Beer Fest: Epic friends-to-lovers romance (European City Breaks), page 1
Lilo Moore
Beer Fest
First published by LM Books 2023
Copyright © 2023 by Lilo Moore
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Lilo Moore asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
First edition
ISBN: 978-3-910607-02-6
Cover art by Cover Ever After
This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy
Find out more at reedsy.com
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Also by Lilo Moore
Chapter One
If there’s one thing you learn when you spend a lot of time alone, it’s that there is nothing more human than a hug.
The bad ones are those uncertain clasps, where you jerk a few times on the way in, petrified that the other person didn’t actually mean for you to hug them – or worse, that they’re going to try to kiss your cheek. Then you don’t know if you’re supposed to close your arms around them completely, or keep your hands clear in a kind of plausible deniability, leaving them to wonder if they were the one wanting the hug more.
The good ones… they might be tight and apologetic or warm and soft, but they’re always a deep breath out, a little tear, a meeting of souls and bodies and… smells – I mean that in a good way.
This was one of those hugs. His arms were draped around me – everywhere, somehow. There was a slight tremor in him; he squeezed just a little too tight, but that was okay, because it made me feel as though I could hold on as hard as I wanted, tuck my head into his shoulder and just breathe. He’d grown sturdier since I’d last seen him, but he was still so Max, that hugging him was like clutching a little piece of myself.
I’d missed him more than I thought.
‘Are you crying?’
‘I’m not falling for that,’ I mumbled into his hair. I was a smidgen taller than Max – not unusual for a woman who was an inch shy of six feet. What was unusual, was that I still felt tucked up into him. He was gathering my lonely soul and it manifested itself in an enormous hug that should have been physically impossible. ‘You’re just trying to make me let go.’
I felt his laugh against my chest – inside my chest. At least the wonders of technology meant that laugh was as familiar to me as it had been after a year of sharing a dorm during our study abroad semesters at the University of Freiburg fifteen years before.
Fifteen years. It wasn’t quite half my life, but it felt like all the most important bits had featured Max.
‘Does it feel like I want you to let go?’
‘Nope,’ I said, breathing in deeply, one more time. I pulled back only far enough to peer at him.
He smiled – a signature Max grin that made me want to blubber all over him. With his crooked tooth, he always looked as though he was telling a joke. He usually was.
‘You know what I think about masculine affection,’ he said.
‘I’m not a man.’
‘I’m still showing affection.’
My face hurt, I was smiling so hard. ‘Cutting off my circulation, too.’
One eyebrow lifted – an eyebrow the same shade as his hair, making it also improbably white. ‘Four years, Fi. Four years! It’s definitely too soon to let go of you.’
‘Fine, if I’m going to lose a limb, I’m taking you with me.’ I tightened my arms around his shoulders. ‘I hate adulting.’
‘No, you don’t. If you hated adulting, you wouldn’t have your fantastic career and you’d live here in Munich and spend your days being bohemian with me.’
It was way too early in our reunion to be talking about my ‘fantastic career’ and the work dilemma that still had me by the guts. I’d travelled halfway around the world and felt like I’d gone back in time. Work could take a back seat for once.
‘Bohemian my arse,’ I scoffed. ‘I hate to break it to you, but getting high occasionally does not make you a free spirit. Which of us recently started a business?’
His answering smile was a small, self-deprecating number. He reached behind his head to grasp my hands, pausing briefly to squeeze them, then unravelled my arms from around his neck. ‘A struggling business is very bohemian. I’m eking out a living until I can die of consumption.’
‘Did you just make an opera joke? Who even are you?’
‘I had a boyfriend who made me sit through La Bohème,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘But you dragged me to the opera once in Riga.’
‘That was ballet and it was much less boring. Which boyfriend was that? Xaver? Kai?’
‘You know all the names of my former boyfriends and girlfriends,’ he quipped, smacking a kiss to my cheek and looking around for my suitcase. ‘It was Kai.’
Since he knew about the romance vacuum in my life recently – well, forever, really – it was a relief to think I still knew just as much about him. We usually saw each other twice a year, took off on a crazy trip when I visited, ticking off ten cities in eight days – stuff like that. But a global health crisis and my stupid career had made the absence longer this time so video call oversharing had been a necessity.
‘I missed you too much, Fi!’ He punctuated this sentence with another rough hug, giving a worked-up sigh. My face landed in his neck and the warmth, the smell of him made me woozy with tiredness and relief.
‘Have you forgotten that the planes fly in both directions?’ I said, my words muffled in his collar. ‘And Australia isn’t like Narnia, where the portal only opens up a few times before you get too old – not that that would apply to you. If either of us never grew up, one hundred percent it’s you.’
