Tuxedo Masquerade

By Alex Turner

Halloween skeptic Jessi dresses as Sailor Moon and meets Tuxedo Mask at a masquerade Halloween party. Tuxedo Mask swoops in, red rose and all, to rescue Jessi from her intrusive ex... but little does Jessi know that her masked hero is none other than her irksome colleague Krystal. Will the masquerade sparks help them see through each other's IRL masks, or is this Halloween romance all about tricks?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Turner
• Release date: Oct 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393171058

Alex Turner

Alex Turner writes queer romance novels whenever they’re not playing basketball, reading, or pretending to be good at video games. They can also frequently be found holding hands with their wife and babbling about astrophysics while stargazing.

Book preview

Chapter 1

One of the things Jessi liked best about living in Park Slope was Halloween.

Right as October rolled around – some houses, as early as the last week of September – everyone slung up their spider webs, blew up their inflatable ghosts, and scattered pumpkins on the old concrete steps leading up to the old red brick brownstones.

Living in a brownstone had been a dream of Jessi’s since she first traipsed into Brooklyn in search of the Lesbian Herstory Archives when she was a freshman in college. A decade later, she had a room the size of a closet – but the living room she shared with her roommate had a brick wall.

And just a couple of weeks ago, she’d strategically placed her own pumpkin – carried cradled like an awkwardly round baby from her favorite grocery store on 3rd – on the steps of the brownstone. She’d taken a photo and sent it only to her best friend – it was silly, small, and nothing Instagram would have cared about anyway.

But Jessi did. And she cared, too, that on her way home from work, she could hop off the subway and slip silently into a tiny, local specialty grocer – which really meant expensive, but a girl could have a vice, couldn’t she? – and turn off her music to listen to the hum of the refrigerator lining the walls with yogurt and fruit, the soft sweetness of nothing that she entered into for just a moment.

She didn’t particularly relish running into other people taking sanctuary in her little corner grocery store, part old-school bodega and part symptom of Cobble Hill’s gentrification. But Halloween was fast approaching, and the partially vegan ice cream shop right next door was making its last hoorah before fall swept through in earnest, boasting all manner of pumpkin spice flavors and cinnamon galore. Of course she was going to run into other people.

Jessi flinched slightly when she saw the woman contemplating cheap wine, decked out in beat up converse and – naturally – a plaid flannel. She considered turning her music back up, leaving without getting what she came in for – what was that, again? – but she wasn’t a jerk. Was she?

They’d be forced to socialize that Wednesday night, anyway, at their office’s annual blow-out Halloween party. "It’s secular and it’s gay Christmas, their ED always joked when explaining why their office always made a bigger deal out of October than December holidays. But accidentally" ignoring Krystal Thomas, the non-profit’s newish social media manager, probably would make the whole thing a lot more awkward, not less.

Just when Jessi was about to take a deep breath and step into her colleague’s line of sight, she saw someone else talking with her. Someone else from work, Megan, their IT human – if memory served, Megan had been the one to tap Krystal for her position at their LGBTQ economic justice group to begin with.

Please don’t notice me, please don’t notice me, Jessi tried to manifest her wishes into reality. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her colleagues, just... she had to save all her social energy for tonight. And avoiding talking to two people was more accidental and less hurtful than accidentally-on-purpose ignoring one person on their own, right?

Jessi! Well, damn.

She grimaced her face into