Feathered Friend Short Read, Fantasy, LGBTQ, Science Fiction
JMS Books LLC
July 15, 2023
Kinde
53
Amazon
Not your average peck on the cheek ...
Mild mannered Derek is a perfectly ordinary bloke living a perfectly ordinary life. He works at the library, supports Stoke City football team, and cares for the twelve beautiful racing pigeons he inherited from his father in his spare time. He isn’t into kink. He definitely isn’t into feathers, in spite of the birds. So when a mysterious young man appears in his home claiming to be a pigeon, it’s all a bit much.
Avery is eccentric, perching on the furniture, refusing to eat eggs and stealing Derek’s chocolate digestive biscuits when his back is turned. He’s also attractive, kind, mischievous, and a dab hand with a feather, and Derek finds himself falling madly in love. But when he discovers the truth about Avery, it causes him to question everything he thought he knew about himself. And when those doubts take him to a very dark place, it’s up to a library book, his own innate decency, and Avery himself, to make things right again.
This sweet, angsty romance is a contemporary, tongue-in-cheek take on the old northern European Swan Maiden fairy tale.
Reviewed by Linda Tonis
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
This short story is based on the folk tale Swan Maiden, a tale I was unfamiliar with but not anymore.
Derek lost his father who was very involved in racing pigeons, another thing I was totally unfamiliar with till now. Derek works at the library and was never interested in the racing pigeons but since his father’s death he was determined to follow in his footsteps knowing how much the pigeons were a part of his life. In time Derek found himself getting attached to the birds and took them for racing events.
After a race Derek would get in his car and head home, the pigeons just flew home and usually beat him there. Checking that the birds weren’t hurt and making sure they were taken care of he finds himself with thirteen pigeons when there should have been twelve. This bird was not the breed his father raised but all attempts to find the real owner were unsuccessful.
Derek has one bird too many and with that bird’s arrival things become very strange. When Derek comes down for breakfast there is a handsome young man sitting in the kitchen, is he a thief, a murderer all the thoughts that run through Derek’s mind in addition to wondering how he got in. Fearing for the safety of the birds he finds the carrier that the strange bird was in is now empty his birds are find.
The young man’s name is Avery and sometimes he is there and other times the bird is. Derek realizes something is amiss and when he sees a fable book with a story, Swan Maiden, his mind goes a mile a minute. When he walks into the bedroom everything becomes clear, bird thirteen and Avery are one and the same. As Derek begins to fall in love with Avery, he fears what happened in the Swan Maiden could happen to him, the man he loves will leave. When he discovers Avery’s feathers, he did what the huntsman did in the fable hide the swan’s feathers.
Derek follows through with his plan, betraying the man he loves to keep him from leaving but he learned a valuable lesson about pigeons which I won’t reveal.
Romance, sex, betrayal and lessons learned.