Coming Home, page 1
part #1 of Finding Shore Series
Coming Home
Finding Shore: Book 1
J.P. Oliver
Peter Styles
Contents
Get your FREE Books!
Important information…
Prologue
1. Wes
2. Wes
3. Sam
4. Sam
5. Wes
6. Wes
7. Sam
8. Sam
9. Wes
10. Wes
11. Sam
12. Sam
13. Wes
14. Wes
15. Sam
End of Book 1 – Please Read This
Coming Home
Get your FREE Books!
Get Your FREE J.P. Oliver Book
Get your free prequel to the Finding Shore Series sent straight to your email inbox. Just click here.
Get your Free Peter Styles Starter Library
The bundle includes over 8 M/M romance books, at no cost to you.
>> Just Click Here <<
Important information…
This book, “Coming Home” is the first book in the Finding Shore Series. However, this book and every other book in the series can be read as a stand-alone. Thus, it is not required to read the first book to understand the second (as so on). Each book can be read by itself.
Prologue
Wes
Falling in love with his best friend’s brother had never been part of Wesley Adams’ plan.
Having the crush on his best friend’s brother—well, he was used to that. He’d had a crush on Sam Carlisle for nearly a decade. It wasn’t all that surprising that when the handsome, aloof Navy SEAL came home for leave, he spent their alone time hopelessly thinking about how nice their faces would be pushed together.
But here they were, the night before Sam shipped off again, and Wes could feel his heart hammer beneath his chest in a way that it never had before.
In a way that demanded attention. Demanded a response.
The sky above them twinkled from the stars brightly shining. The Kansas sky had never looked half as good as it did that night. Wes thought every little ache inside his chest was etched into the atmosphere; every glimmering star was a reminder that things were going to dim so thoroughly, so soon.
Sam Carlisle was leaving again and Wes couldn’t even muster the goddamn courage to kiss him.
Wes swallowed around the lump in his throat and asked, “When do you leave?”
Sam looked down from the patch of sky he, too, had been staring at. He watched Wes for just a moment before answering. “The morning.”
The air crackled around them. For the first time, Wes told Sam exactly what he felt.
“Don’t go.”
“I have to.”
“No, you don’t. Don’t go, don’t leave.”
“I have to,” Sam argued. “I have to leave because it’s the right thing to do.”
“Fuck the right thing to do. Do what you want.”
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair because Wes barely knew Sam, but he wanted to. He knew him well enough that the possibility that Sam’s presence offered him felt full of hope for something more. He wanted to find out what it’d feel like to make Sam laugh in that loud, happy way or what their palms would feel like touching or what he’d look like in the mornings.
He wanted the life that Sam’s presence teased him with.
“I want—” Wes hoped hard that he would say you. “I want to do the right thing. I want to be there for the people I’ve said I would be.”
“Sam, listen. You’re brave and you care so much—that’s probably your worst quality and the idea that anyone’s worst quality is to care is stupid and dumb and true, for you. And, look, I know you barely know me and, hell, I barely know you. But I’ve been thinking about you for ten years and I—I don’t care that it’s dumb. I don’t care if it’s too soon or too much. Don’t think that you’re not worth it. You’re worth everything.”
Sam looked a thousand feet tall and like two inches all at once. Wes watched the way he swallowed hard and asked, “Why?”
“Why?” Wes laughed; it was a little too hard and cruel. “Because I fucking care about you, you idiot.”
The world, all at once, threatened to collapse.
It wasn’t a declaration of love; but it was something so full of maybes and potentials and truth that Wes felt dizzy.
Sam looked at him.
He looked and he looked and Wes thought maybe he was seeing something that no one else had. He thought maybe when he looked back at Sam, Wes was seeing something else that no one else saw, too. When Sam’s face cracked from the hard stillness he’d been wearing, Wes thought they saw each other in such a full way, it had to have been the only thing that mattered.
Sam surged forward, hands gripping Wesley’s t-shirt in tight fists and yanked him in towards him. Wes let out a small grunt of surprise that Sam cut off by slamming their mouths together.
It was a little too rough and a little too awkward, Wes's lips parted in surprise instead of pleasure as Sam desperately clung to him.
Then, after one immeasurable moment, Wes began to kiss him back.
He moved his lips in tandem with Sam’s, matching the speed and intensity with ease. Their teeth clashed and the kiss was bruising.
It was perfect; it was right.
One of Sam’s hands rose to Wes’ hair, tugging on the long strands. Wes gasped at the sensation and Sam quickly took advantage of the new position, deepening the kiss.
Wes pulled back, laughing. His chest ached in the best way.
