Title: Lose Me to Love You
Author: Chloe B. Young
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 11/28/2023
Heat Level: 3 – Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 64000
Genre: Fantasy, contemporary, gay, romance, urban fantasy, paranormal, suspense, magic/magic users, slow burn, tattoos, depression, grieving, second chances, religious parallels/subtext
Add to Goodreads
Description
At the bottom of a downward spiral of alcohol, sex, and risky behaviors, Matty Hill discovers that magic is real and that a mysterious man will teach him how to wield it if he can deal with the trauma of his past and present.
Sean Wildgust, Matty’s new teacher, is as secretive as he is fascinating. But when those secrets come back to haunt them both, Matty must decide if obsession is the same thing as love.
Lose Me to Love You
Chloe B. Young © 2023
All Rights Reserved
After that night, Matty understood.
It wasn’t a chore to sit for hours and try to find the space in his head that he’d found in the parking lot. He found it again and again, but he never managed to make the temperature change like he was sure he had then.
Not that he was trying, necessarily. Sean had already told him he wasn’t ready to do magic yet, and his getting warmer during their first walk had been a fluke or a coincidence. Beginner’s luck.
Now that Matty wasn’t an invalid, Sean was back to being the cool and collected teacher who looked like he’d never had a hair out of place in his life. But Matty wasn’t as intimidated now that he’d seen Sean playing Tetris on his phone and drooling into Matty’s spare pillow.
He still understood Sean’s need to put on the costume of his former self. Matty had demanded a pair of jeans and a shirt with buttons on it and avoided the bed except for sleeping. That meant he spent a lot of time sitting on the hardwood floor, but he preferred a sore ass to the reminders of detox.
Nothing was fixed. His family was still dead, he still wanted a drink more than his next breath on bad days. But this time, he had something to take his mind off of everything, something far more tempting than alcohol oblivion.
All he needed to do was annoy Sean into actually teaching him something.
When he was a toddler, Matty had gone through the classic “Why?” stage. His mother used to laugh and tell him it’d been less of a stage and more of a way of life for him. She’d been tested every day, she’d tell people, ignoring Matty’s embarrassment at the stories of him asking intensely personal questions at the age of five.
He never denied it, and a part of him never grew out of it.
How long have you been doing magic?
Why should I breathe through my nose? What difference does it make?
What are you reading? Does it help you do magic?
Are you wearing suspenders? Do you have grandchildren I don’t know about?
Not every question was about magic.
“Do you think my birth parents can do magic?”
The cool floorboards bled through the material of Matty’s shirt. He was cold, but he didn’t want to get up to get a sweater.
“Not necessarily,” Sean said, tapping a wooden spoon against Matty’s one pot to clean the tomato sauce off. “They might not have the ability.”
Sean cooked simple things, breakfast foods and meals that only had a few ingredients. The only thing remarkable about what Sean made was that it was all pretty unhealthy. Everything was covered in butter, cheese, or both. Sean gave nothing away, so Matty hadn’t been able to figure out if it was for Matty’s sake—he already felt less like a walking scarecrow—or if Sean liked it that way and kept trim and muscly through witchcraft and dedication to portion control.
Matty sat up. “Why not? I thought you said it was genetic.”
Sean wiped his hands on a towel and sat at the table, a thoughtful expression on his face. “It’s more complicated than that. Your genetic makeup is part of it, but it’s not the most important thing. Something has to happen.”
This was the most Matty had ever gotten Sean to talk. He wasn’t so much a teacher as a gatekeeper, giving out information on a need-to-know basis. Matty had no idea what it was about this question that’d opened Sean’s mouth, but he stayed silent, unwilling to break the spell.
“You won’t just start exhibiting magical traits accidentally. There’s a catalyst,” Sean explained. He paused, rubbing his hands together and taking in a longer breath than ever. “The magical trait requires the user to experience loss.”
“Loss?”
Matty had never thought of his own tragedy as losing something. He’d only ever explained it to himself as something that had happened to him and to the people he’d loved, not an absence that felt somehow less preventable.
“Not like your dog running away,” Sean told him, making firm, unbreakable eye contact. “Or your Great-Aunt Shelly passing in her sleep. True, untimely, devastating loss.”
The awareness of all that Matty had lost—home, family, love, the shelf of books he’d started but didn’t finish because he’d guessed what the ending was and got bored—was thick in the air. Thick as the smell of tomato and fresh garlic, delivered to their door because no, Matty, it is not the same as garlic powder.
Matty didn’t believe in ghosts. He hadn’t believed in magic either. The presence of the specters of his family were enough to make him reevaluate.
He cleared his throat and asked, “Why?”
“Imperative. Magic needs to be needed. It needs to have a space to occupy, where love and happiness were before.” Absently, Sean rubbed his thumb over a spot below his sternum. “It lives there and helps fill it. You’ve probably already felt it.”
Matty touched his body, higher, at the center of his collarbones. He’d felt it…buzzing. Reverberating like his dad’s chest used to when he would let Matty sit in his lap when he was on the phone.
“And what happens if you get over it?” Matty asked. “Move on, find love, or whatever. Do you lose the magic?”
Even as he said it, he knew the answer.
“You never fully get over the kind of loss you need to use magic,” Sean said. He stood up and went back to his pot, moving slowly as if it was suddenly a lot more effort to stand and carry on.
He’d lost someone too. It occurred to Matty all at once and made him want to watch Sean’s back as he returned to stirring his sauce, just in case he might see something that would give away what Sean Wildgust had lost to bring him to where he was.
In Michigan. Making spaghetti for a recovering baby alcoholic with serious attachment issues.
Purchase
NineStar Press | Books2Read
Amazon
Writing is just one of the many ways Chloe gets her storytelling fix. In her other life, she sings and acts to fulfil the urge, and is never far from a stage.
When not writing, Chloe cooks with too much garlic, sharpens her eyeliner to a deadly point, and tries to accept that she’s turning into one of those people who only wears one color. (Pink.)
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Tumblr
One lucky winner will receive a $50.00 NineStar Press Gift Code!
