They could hardly have been less
alike.
David is striking, tanned,
smooth, charismatic, blond with an ice melting smile, and possesses an
unmistakable gift as a fiction writer, even at twenty-one. Wyatt looks as plain
as paper, short by comparison, mildly hairy, white as a ghost, graceless, a
celebrated oil painter. He is single and he is out. David, raised a strict
evangelical fundamentalist, is embarrassed by his own virginity. Both men are
sent to Puffin Island and, within days of their arrival a young woman washes
ashore, frozen and unresponsive after her kayak crashes against the rocks.
David and Wyatt save her life.
Days later, Wyatt is charged with rape. While the authorities investigate, the
woman’s nineteen year old identical twin brothers paddle their way to Puffin to
teach Wyatt a lesson. Their goal, to avenge their sister.
The bond between David and Wyatt
increases during island duty, and just when things seem as good as they can
get, David distances himself from Wyatt. During David’s absence, Wyatt meets a
hometown computer whiz who makes it quite clear that he wants Wyatt for
himself. But, David’s heart struggles
with his imbedded childhood dogma and lethally homophobic parents, propelling
him to establish an unthinkable bond of love with Wyatt, and, when the
inthinkable happens, Wyatt is once more left alone and he moves forward because there is a lot at stake. He turns to the most unlikeliest of
characters to fill the void, a person
who will teach him an important lesson; that love is all about choice and on
making a decision, he must sacrifice a need that had been created by his past
with David.
Purchase at: Amazon
Excerpt:
Thayne wasn’t next to me.
Gradually, I awoke, the reality setting in that his
side of the bed was empty.
I figured he’d simply crawled out to take a leak. I
knew he needed to leave early, about seven my time, to be at work by
eight-thirty his time. Minutes later I discovered the head vacant and that it
wasn’t even four forty-five, yet. I could not find him anywhere in the
apartment. I hoped to spot him on the balcony searching for dawn’s early
lights, but no; still far too early even in this mid-August time frame.
My angst bubbled over when I saw his vehicle wasn’t in
the car park.
“What
the fuck?” I shouted.
Did he get a phone call in the night summoning him
home? Upstairs I scrounged for my cell phone, searched for a hand written note,
not that it would be like him to write one. But lo, tucked into the handle of
the coffee pot, where I couldn’t miss it, I found one of my index cards.
My name is Thayne, not David. You ain’t near
ready for me.
“What the fuck?”
I tried his cell phone, but he had turned it off,
sending my pounding heart directly to his voice mailbox.
“Thayne, what
happened? Call me. Please.” I prepared a pot of coffee and plopped onto the
sofa. My deductive abilities prior to caffeine were near nil. Did I do
something or say something during the night that offended him? I sipped on the
hot black liquid as my head gradually drifted back into the game of life. I
took my cell into the bathroom with the ringer volume on high, hoping he’d call
while I showered. I needn’t have bothered. No call came in, so after dressing,
I called him again. His phone remained off and being this hour on a Monday
morning business calls were unlikely. I suspected it would remain off for
hours. But why? What could I have said or done to cause such a dramatic
reaction. I read his note again, and a thought came rushing over me like the
cascading waters of Dickson Falls in Fundy National Park.
How
do you fix something like that? Or could Thayne be spot on, that I wasn’t ready
for him? I vaguely remembered kissing and cuddling him in the middle of the
night.
I must have called him David, but what else did I say?
What else did I do? Did I attempt sex with him thinking of him as David;
telling “David” how much I loved him, and how thankful I was that he returned
to me?
Oh, I could see that happening, but I had no
independent recollection of such an event. I swallowed more coffee. Conversely,
I also knew that in times of trouble my mind worked overtime creating a litany
of worst possible scenarios like when they charged me with raping Brenda and I
saw myself on a chain gang with a pick-axe.
So maybe I did none of those things, just like I never
raped Brenda. Maybe I said something earlier in the day that stewed in his mind.
Thayne’s inferiority complex could be an undetonated grenade in times of
stress. I wondered what time he left and how far he had travelled toward home.
Hopefully that’s where he was headed.
After
making more coffee, I tried calling him again, this time while sitting on the
pot. I might as well have been sitting on Neptune. The results were the same.
Standing on the veranda overlooking the bay I used the
peaceful scenery to think. No, think is too strong a word. I stood there for an
hour watching the lights, listening to the neighborhood birds protesting their
predawn duties, filling the early morning airwaves with their unique and varied
songs. I was in no mood for all that screeching and chirping and pecking and
warbling and hooting this morning. Normally, I enjoyed the early avian sounds
of nature, but I could find nothing in that cacophony to savor at this
moment.
I
reached for my wallet, car keys, and cell phone, pocketing them with a couple
of pens, index cards and a handkerchief to help me deal with the allergies that
fucked with my nose and throat this time of year, ragweed now coming into full
bloom.
Seated in my parked car, I palmed my phone to try
Thayne once again, spotting an inbound voice mail.
I knew who originated it without listening. I felt
like a man with his hands tied behind his back, a hood over his head and a rope
around his neck.
“Wyatt,
do not call me no more. After your love affair with David last night I know you
are too sweet on him to care about your ignorant hick even a little. I know I’s
just a stand in for David. Nothing more. And it smarts so bad I can’t takes
it.”
The trap door opened.
I fell into a deep and dark malaise, choking on my own
conflict and phlegm.
My head crashed into the steering wheel.
I screamed.
Anyone walking past my vehicle in the darkness of that
predawn hour would have thought I had escaped from the psychiatric ward.
I remembered David walking out on me once, too; that
Sunday back in November, 2010, leaving me alone at the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel
in Fredericton; also because of another guy.
Message from CoolDudes Publishing CEO:
When I first read The Island Keepers two years ago, I fell in
love with the leviathan scope of the novel. It took me to places I have never
been, it enthralled me and blew me away. The book has been five years in the
making and during that time it has been through several edits. Without giving
too much away, you have my assurance that the characters and the island itself will leave you with a lingering sense
of joy, and above all hope. There is such a thing as true love.
Debut
author Kristopher Quentin lives a quiet life close to this island.
You won't want to miss this amazing book to be published on the
1st April. Available through
Amazon, and the CoolDudes Publishing website.
Louis J Harris
March 2015
About the Author:
Kristopher Quentin has been writing for decades.
He is a businessman and journalist by trade, a man up at 3:45 every weekday
morning for a stint on the news desk; a little earlier on weekends to write
fiction in his man cave.
An upstate
New Yorker by birth, he now lives in the most rural area of far Maine, USA, on
54-acres of land: wooded, lawns, driveways, and a few buildings including his
four thousand square foot home which he calls the white house; because it is.
His property
is home to moose, deer, rabbits, raccoons, porcupines, fox, weasels, black
bears, and one Bard owl. He loves reading gay romances among other forms of
fiction; non-fiction; and memoirs most of which he considers to be fictional.
Traveling, dining out, boat riding are among his passions; that and flying his
own single engine airplane when he was younger.
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