of youth and…what? Be a man? No, Kelly reluctantly realized. Not that. Not any kind of human being.
A biscuit baron.
McClintock’s had, in recent years, diversified from just the crackers and crispbreads, and now had one of the country’s top-selling lines of teatime treats: the famous Malted Choco Crunch Shells for which the new factory in North Canterbury had been opened. That factory seemed nothing more than a yawning grave, beckoning him into a plush office, ready for the doors to clang shut with a resounding, deathly knell. He’d visited, during that fateful Christmas holiday, propelled round by his father, hand on shoulder and flat, nasal voice droning in his ear.
Kelly had been a familiar face in the Christchurch plant since he was fifteen. His father had decided it would be good for him to see the factory at work, learn something about the workers…and good for the workers to see him, to acknowledge the continuance of power. Kelly hadn’t really minded, though he’d been pretty sure the blank-faced people he got introduced to hadn’t seen it that way. They’d nodded, and smiled, and he felt the mockery coming off them like a heat haze.
All the same, the North Canterbury factory had somehow been worse, and not just because it already had his name inked on one of the upstairs doors. It made Kelly feel vaguely sick; the warm, sticky chocolate gushing out of nozzles, the machines stomping down on sheets of dough, the endless rows of bored, trapped workers in white plastic gloves and caps, nodding, smiling and trying to pretend they gave a shit about their jobs, the company, or the family behind it.
Then again, if Kelly was truthful, he found himself hard-pushed to give a shit about his family. Over the years, it had matured into an almost physical reaction…much like the one he found quaking up in him now, as he stood before the shopping arcade hoarding, the ebb and flow of the airport buzzing around him.
Oh, things had changed a little bit. Clint the Cracker had been revamped and computer-generated, his edges rounded and his wild stare made slightly less indicative of bi-polar symptoms. But he was still doing his stupid thumbs-up, and there were still those bloody Choco Shells.
Kelly gazed gloomily at the hoarding and tried to fight down the dual impulses of nausea and flight. He had enough money left. It would be easy to turn around, hop straight back on another plane. It didn’t matter where…just anywhere but here.
He sighed, knowing he wouldn’t do it.
The jet lag would catch up with him, and so would his mother.
Reluctantly, Kelly slumped out of the terminal into the chill wastes of segue parking and New Zealand’s weather, not as much of a surprise as it might have been if June in England had actually been warm. Instead, he’d come from one grey, overcast threat of rain to another At least here if it planned to rain, it did it in full-on torrential downpours, instead of that half-hearted, tippy-toe English drizzle. Kelly had always preferred getting the deluge over with to just being needled by damp and tedious nagging.
He scanned the car park and thought of the day he’d first left—that inaugural farewell, moistened with his mother’s hypocritical tears and peppered with instructions. Write or call as often as you can, don’t be afraid to ask us for money if you need it, watch who you make friends with, take lots of photographs, don’t forget to join the right societies (list packed along with your undies), work hard, and remember who and what you’re representing. Don’t do anything we wouldn’t want to see in the papers. A list of maxims repeated every college year.
She didn’t come to the airport to wave me off, though.
And she wasn’t here to meet the plane. Kelly dismissed the brief sense of betrayal, because it didn’t really matter, and time couldn’t be turned back. He stood for a minute, shifting from one foot to the other, the weight of fatigue already bowing him. He ought to just go and get in a cab.
But he didn’t.
Instead, Kelly darted away from the necessities of taxis and tarmac, and nipped back into one of the less offensive generic coffee chain shops that represented airport shopping’s first line of attack. Just a few minutes more of freedom.
He could have that, couldn’t he?
Kelly bought himself something sweet and hazelnut-flavoured to at least try and deal with the ‘something crawled in here and died’ mouth-feel of long-haul air travel, and collapsed gratefully into a tubular steel chair. It wasn’t comfortable, but he was already cramped into the unnatural shape of an airline seat, so he barely noticed it.
Yes, just a very little bit longer, and then he would head out to the house and finally, irrevocably admit he’d come home. Not that, it didn’t feel good to be back in a way. It was great to be on the ground at last, for starters, and surprisingly nice to feel once more the familiar heartbeat of the town in which he’d spent his childhood.
Christchurch, one of the South Island’s largest and oldest cities, still drenched itself in flowers. Not so many bright colours this time of year, not so much cheerful display on the clean-scrubbed streets, though the same sense of orderly neatness lingered. Most of Kelly’s perceptions of life here had been forged when he’d been too small to recall much more than the colours and shapes of things. From the earliest possible moment, he’d been parcelled off to board at the local boys’ school and that, in all honesty, had probably afforded him more freedom than he could have hoped for at home. Oh, it had been fraught with its own difficulties and crises, but those would have reared their heads wherever he’d been. And he rather suspected dealing with them had been safer and easier in the hothouse womb of Charlton Hall’s dormitories than it would have been under his parents’ watchful, suspicious eyes. All the intense delights and agonies of a single-sex dorm, and the comforting reassurance of knowing it wasn’t your mother who washed your duvet covers.
Kelly winced at the cloying, synthetic taste of the coffee. “Ugh,” he said to the café in general. It didn’t seem to notice.
People pottered here and there, going or coming, chatting or silent. Their voices seemed strange, and Kelly supposed he’d grown too used to the shapes and layers of English sounds. His first year up at Cambridge, he’d thought he’d never adjust to the strange intensity of the place, but he appeared to be missing it already. Some things, anyway. The freedom to dress, act, and speak how he wanted, the ability to make his own friends, go his own way…take a lover, if he chose, and not feel he had to hide the poor bloke in a cupboard to avoid discovery, or the potential knock-on drop in share prices.
Lavish little comforts, he knew.
And all over now.
Keywords: New Zealand, kiwi, novella, gay, glbt, lgbt, m/m, manlove, romance, lust, obsession, tattoos, dark fantasy, magic realism, gay fiction
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