‘You don’t want me to grow up,’ he muttered, but his scowl was wobbly and he was somehow grinning at the same time. Only Max. ‘If there was a magic portal, you can believe I would have come through it. Unfortunately there are only expensive airfares and we brew beer and not money.’
‘I can’t wait to see the place. You actually run a microbrewery. After all the times we joked you should do it.’
‘Perhaps it was fate, after all. But if I became a brewer because my surname is Dutch for ‘brewer’, what are you supposed to be, Miss Butkus?’ He grabbed the handle of my suitcase and wisely darted away after that one. He knew the rule: the only one who was allowed to make ‘butt-kiss’ jokes was me. ‘But I don’t know,’ he threw over his shoulder, ‘now you’ve got your big promotion at BJ Williams, maybe your name is apt, too!’
My scowl was a lot more acidic than his had been. ‘The global team was kissing my butt to get me on board!’
‘Lucky them. Are you coming?’
After our study abroad year, I’d returned to my marketing degree at the University of Sydney and got a boring, well-paid job at BJ Williams – affectionately known between Max and me as Willi’s Blow-Job or simply ‘the Beerhemoth’, since it was one of the largest drinks conglomerates in the world.
Max had loved his taste of freedom too much and had never gone back to Holland after his year abroad. He’d lived in Munich for over ten years, now. Eek, how were we old enough for this fifteen-year reunion?
It was the middle of September and it turned out global marketing VPs were required to schmooze and get drunk at Oktoberfest once a year. I would take that, as it meant an extra trip to see Max. The rest of our friends from Freiburg had decided to come, too, since we’d always meant to hit Oktoberfest together, but the university term dates back then hadn’t allowed it.
We had planned an unofficial University of Freiburg 2007-8 international student reunion and I had planned three weeks of reconnecting with my best friend and trying to gain some perspective to make a decision about
Although I’d been to Munich airport at least five times, finding my way out to the suburban train station always threw me. But when I saw the wide, red carriages and the rows of carpeted seats, memories of all my previous trips flew back.
Max parked us at the end of a carriage and squinted at my suitcase. His albinism meant his eyesight wasn’t entirely correctable, but he did okay with his glasses. I guessed he wasn’t studying my luggage to admire it, though.
‘Is this Louis Vuitton or something?’ he asked.
I bit back a laugh. Max, in brown corduroy trousers that were furry like a bear in some places and worn to dirt tracks in others, saying the words ‘Louis Vuitton’ didn’t quite compute. I hadn’t seen him in four years, but I recognised his old Adidas sneakers. They could be called ‘vintage’ by now.
‘It’s not Louis Vuitton,’ I said dismissively.
‘It’s a bit different from your turtle backpack.’
‘Yeah, because it’s not going to wrestle me to the floor,’ I said drily.
‘It’s probably just as heavy, though, right?’ He threw me a smile, his pale eyes twinkling, and it completely disarmed me. I grasped his arm and snuggled in, resting my head on his shoulder. But he sat up suddenly after only a moment, giving me a pat of apology, and rummaged inside his ancient backpack.
‘How could I forget?’ He produced two cans of beer and pressed one into my hand. ‘A tinny for the road,’ he said in a passable Australian accent. Max was amazing at languages. It had driven me crazy that year in Freiburg when his German improved so quickly, while I’d been slaving at the stupid language for years in Australia and still sounded like a bad actor in a World War II movie.
He popped the can and tapped the bottom against mine, sprawling back in the seat. I nursed my unopened beer with an odd tingle of nostalgia that was disturbingly bittersweet.
Shaking off the feeling, I pulled on the ring with a little too much force and my beer spurted foamy mess, making me flinch. Shooting out his hand, Max cupped the can and lifted it to his mouth – my hand and all. I stared, frozen in place, as he licked up the spilled beer, his tongue swiping hot along my knuckles.
He had a crease in his bottom lip, right in the middle. I hadn’t forgotten. I knew every nuance of Max’s face. But that day my eyes fixed on that crease and I had a lot of questions about his mouth.
Whoa, that hadn’t happened before.
‘I see your hygiene hasn’t improved in four years,’ I ground out, ignoring the gravelly quality of my voice. ‘Did you shake it on purpose?’ So you could lick me? Crap, I hadn’t meant that. I knew – had always known – that Max was bisexual, but I had never been included in that spectrum.
Back in Freiburg, he’d had one of those messy, seminal relationships with his boss from the restaurant where he’d been a dish-pig. Although I’d seen him hook up with a girl or two over the years, he’d always seemed a little less fussed.
Both of us were late bloomers in the romance department – or never bloomers, in my case. Watching my parents chip away at each other’s self-respect for over a decade – even after they’d got divorced – had kind of killed my appetite for anything that started with an ‘r’.
