NEW RELEASE and UPCOMING EPILOGUE
Book Title: Hilarina and the Ogre (and an extended epilogue, The Ogre Comes Home)
Author and Publisher: October Arden
Cover Artist: Dhananjaya
Release Dates: September 15, 2026 (The Ogre Comes Home: October 13)
Tense/POV: Close third, past tense, alternating POV
Genres: MM Contemporary Romance with dark elements
For Hilarina and the Ogre: Friends to lovers, found family, ace/demi spectrum romance, protector hero, first love, bullying, size difference, hurt/comfort, dark themes with a hopeful core.
For The Ogre Comes Home: Reunion romance, hurt/comfort, amnesia, recovery from trauma, meeting the parents (again), marriage proposal, domestic intimacy
Heat Rating: 2 flames
Length: 81 000 words (17 000 words for the epilogue)
It is a main story, plus an epilogue with no cliffhanger.
Goodreads
Hilarina and the Ogre | The Ogre Comes Home
Buy Links – Available in Kindle Unlimited
Hilarina and the Ogre | The Ogre Comes Home
A ballerina, an ogre, and a love that refuses to stay forgotten.
Blurb
Hilary Davis knows how to disappear.
After years of being mocked as “Hilarina Ballerina,” he’s perfected the act. He has a popular girlfriend he can’t stand, friends he doesn’t trust, and a strict rule never to dance where anyone can see. It’s a brittle kind of safety, but it’s all he has.
Then he meets Trenton Wells.
Massive, solemn, and the school’s most devoted outcast, Trenton doesn’t play by anyone’s rules. He reads through every class, speaks with unnerving calm, and sees straight through every mask Hilary wears — including the ones Hilary himself doesn’t know he’s wearing.
What starts as a simple trade (calculus tutoring for ballet lessons) becomes something neither of them can walk away from. Choosing Trenton means losing every shield Hilary built to survive. But as the town’s cruelty sharpens from slurs to violence, Trenton is willing to become any kind of monster to keep Hilary safe, and Hilary will tear his own world apart to stay at his ogre’s side.
What they don’t know yet is that some devotions outlast memory itself — and some damage can only be undone by the people brave enough to keep choosing each other.
Spanning youth and adult trauma, Hilarina and the Ogre is a dark, fiercely tender queer romance exploring the scars of first love, the fragile hope of second chances, and the unyielding weight of an absolute love.
The Epilogue
Trenton Wells remembers everything now.
The family that loves him. The years of forgetting. And the man who followed him across state lines, through seven separate lifetimes, without once giving up (even when it nearly destroyed him.)
So coming home should be the easy part, but Trenton can’t stop tallying the cost. The fifteen years of life Hilary spent chasing him. A body that still flinches at the wrong touch. And an arm that aches when it rains, a permanent reminder of the night that shattered them both.
Hilary doesn’t want his guilt, he wants his ogre — whole, present, and done apologizing for the things that were never his fault.
The Ogre Comes Home is the story about what happens after the rescue, and the fumbling, fierce, and sometimes ridiculous work of re-building a life with the only person who matters.
Alternate Hilarina Excerpt
If there was an end to the season, they were long past it, but Hilary let his father have it. He could only fight one battle at a time, and he was still nervous about Trenton. The boy was being very quiet. It was only after the cake had finished baking, and a slice as big as his head was cut for him, that Trenton finally spoke. “I can’t—”
“It’s your birthday,” Annette said, still severe, or at least trying to be. “You can’t diet on your birthday.”
And that slid into place something that should have been obvious to Hilary the entire time. “You’re on a diet?”
But of course, Trenton was. Two meals a day with no snacking, only ever drinking water and tea, avoiding all sugar like the plague, and eating too many green things. It was either a diet or a religious devotion to asceticism.
Trenton wavered as he picked up the fork, his eyes on the cake. Hilary had thought the boy was just one of those people who didn’t like dessert. There were aliens like that, mouths freakishly devoid of a sweet tooth. But Trenton wasn’t one of them. And then Hilary really was angry. More than he had been about Trenton hiding the birthday thing.
He pushed at the back of the boy’s head. “You’re not fat, asshole.”
Trenton peeled his eyes from the cake. “I have a BMI of twenty-seven. Of course I am.”
Hilary didn’t know what the number meant. He’d never looked up his own. But the way Trenton said it made it clear he thought it was bad.
“You’re a brown belt in Aikido. You do ballet. You can run across the parking lot in half the time I can. You’re fit. You don’t need to starve yourself.”
“I’m not—”
“Are you doing it for me?”
Guilt sparked, even as Trenton denied it. “No.”
“You are. You eat so little. There’s no way you can eat this little and be healthy. I’m surprised you aren’t hibernating.”
Trenton didn’t want to be talking about it. He’d always seemed immune to humiliation, but the boy was feeling it now, the embarrassment making his ears red again. “I have plenty of fat stores. It won’t kill me to miss a couple of meals.”
“It’ll kill me.” And Hilary didn’t care if that was dramatic. He was his mother’s son. He shoved away his own plate. “From now on, I’m only going to eat as much as you do.”
It wasn’t a threat Trenton expected. “You can’t. You’re still growing.”
“So are you.”
“My growth spurt hit at twelve. I’m not—”
“And your brain?” Hilary had read somewhere that the neocortex wasn’t fully developed until the late twenties. It was why teenagers did so much stupid shit. “Are you going to sacrifice that too?”
Tears sparked in Trenton’s eyes. Not enough to fall, just enough to glisten there under the light, frustration burning into his humiliation. “I was fatter before. I don’t want to be like that again.”
Hilary grabbed the boy’s hands and realized he was kneeling in front of him. “Then we’ll eat your healthy shit. Your whole grains and the legumes and whatever else you want, but we’ll have three meals, and you’ll eat until you’re full. Say you will.”
Trenton wouldn’t look at him, staring into his lap as if he found the weave of his pants fascinating. Hilary put a hand under the boy’s chin and lifted it. “If you gain weight on a healthy diet, then you gain weight. Maybe that’s just the way your body wants to be. I like your size and how safe it makes me feel. Do you hate that?”
Trenton’s mouth was a thin line, pressing his lips together as if he meant to mash them into one. “I don’t hate it.”
Hilary kissed Trenton’s hand, then the side of his face, the relief of it very different from the usual kind. He would fight for this boy. Even a coward like him could fight. He reached for the cake and cut out a smaller piece, though still of a decent size, and sat down in Trenton’s lap. He put a bite into his own mouth and held out the next one. “We’ll share it.”
October Arden writes emotionally raw queer stories that live somewhere between literary fiction and romance. Their work explores fluid identities, found families, co-dependent devotion, and complicated love—often through the lens of characters who are chronically ill, neurodivergent, or quietly self-destructive. These are stories for anyone who’s ever felt unwanted or unseen, where even the most damaged hearts can find a home.
October loves hearing from readers, so feel free to reach out, ask questions, or suggest what you’d like to see next. You can also join the newsletter to stay in touch—and as a thank you, you’ll receive a free copy of Starting with Cake, a quietly unhinged neurodivergent love story full of snack cakes, janitor uniforms, and the kind of care that sneaks up on you. Find out about new books and other extras at octoberarden.com
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