Red Lettering

By Angela Fiddler

Colin’s boyfriend Ren was flamboyant and fabulous, in or out of drag. Colin has been mourning him for seven years. When Colin walks into the local diner, he doesn’t expect to see Peter the flirty waiter in drag as a waitress. Colin wants to let Peter go, but somehow just can’t do it. It’s Halloween, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and Ren still has a lot to say. Peter’s been hurt before, and Colin has truths of his own to face, but with Ren’s help, maybe they’ll have a shot at more than a one night stand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Angela
• Release date: Nov 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005056643

Angela Fiddler

Angela Fiddler is the occasional pen name of Barbara Geiger. Barbara didn’t learn that she had lived in three out of the four Northern Alberta towns that had a known or suspected Wendigo attack until well after she’d moved south to Lethbridge. She grew up loving ghost stories and pony books, and spent most of her summers on the British Columbia coast, where she fell in love with the ocean.As Angela Fiddler, she has written The Master of the Lines series as well as Cy and his sex demon problem books. As Barbara Geiger, she has written The Tempest trilogy, starting with Coral Were his Bones, which exists in the same universe as the Middlehill series, starting with Changeling, as well as various other novellas and short stories.When she’s not following the exploits of selkies, sex demons and vampires, she writes epic fantasy and makes the occasional foray into science fiction and short stories.

Book preview

RED LETTERING

by Angela Fiddler

Copyright 2014 by Barbara Geiger writing as Angela Fiddler

Smashwords edition 2021

ISBN 9781005056643

*****

This book contains sexually explicit scenes and is meant to be enjoyed by adults.

This book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment, and may not be re-sold.

Original MLR Press edition edited by Christie Nelson

RED LETTERING

Colin’s boyfriend Ren was flamboyant and fabulous, in or out of drag. Colin has been mourning him for seven years. When Colin walks into the local diner, he doesn’t expect to see Peter the flirty waiter in drag as a waitress. Colin wants to let Peter go, but just can’t do it. It’s Halloween, the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and Ren still has a lot to say. Peter’s been hurt before, and Colin has truths of his own to face, but with Ren’s help, maybe they’ll have a shot at more than a one night stand.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

About Angela Fiddler

Angela’s other books

Read an excerpt from Black Shades

Dedication

To Elisabeth. You make it so easy to write about love.

Chapter One

The end was always nigh when the whale watching business closed down for the season. Tourists expected to be cold and wet when viewing nature in all its majesty, but not even the whales stayed around for the winter near the tiny town on the coast of British Columbia. In Edmonton, Colin’s hometown, winter threatened in late September and was well entrenched by mid-October. Here, the winds off the ocean kept the season temperate enough that the town could use Hallowe’en as its last great hurrah before completely closing down to tourist traffic by November second.

After a decade, Colin had been accepted as an in-law to the town. He was only thirty-five, but his bones started aching when the leaves changed, long before the chill in the air arrived. The haunted hotel on the main street—which was actually called Main Street—had been practically empty for a month. When all the summer businesses closed down one by one, it was like walking an explosive down a beam in a controlled demolition. The weight of the building above helped destroy the supports as much as the blast itself.

Colin had never actually seen a live controlled demolition, but the hero of his long-running series was an explosives expert, and if there was one thing Colin could do well, it was research. He would stay up for days at a stretch, months at a time, reading everything he could around what his character would know. Then he threw only the smallest fraction of that knowledge into the story because no one really read his stuff as a how-to.

He’d been doing so well over the summer. Since Ren had died, he had picked up a second pen name so he would always be up against a deadline. He understood he was the biggest cliché of them all, a small town recluse writer with a tragic past. But people in this small town in particular had all known and loved Ren as much as he had. He could wrap himself up in his misery until the scent of it stained his skin.