Max gripped my wrist to hold it still and licked once more along the base of my thumb. I ignored the enormous whump in my stomach. It was just a symptom of this weird funk I’d been in ever since I’d realised my dream promotion would require swallowing my pride and holding my tongue and that sounded quite nauseating, actually. I still didn’t know what to do.
‘Me? Do it on purpose?’ he asked with studied innocence. With a jaunty shake of his head, he produced a fresh pack of tissues and a little bottle of sanitiser. He plucked the can out of my hand and wiped it down while I cleaned up, trying not to think about his mouth on my skin. ‘The only time I shook it on purpose was—’
‘Dubrovnik,’ I said, forcing a frown, while I was laughing inside.
‘It was for your own good! You picked up that guy after you soaked your shirt.’
‘With hindsight, anyone you pick up with a shirt soaked in beer isn’t going to blow your mind in bed.’ I said drily.
I scrunched up my nose at him, but settled back in the chair, my shoulder against his. It kind of sounded like I hooked up a lot, but it wasn’t like that. When a casual hook-up is all that’s going, sometimes you take it. That, and Max was the best wingman you can imagine. It’s easier to pick someone up when you’re in another country and your best friend has your back.
I lifted the beer to my lips and took a long sip. In combination with the light pressure of Max’s knee against mine, in the harsh light of the Munich S-Bahn, with the gentle rock of the carriage, it tasted like every trip we’d ever taken together, like the years falling away.
‘I cannot believe I live in a country that does not understand the appeal of public drinking,’ I said with an emphatic sigh, lifting the can to my lips for another glug. ‘It’s good to be back.’
The four long years without travel felt like a lifetime. At least before the world had closed down for a few years – Australia especially – I’d had my trips with Max to reset my mind, remember I was a person outside of my testosterone-fuelled workplace.
I was here, now. I would rediscover the Fiona who used to roam Europe with nothing more than a turtle backpack and her best friend. We’d enjoy an enormous beer in a tent with the rest of the world and see our friends again and it would be wonderful.
I was jetlagged as hell. That had to be the reason for the weird hug craving and the philosophical effect of two sips of crappy beer. I glanced at the can, recognizing the Fuchsbräu label – it was one of the BJ Williams brands, one of my family of commercial assets to play with. I felt Max’s gaze on me and glanced over to find him giving me a thoughtful look.
‘I thought I’d… make you feel at home,’ he said lightly.
‘No, you didn’t. You’re having a dig at me for working for a big multinational while you slave away for your handcrafted, organic, free-range hops-containing, we-could-never-have-afforded-it-back-when-we-were-cool-enough-to-drink-it beer.’
He howled with laughter and the odd panic of nostalgia dissipated into relief. He looped an arm around my neck, which, given my height, kind of felt like he was trying to give me a noogie. He pressed a kiss against my hairline and, for a fleeting second, I had to ask myself whether he’d used to kiss me like that. But it was such a smacking kiss, that the question seemed stranger than the action that had precipitated it.
Max was just that kind of guy. It wasn’t anything to do with being queer. He just loved affection and he wasn’t going to apologise for it.
I shrugged him off and knocked back more of the beer. It did taste sort of like the idea of beer, rather than the actual stuff, but I wasn’t going to tell Max that – right now, when he was shooting me amused looks. It went down extremely well and it would knock me out, given my current state of jet-lagged stupor, where my eyes felt as though they’d been scraped along the plane carpet and I’d left some of my consciousness back in Singapore when I’d got on my connecting flight.
‘I would rather have tasted your beer,’ I mumbled. ‘I can’t wait to see Snaketooth.’ In my professional opinion as a marketing VP, Snaketooth was THE BEST name for a beer in history. I wasn’t biased at all.
‘Do you really think I’d let my beer be sold in cans?’ he said with a snort.
‘I take it back. You have grown up.’
‘Are you too disappointed?’ he asked.
That was a loaded question. If Max had changed, where was my conduit to the past? I was thirty-six. And even though I hadn’t married or had kids like a lot of my friends, I was losing some shine – or life was. All I had was my career and that wasn’t making me feel great about myself right then. I closed my eyes so I wasn’t tempted to look at him again and worry about what might have changed.
‘Fi?’ His voice was unbearably gentle. His breath feathered my ear. I sighed deeply and snuggled in. I wondered if he’d been working out, because his shoulder was weirdly padded. I was annoyed about that, too. When I’d first met Max, he’d been a stringy little whelp with a shock of white hair and I’d loved that Max to bits.
‘Moppie.’ He nudged my cheek. ‘We have to get off the train.’
I sat up with a snort, with no idea how long I’d been asleep. The rude bastard laughed at me as he grasped the handle of my suitcase in one hand and held out the other to pull me up.
