Title: How to Share a Cat and Other Life Lessons
Author: Evelyn Fenn
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 01/09/2024
Heat Level: 1 – No Sex
Pairing: No Romance
Length: 90200
Genre: Contemporary, young adult, lesbian, asexual, aromantic, aroace, over 40s, crafts, knitting, musicians, misunderstandings, coming out
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Description
Seventeen-year-old Nessa Clarkson is full of questions and confusion. How does she fit into the new household Dad is forging with his partner, Cindy, and Cindy’s son? What will being a lesbian mean in practice? And why is their neighbour so reluctant to talk about her past?
Moira Cavendish had been famous for a while, in the 1980s. Then she fled the bright lights of London, leaving only a mystery behind her.
Moira and Nessa shouldn’t have anything in common. But when their paths cross, and they bond over their shared love of knitting and the ginger tomcat that can’t decide whose home is best, they find themselves on intertwining journeys of discovery.
How to Share a Cat and Other Life Lessons
Evelyn Fenn © 2024
All Rights Reserved
Most of the time, Moira dealt with bad days by keeping so busy she didn’t have time for the bad to crowd in. Sometimes, when bad visited on a non-shop day, the only thing she could do to keep negative emotions at bay was attack her garden.
Moira assaulted the earth ferociously, digging around a particularly well-entrenched dandelion.
Moira had new neighbours: a man, a woman, and a young boy. She’d seen their car and the removal van pull up two days before.
Moira hadn’t spoken to them yet, but she’d heard them. They’d thrown the windows open, presumably to air the place out, and they’d shouted good-naturedly at each other as they arranged things, made one another cups of tea, and asked one another how they were getting on.
One of the first things the man had done was erect a swing set for the boy, who was currently squealing with glee as he pumped his legs hard enough to raise him parallel to the ground. At that height, the boy could peer over the fence and into Moira’s vegetable patch. Moira guessed he was about seven or eight, but she had limited experience of children, so she was probably wrong.
His eyes bored into her every time the swing reached the top of its arc, and her skin prickled. She hated the feeling of being watched.
She was being unreasonable. This was no worse than the family seeing into her garden from the upstairs rooms in the same way she could see into theirs.
Music drifted out of the neighbours’ open windows and back door. Moira could hear unintelligible segues from a DJ, which meant they were listening to the radio. Thanks to the patchy reception, there was a limited choice of stations, which was why Moira had recently developed a fondness for streaming services.
Interspersed with the DJ’s links, she heard occasional jingles and the recognisable sounds of Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, and David Bowie: a radio station playing golden oldies. She could even pinpoint the year, which meant it was only a matter of time until…
Yep.
Here it came.
The distinctive opening chords of the Diptych’s most enduring hit, “Will You (Ask Me Out)?”
Moira had mixed feelings about the song itself and hated the memories it carried with it. She dug aggressively, trying to get lost in the mindless motions as she scooped more soil away from the dandelion’s tap root. To her horror, she found herself singing along.
Will you ask me out, a fancy restaurant, a slap-up meal?
Will you be my mentor, show me what life’s meant to be?
Will you make me feel how I’m meant to feel?
Will you awaken the love that waits inside of me?
Dammit. The new neighbours were unsettling!
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I lived in five different cities, spanning two continents, before leaving crowds and commuting behind and settling somewhere that official statistics describe as “Very Remote Rural”.
I have made up stories for as long as I can remember, and I have been writing them down for almost as long. I cut my creative writing teeth on fan fiction in the days of paper fanzines and, later, online. I had fun but eventually grew tired of playing in other people’s sandpits. Turns out, it’s more fun to create sandpits of my own.
I have worked in the public, private, and voluntary sectors, with roles ranging from number crunching and lecturing to mucking out cowsheds and toilet cleaning. I currently hold down a day job while daydreaming of writing full time.
Evelyn Fenn is a pseudonym. You can find Evelyn on Twitter
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