“I usually breathe,” he said, the small space between their bodies barely enough to let the words sit. He couldn’t keep his gaze still, flickering back and forth between the long lines of Sam's neck, his swollen lips, and the dark look in his eyes. Every bit of Sam was as appealing as the next and Wes felt nearly dizzy with the desire to experience it all at once.
Sam’s face softened, just a little, and his eyes became framed in deep, smile-induced wrinkles. Wes thought maybe this mattered just as much as talking—maybe even more.
Wes ran his thumb up and down Sam’s arm, soft and slow. It sent shivers down his spine and Sam wanted to curl into the touch.
The next kiss built more slowly. It was soft, tentative kisses that started with Wes closing in on Sam’s mouth before pulling away just as slowly. Sam followed the movement in the same pace. Wes fought to clear his head despite the lips pressed against his.
When they did finally separate, Sam rested his head against Wes’s forehead.
“Don’t go,” Wes repeated.
Sam closed his eyes.
“I have to.”
They pulled away a little, staring at each other. Wes laughed a little too low for it to be happy. “Told you that we didn’t have the same values.”
Sam held himself a little straighter. “I have a duty to my country,” Sam explained. His voice quivered.
“Your family, too.”
The implication that Wes could be his family, that Sam could have a duty to him, too, if he wanted, sat between them.
“I’ll be back,” Sam said.
Wes looked away.
“Will you?”
Sam nodded. “I promise.”
He closed his eyes. Then he nodded, once, sharply. “I’ll be here then.”
Between them, potential sat like a planted seed.
Sam seemed to see it, too. His smile curled onto his face, lighting up like the sunlight the plant would need. “Waiting for me?” Sam cocked his head. His gaze was sharp, questioning.
“Waiting,” he confirmed.
Wes held his breath, reaching out for Sam’s hand. He closed his fingers around Sam’s and the weight felt just as right as he’d hoped it would.
Sam would leave, as Wes knew he was going to have to, and Sam would do his duty for his country. But Wes wouldn’t forget.
Because Sam would do what he needed to but then he’d come back. He’d find out if all this potential was going to turn into his happily ever after.
He supposed, after having a crush on Sam for years, it wouldn’t be that hard to wait a little bit longer.
He could do that. He’d wait until it was time for Sam to come home.
1
Wes
In a lot of ways, Wesley Adams was drowning.
One day, he’d been completely on land, the air warm and dry inside his lungs and against his face. Then, without any notice, he slipped; feet sliding against the breaking sand, with gravel giving way to his weight until he broke through, unnoticed, right into the ocean. He plunged down and swallowed mouthful after mouthful of salty water until his lungs were so gorged that they were ready to explode.
But it felt like right before the end, right before he would finally have been at peace, someone had pressed pause. He felt suspended in that moment of near blacked out agony, full of water and regret. And no one knew. He couldn’t move or breathe or die; he could only lay there, freezing and weighed down.
Each morning, when he blinked awake, he’d feel as if water was dripping away, too.
He’d never really been fond of the water but Wesley knew without a shadow of a doubt that he’d rather drown for real than feel like this.
Unfortunately, no one had bothered to ask or give him the choice. It was decided for him long before he woke up and so every morning he felt a little bit like drowning.
Wesley climbed out of bed on shaky sea legs and stretched. His shirt had a hole the size of a thumb
Wesley padded into his kitchen, a short room away from where he’d been sleeping. His apartment was small, partially because he knew that it wasn’t practical for a single man to need a huge amount of space, but also because he’d picked it right after moving to Poplar, Kansas and he couldn’t really be bothered to move. The coffee pot was already brewing what he knew would be an incredibly strong dark roast and the smell of it alone perked him up.
He sat at the table, slumped over and trying to fend off the urge to call off work and crawl back into bed.
Just as he was finishing up a really convincing argument— the basis of which was that the bed was fucking comfortable and Wesley could be back in it in under a minute— the coffee pot gurgled to a stop, announcing the finished product with more flourish than he thought was strictly necessary.
“Fine,” he grumbled, pushing himself out of his aching position, “I’ll drink you.”
His voice was rough, gravelly from sleep and smoking in his teen years. He poured as much coffee as he could into the biggest mug he could find. Some sloshed out of the sides, coating his hands, and he winced a little at the heat.
Halfway through the mug, Wesley started feeling a bit more human. The waterlogged feeling in his chest receded just a little, just enough that he could feel air in there, too, and he stopped imagining his own body being sucked underneath the waves.
So Wes felt like he was drowning a lot of the time. He also felt like he was asleep before his second cup of coffee in the mornings and like a jerk every time he forgot a birthday and like a lovesick puppy every time he thought about Sam.
Well, Wes felt like a lot of things. And just like all the others, he’d get used to the feeling of drowning. He was good at getting used to things.
