Biblio M/M Fic

The Boy Upstairs
An exclusive original male/male romance novel by Biblio

Detective Adam Rourke has lost his wife and the life they shared together but is trying not to lose his way.  Librarian Ellery Keaton is a solitary soul working hard to overcome the daily challenges of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  Can two vulnerable men forge a connection and help each other, instead of struggling alone?

Debut: early 2009

Read an extract by clicking on the link below:

Meet Adam

Dying was expensive. While there was hope, the slimmest chance of saving your wife, you didn’t count the cost. You shouldered the responsibility, the care, the mental and physical exhaustion. Hid the anger and frustration, kept the pity parties strictly solo. Put on that game face and fought the HMO, the doctors. When it was clear the only hope you had was to blunt pain, you adjusted, you carried on caring, and then that hope was gone. The last hope. Your wife, your friend and partner was gone, and with her, the life you’d built together. All that was left, all you were allowed, was loss. Loss suffocated by debt. Debt and bureaucratic insistence.

Now Adam was clear of it. It had taken their savings, their home, every second of overtime the sheriff could send his way. Joanna Rourke was in the ground and Adam was here, in a small first floor apartment he couldn’t even afford to buy. Thirteen years on the force, ten years of marriage, six years as detective, he was back to renting, one bed, one bath, living paycheck to paycheck and trying to save for a downpayment.

He’d loved Joanna, and she him, even though they’d never been in love. Never followed convention. They were friends, true friends, partners more than lovers. Jo was intensely focused on building her career, and Adam, well, he’d got what he needed in his infrequent solo vacations. He’d been open with Jo from the start about preferring men. She’d kept his secret and they’d gotten closer, more open. Jo had been the one to broach marriage. Honesty, trust, respect. Those were good foundations. Jo understood Adam’s commitment to the job, shared it, and she’d reached a ceiling at the bank she couldn’t break through without a husband. Ironically, Carrick First Mutual Bank and the Sheriff’s Department were equally family oriented and equally demanding of their employees’ time and commitment. Marriage had suited them both, protected them both. Led them both to advancement. Maybe Adam had never been in love with Jo, or she with him, but their life together was good. They had tried to be there for each other, to be generous in their friendship.

He missed her.

She’d had a presence, an energy and drive that lifted him. He hadn’t stinted when the cancer took hold, fought to the last to help her any way he could, to be with her, until the only thing he could do for her was let her go.

Meet Ellery

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy was for life, Ellery thought wryly, not just for Christmas. The hardest thing to accept about his OCD was that it was a lifelong illness and he could never stop working at it. His control of the condition ebbed and flowed with the circumstances of his life.Going for the job at Carrick College and succeeding against older and more traditionally experienced candidates had been a huge boost to his self-esteem and he was feeling the benefits rippling positively in lots of small but significant ways.

Being able to walk away from his office door without checking it was secured, that was a big deal for him. He felt the tug of it as he left the library admin corridor and made his way along to the seminar room he had booked for the senior staff meeting, but he held out. There had been times he wouldn’t have made it away from the door in the first place. Times when he would have had to return to check the door again and again and again and still not be able to see the reality, make himself believe it was locked. Dark times, dark thoughts, frightening compulsions.

The CBT techniques helped him cope. Helped him walk away even when his heart was slamming in his chest, when he was in the grip of a full-blown panic attack. It was the irony of the thing, that the CBT felt worse than giving in to the compulsion.

His psychiatrist had told him at their first session that Ellery wasn’t crazy, that he could be helped and could help himself with his irrational, debilitating anxieties, that he had greater inner resources than he could believe. Now Ellery worked, he worked every day to accept himself, all that he was, to cope with his condition and with life, keep that belief.

It had been his choice not to disclose his disability, not to anyone not directly involved in his healthcare. It was not an easy choice, but it was the necessary one for him. If it left him isolated, too much alone, he liked to think that was balanced out by his self-reliance and the progress he’d made because of it. One of the lessons he’d learned in the earliest days of his diagnosis was he had to take responsibility for himself, he couldn’t lean on other people.