The facades of the buildings down Main Street all had to be maintained under strict zoning permits. From the outside, the Miyazaki general store appeared no different from the branded coffee chain right next door. The store sold far more specific touristy kitsch these days than anything useful. The family had originally built the store across from the hotel up near the spring by the natural pools during the turn of the last century. It had been sold off for ten cents on the dollar after Ren’s family had been interned during the second World War in a Japanese camp over a thousand miles inland in Lethbridge. During the war, the hotel had moved into town because of the gas shortage. The hot water was piped in to keep the Springs in the name. The old store, like the pools had dried up. When the Miyazakis came back, they’d set up shop in town, once again across the road from the New Springs Hotel.

Colin had been more furious about the injustice than Ren had. Maybe because it was new to him, and a familiar part of the landscape to Ren. Ren’s grandfather had worked every day in the store to make sure that Ren’s father could finish medical school and then he’d come back to the small town to establish the modern hospital. Colin had met Ren at school where Colin was half-heartedly studying economics, and Ren was obsessed with pinnipeds in general and the Northern Sea Lion in specifics.

The Coast Guard had found Ren just north of town, dressed in his yellow slicks and his red life preserver. Colin had been expecting the worst when he got the call to come down and identify the body. He and Ren’s mother had stood together in the small white room with the flat screen television.

Canadian movies so loved their color filters, Colin remembered thinking. He’d wanted to believe the paleness was a trick to the camera, but every bit of color was truly gone from Ren’s cheeks. No one would’ve believed he was just sleeping on the cold slab.

Ren slept like the dead. That had been the joke between them. Colin hadn’t appreciated how life-like sleeping Ren really had been. His sprawl of his limbs and the slight snore he always had when he had a cold was the opposite of what Colin had seen. Ren had always been so susceptible to colds after coming back from three-day trips up north while checking on the most distant rook he had been responsible for. Ren hadn’t liked sleeping in the cabin they provided for the naturalists that had to travel to the remote island. So when he’d come back to town, he’d sleep for like eighteen hours straight. After he’d woken up, he had always been hungry for food, for sex and for his stupid reality shows that he’d mocked and yet watched religiously.

Colin had often seen him curled up on the end of the couch hugging his pillows, every time he’d entered the house. He’d loved the fact he could see the whole floor when they redid it, but now it was too easy to see he was all alone. Ren had had the metabolism of a sparrow, consuming vast amounts of anything he could nibble on that was sweet and salty at the same time. He used to drink his weight in fizzy sodas.

Colin didn’t have to worry about diabetes any more. They’d joked that they were going to grow old together on their front porch of their small house on Third Street, two blocks north and one block south of the family home Ren had grown up in. Colin could have worked anywhere, but when a job came up in the Fish and Wildlife division in the next town over from White Springs, Ren had driven the hour in and out every day along the coastal highway. Colin had been so sure, in his morbid author way, that it would be the highway he had to worry about.

But the mystery of Ren’s death hadn’t taken more for the coroner to solve than opening him up to see the damage done to his aortic valve. It was a silent time bomb befitting any of Colin’s novel plots. Even though most thriller heroes may have been the captain of the football team, they would never have been voted both the King and Queen of prom like Ren had. The school officials hadn’t let him run officially as Queen, even though he had a prom dress instead of a suit. He’d campaigned hard to be the write-in candidate and had loved every campy moment.

Colin hadn’t thought he’d be comfortable at all with a drag queen as his lover. He’d thought acceptance had to come with passing off as normal as possible. But Ren, who’d slept like the dead, had taught him how to scream fuck normalcy while out way too late, drunk on something that didn’t come in a bottle or from a chemical. Walking with Ren in his bare feet down the street, because his feet didn’t really appreciate his four inch clear heels as much as his fashion sense, had made Colin feel as tall as he would have been wearing the shoes in Ren’s hand. He’d loved a man who had been loud and proud and bright. Colin had loved every second being beside a man who wore a drab green uniform to work but had the pants tailored to show off his