Trevor was farther away from home and his loving family than he’d ever expected to be. He’d only left the small town of Winston, Oregon, where he was born, twice in the past: once for a high school field trip to Portland and the other to visit relatives in Eugene. Before his high school graduation he’d applied to a dozen colleges, but his GPA and SAT scores were very low. Time after time he received letters with discourag...

My sixteenth year was the most miserable of my life. In fact, I could say it was the only miserable year. I had just begun to realize that I was different than the other boys my age that I knew. There was a new boy in my class named Calvin, and I had a crush on him. Calvin was a country boy from Oklahoma who was a year older, having been held back a year. His family had had a farm that had failed, and his father had moved...

Casey and Emma had been married for thirty years. He was twenty-eight and she was twenty-five when they tied the knot, and it had lasted for all these years, through ups and downs, thick and thin. They had a daughter who, from age seven on, had been a handful. They’d never been able to control her. At the age of eighteen she had run away from home with a thirty-four-year-old man. That hadn’t lasted long, but she didn’t re...

Fearing the draft, Maxwell Braxton fled Colorado and migrated to Canada during the Vietnam conflict. He stayed there for five years until the war ended, and then moved back to the United States and settled in Seattle, where he married and raised a family. Alan Braxton was his second born. When he was sixteen he became aware that he was gay. He found no problem with this. Although unplanned, being gay was simply a part of...

It was the middle of August and the summer heat hadn’t yet arrived. It was beautifully warm, and indeed, very warm if you were working, but the mind-numbing stifling heat that usually arrived toward the end of summer hadn’t yet made an appearance. Logan Ellison was a relatively young entrepreneur who believed in sustaining the past as he pushed ahead to the future. He’d bought this 1930 era house built in the style of Le...

  It was my brother's idea to head to the beach. Something I wouldn't have agreed to normally. I hated the beach. Too hot, too sandy, and too damn boring. I would be happier holed up in my room, fucking around on my computer, but he'd insisted, saying I needed to get out of the house. Apparently, my period of moping around after being dumped by my girlfriend, Amy, was over. "Andrew, do I have to do this?" I asked. "I'd ra...

My sister, who is a year older than me, always had good taste in boyfriends. I liked every one of them, but a few of them stand out. When I was sixteen she had one named Richard who was nineteen. Mom normally wouldn’t have approved because of the age difference, but she said Richard was a nice boy from a good family, which meant they had more money than us. Richard wasn’t nearly as nice as she thought, but he was gorgeous...

Many people said Abbott was a bad seed. Since he was a very small kid he’d gotten into trouble. He seemed to take pleasure in doing things he knew were wrong. His parents had given up on him, but that was probably a big part of the problem.They shouldn’t have been parents in the first place. They were ill-prepared to raise a child, and especially one who may have had some issues. Abbott himself, more than likely, didn’t k...

The house I was born in had belonged to my great-grandfather, then my grandfather and then my father. It had been a stately wood-frame house, but by the time I came along it had deteriorated and needed constant repairs. The neighborhood it stood in had deteriorated even more.What had once been a nice middle-class neighborhood with single-family homes and small apartment buildings, which had been built later, was now a run...

The last light of day was fading from the sky as the fire engine backed through the open door into the fire station, its spinning red and yellow lights ricocheting off the surrounding buildings. As blocked traffic began to move slowly down the street, the firefighters jumped down from the truck and removed their protective gear.It had been a long and difficult fire to fight in a used-furniture store, dry wood blazing and...

 When I tell people I’m a sailor they immediately think I’m in the navy. I’m not. The same thing if I call myself a seaman. I’m one of those thousands of guys who work on cargo ships. I’ve worked on freighters and more recently on a container ship.I’ve spent almost half my life now at sea, traveling all over the world - which means I’ve had my balls drained in almost every country that has a shoreline. Rubbers full of my...

In this instance, Buck couldn’t ask himself how he had gotten in this situation. He knew. When he came to this country he knew he was stepping into risky business. Any get-rich-quick scheme had its risks, but getting into the drug trade was almost begging for trouble. And when you were a foreigner becoming part of an established illegal enterprise, well, what could you expect?But he was in his late thirties and had nothin...

When I had graduated from high-school and was preparing to go to college my mother said it would be great if I roomed with the son of one of her friends. The university we both had chosen allowed for students to request roommates they knew.My mother and Jason’s mother had met several years ago at the hairdressers and had become good friends. I therefore knew Jason but we had never developed a friendship, because we had no...

Gaining a Son-In-LawWhen the phone rang it surprised Guy. It hadn’t rung in days, maybe weeks.He answered and a familiar voice said, “Dad, hi, how are you?”Guy was delighted. “Trish, my God, it’s great to hear from you. How are you?”She said, “I asked you first, but I’m fine.”“Me too. What’s new? To what do I owe this call?”“Dad, can’t I just call to see how you’re doing?”“Yeah, but what, once a year?”“Oh, come on, it has...

Now that you've met Chloe in Part One:Today I want to remind myself of how much I owe her for luring me into the circumstances wherein I met a beautiful man, a man who would change not only my life, but my basic conception of myself. I found him in the most unexpected of places. A place where Chloe brought me.SUMMER 2011. THE SAN FERNANDO VALLEY.I had just gotten home from work, put on my makeup and changed into some old,...