Book Title: BREATHE (London Love book 1)
Author: Sophia Soames
Publisher: Self-published
Cover Artist: Christina Stern
Release Date: May 15, 2021
Genre: Contemporary M/M Romance
Trope: Hurt/Comfort
Themes: Adult entertainment industry, Heartbreak, Found family
Length: 108 758 words/ 300pages
It is a standalone story.
It is Book 1 in the London Love series.
A companion novella, EXHALE, will be released in May as part of the Love is All 4 anthology.
Trigger warning/Author note: This book contains an off-page description of a sexual assault.
Buy Links – Available in Kindle Unlimited
Universal Link | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Blurb
Meet Ryan, aka, Joey Hole, disgraced former adult entertainer with more issues than he can keep track of. His boyfriend left him for an Instagram twink with 150K followers, his Mum wants him out of her spare room and then there’s that idiot at college who just won’t take no for an answer.
Meet Luke. He was once the rich kid who’d just been gifted his first car, and now he doesn’t even own a bike. He’s also slumming it in a house full of ungrateful siblings and his first trip to the Food-bank gave him some goddamn emotional scars. Life is getting better though, and he’s acing it at college, as well as making some brilliant new friends. Well except for that stuck up twatwaffle Ryan who won’t talk to him and refuses to like his brilliant social media posts….
The first book in the new London Series. This series will follow the ups and downs of three couples living extraordinary ordinary London lives.
LUKE
“You didn’t!” Emma snorted, holding up her phone to my face, where my ugly snout took up most of the screen.
“Confidence boost,” I scoffed back, my mouth full of noodles, as Jamie took the phone from Emma and slurped another gulp from his generic-brand-pretending-to-be-Coke drink.
“Bro,” he said and looked at me with pity.
“Bro. Don’t judge. You’re a handsome bastard. I’m a bottom-dweller in the Tinder pool. I get the scraps. I’ll be lucky if I get laid again at all this year.”
“You can lie in my bed,” Olive piped up. “I have a big bed now.”
“You should sleep in your bed,” Toby said, shooting Olive a smile. “That’s what a bed is for.” He was good with Olive and the only one who could snap her out of her tantrums when she pulled one of her rages out of the hat. He had more patience than any of us, including Emma, who deserved a medal for all she had gone through.
“Don’t like sleeping in my bed. I like your bed. Or Emma’s.”
“You slept in my bed last night, Squirt.”
“True love is not found on Tinder,” Emma said softly, pouring ketchup all over her noodles.
“Em, that’s disgusting.” Jamie pushed his chair away from the table. “Can’t we just eat food like normal people?”
“We are not normal people,” Aaron pointed out from the end chair, where he still had his headphones in. “There’s cake in the fridge for afters. Trial run for my trifle project.”
“Aaron, we made a deal. No headphones at the table.”
“Stop being Mum.”
“I’ll be Dad then. Get the fucking headphones out, mate.” That was Emma, rolled into one. Mum, dad, sister, boss, punisher and all-round dictator of the Walters family.
I was the second oldest, in case you were wondering. Jamie was my twin, three minutes younger by pure chance. We were C-sectioned out as Mum was too posh to push and refused to do anything naturally after having suffered terribly with Emma, or so she said, but we’d learned the hard way not to trust a word coming out of our mother’s mouth. She still claimed total innocence from her jail cell despite a full-on conviction with more evidence than I had really wanted to be aware of.
So Emma, then me and Jamie, then Aaron, who seemed to fly through life like a big clumsy bumblebee, bumping into hurdles and pushing them away with a shrug of his broad shoulders. He loved food and cooking, and anything he could get his hands on was carefully sculpted and crafted into something that could be eaten, preferably with custard. Then we had our Toby, full of anxiety and butterflies as he negotiated the first blooms of romance with someone called Annabelle who rang his mobile at every hour.
“Luke, my dinner is yucky.”
“Olive, just eat.”
“I don’t like noodles.”
“You loved noodles last week. These are exactly the same noodles.”
“No, those noodles came in a yellow packet. I like yellow. These ones are in a red packet. Red means spicy, so I can’t eat them.”
“Makes perfect sense.” Toby tried to pacify her, reaching out to stroke Olive’s cheek. “Eat up, Squirt, and you can come watch TV in my room.”
“I can’t eat. They’re spicy.”
“They are not spicy.” Emma sighed, leaning over to the overflowing bin to grab the remains of the packet. “Look, it says chicken flavour.”
“Chicken flavour in a red packet means spicy.” Olive sulked, tying her arms into a knot over her chest. “Not eating it.”
“I’m eating it,” Jamie cajoled. “You know I hate spicy things. Look, see, I’m fine. Yum, yum.”
“I’m not eating it!” Olive screamed and slid down from the table, leaving her chair to fall over in her tumultuous, departing wake.
“Leave her,” Jamie muttered.
“She’ll eat if she’s hungry.”
“Can we discuss next week’s budget?” Emma asked, getting our family calendar off the wall and throwing it down on the table with a loud smack. “We all need to put in twenty quid for shopping and another forty each for the bills. Can we all get that sorted so I can actually pay for the shopping this time around? I had to put the loo roll back last week, and it’s embarrassing as fuck when it happens every bloody week. Seriously, guys. We’re better than this.”