Wes had never thought he’d be the kind of guy to fall in love. The way he grew up, the things he saw and did— well, they didn’t really leave him as a hopeless romantic. And even after he saw Sam that first time, even though his heart had surged and his world had shifted just a little bit on its axis, he didn’t think he’d ever really love him.
And he didn’t, not for a long time. He pushed the crush on the stranger as far away as he could, even as they spent years on the peripheral of each other’s lives, and even as Wes learned more and more about him through the other people in his life.
When Sam came back to Poplar on leave last year, things had changed for Wesley. He really thought they wouldn’t— really thought he’d be just as hopelessly dreamy about the guy as he’d always been but nothing would happen between them.
Wes’s mouth burned a little from the memory of Sam’s lips against his. He shook his head against the onslaught of desire curling inside of him and the anger that quickly rose to squash that.
They’d shared a perfect kiss, a declaration of potential and hope, and Wes thought maybe— just maybe— he could be the kind of guy to fall in love after all.
Then Sam had left. He’d left and he’d never called or written or come back.
He downed the second cup of coffee twice as fast as the first. He drank his third cup of coffee sporadically throughout his morning, moving throughout the apartment as he showered and shaved. By eight-thirty, when it was time to leave for work, he’d cleaned the coffee pot and his mug, eaten three pieces of wheat toast, and thought about Sam Carlisle ten more times.
Whatever. Wesley threw on his jacket over his ill-fitting suit and dug around the coffee table until he found his keys and cell phone. He’d go to work, breathe around the water, laugh at his co-workers’ jokes, and not let his mind linger a second longer on a crush who hasn’t spoken to him in over a year. Possibility burned him and he wasn’t going to allow one more maybe to play in his head.
Sometimes, it was better to go overboard than keep taking on water.
Wes liked his job. He enjoyed the quasi-monotony of being an accountant. A lot of people thought it was boring and Wes knew they were mostly right— he was an accountant for a bank, for God’s sake and he didn’t have grand illusions about how fun work was. But he didn’t think it was half bad. Work was always a little different— numbers always were— but maintained the same general idea so he was never stumped or found things difficult. He was able to glide through his tasks quickly and efficiently, impressing his bosses and giving him plenty of time to talk to his co-workers.
And his co-workers, really, were why Wes liked his job. He kind of adored them. There were the tellers, Charlie and Josie, who both could drink him under the table any night of the week; there was Ashley, their branch manager, who had the hardest glare he’d ever seen but also carried around a goddamn locket with a picture of her baby in it. And, of course, there was Tommy, Wes’s best friend.
Wes never thought he’d become best friends with Tommy Carlisle. Tom was a good guy, smart and kind and just this shy of being a huge dork, which made their friendship seem as effortless as it was awesome. But Wes couldn’t pretend like he’d noticed Tom first because he was a cool guy— no, it definitely had more to do with the massive fucking crush Wes had on Tom’s older brother the first time he ever saw him.
Wes couldn’t forget the first time he’d seen Sam Carlisle. He wished he could— he’d tried, a valiant effort spread over the past decade. Sometimes he’d tried to aid his effort along with a bit (okay, a lot) of alcohol, but even tequila couldn’t wash away the image of a young Sam climbing out of a muscle car.
God, Wes had been gone from that first day.
He moved to Poplar when he was seventeen. It had been after he’d found...well, just after. He’d spent the day before he moved looking through maps of the Midwest and when he found Poplar, something about its smallness appealed to him. The more he learned about the tiny town, the more Wes had thought that nothing could be further from where he was leaving. His hometown was grimy, gray, and big; Poplar promised sunshine, friendliness, and Wes had thought he could use those things in spades.
So he packed what belongings he had left and hot wired an old Honda he knew had been abandoned, driving and driving until the rearview mirror promised nothing but empty, flat fields and silence.
As soon as Wesley pulled the stolen car into the small town, he knew he’d found his haven. People walking their dogs, pushing kids in strollers, wearing fucking sun hats— Wes hadn’t thought a place where people laughed and held conversations from opposite sides of the street even existed, let alone that he’d be in one.
But he had found a place and made a plan. After everything, after losing so much, a place that reeked of simplicity and family seemed like everything.
It was when he was scouring the town for rentals or even a low priced motel that Wes stumbled upon him.
He’d stumbled down a small set of stairs, hand clinging to the railing. A car had squealed to a stop, tires burning into the asphalt, and the passenger door swung open too hard and fast. A guy, miles high, climbed out of the car. He wore a scowl on his face, though the expression smoothed out when a younger boy came out of the backseat. His hair was cut short, though little tufts of brown curled down to his forehead. Even from across the street, Wes could see how attractive the guy was. His face was sharp, angular; his pronounced jaw and deep set cheekbones cutting even as he tried to shoot the younger boy a smile.