“I transferred the money yesterday.” That was Aaron. Always reliable.
“We kind of need loo paper. There’s like no substitute. Apart from noodle packets.”
“Short of funds,” I said. “I paid for the gaming console.”
“We agreed on the gaming console because you said you could still pay for everything else.”
“College costs money, and the lunches there are a bloody joke. I need to eat.”
“You could make a sandwich to bring from home if you organised yourself enough and got up in the morning.”
“You’re okay, bro,” Jamie said, although I doubted speaking up in my defence. He was always saying random shit. “I’ve ordered that other game you wanted off eBay. It was cheap, but can we take that from the household funds. I need to go out on Friday. A man needs to have a beer now and then. Fuck the household bills.”
“Fuck you, Jamie.” Emma really was the classiest bitch on the block. She was awesome—brutal, fair and the one who kept us all on the same page. She also needed to go out and get drunk and laid but never did. She put us first these days, and we gave her more shit than she deserved.
“Give me until the weekend. I get paid on Friday and can pay double if anyone can cover for this week. Em, can I go out Friday? I can bring Olive to football on Sunday if that helps.”
“Thanks, babe, no money left for things like that. Olive needs new undies—she can barely fit into the one’s she’s wearing. Is everyone happy with me spending that extra ten pounds of her birthday money on clothes? Any objections?”
This was a constant thing, trying to get us all to chip in enough to get our meagre incomes to stretch. Living, even if it was just breathing the air in this house, cost money, and I couldn’t imagine living on my own and not having my siblings have my back. We usually messed up with something, every week.
“You all right?” Jamie flicked a crumb at me. “You look deep in thought again.”
“Trying to figure shit out,” I said weakly. “Just want to meet someone. Someone that I actually fancy.”
“You’ll meet someone, don’t stress.”
It was okay for Jamie, with his clear skin and sparkling eyes and all that hair, which was the same as mine, except Jamie’s mysteriously fell in perfect shapes around his face while mine stood up like a badly constructed wire brush. He also had charm and a humble manner, while I was brusque and kind of weird. We were not identical, but I grew up wanting to look like him more than I looked like me.
Jamie was out every weekend with his mates. I was in most nights watching stuff on TV with Olive and trying to teach her to play FIFA. I wasn’t exactly going to succeed with getting myself laid at this rate, and yeah, perhaps I should go out on a Friday night to drink tap water with the guys from college and see if Danielle would let me snog her. But I didn’t fancy Danielle, and the thought of waking up in the morning with her twittering on in my ear about he said she said… I shuddered with unease, and Jamie laughed at me from across the table.
“What was that about, Lukey?”
“Imagined waking up with someone. Not a good dream.”
“You’re so fucking weird, bro. How we shared a womb is beyond me.”
“You love me, really. Lucky, as you can never get rid of me.”
“Bros before h—”
Emma glared at us. “Guys. That language. Olive is being raised by wolves already. She doesn’t need all that gutter talk.”
“Olive will be fine,” I said. “I’ll make her some toast.”
“There’re only ten slices left. We need them for breakfast.”
“She can have mine.”
“Is Mum calling on Friday?”
Aaron sighed. “Hopefully not. It’s always the same shit, and I’m not interested anymore. She doesn’t remember the stuff I told her last week, and then I get pissy and she gets in a mood.”
“I’m not here on Friday,” Toby blurted out, bolting from the table as I stuttered out something about not being a dick.
“She only rings to talk to Olive anyway,” Jamie said, “and even Olive gets bored.”
“I’ll speak to her,” I said in my sternest big-brother voice, “but it’s all our jobs to take those calls. She doesn’t ring every week anymore because we never want to speak to her. She’s our mum. We should make an effort—if she can be bothered to ring this week. Anyway, I’ll go sort Squirt.”
“She’s our mum and doesn’t give a shit,” Emma added quietly. “She’ll probably forget to call anyway.” She hung the calendar back on the wall. “And I’ll pick up some more bread tomorrow. Don’t worry so much, Lukey.”
“We need to show maturity, and that we are not dependent on her.” I could’ve been quoting straight out of a social services handbook.
Nobody replied. Instead, the kitchen filled with the sound of plates being thrown in the sink and messages pinging phones as my siblings left the room. None of those messages were for me, though.
One day, I would have enough money to fill the house with bloody bread and have more friends than I would know what to do with. But for now, I made my baby sister toast and watched her eat my future breakfast while she slayed me at FIFA and filled my bed with crumbs. I still worried. I couldn’t help it.
Sophia Soames should be old enough to know better but has barely grown up. She has been known to fangirl over TV shows, has fallen in and out of love with more popstars than she dares to remember, and has a ridiculously high-flying (un-)glamourous real-life job.
Her long-suffering husband just laughs at her antics. Their children are feral. The Au Pair just sighs.
She lives in a creaky old house in rural London, although her heart is still in Scandinavia.
Discovering that the stories in her head make sense when written down has been part of the most hilarious midlife crisis ever, and she hopes it may long continue.
Find me on social media @sophiasoames on all platforms
Christina Stern is a Russian based artist. Quick sketches and portraits drawn in pencil are what she likes to do the most. Her work can be found on @christinastern on Instagram
Aurelia Morris is a cover artist, photographer, Photoshop wiz and eternal fangirl. She works in many mediums under more aliases that she can keep track of.
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