The Distance Between Us by L. A. Witt
This was a good story for me for many different reason. The main point was, for sure, that it showed a most than comment event, when two people are still in love but due to their incapacity to talk are drifting apart till the point of breaking up.
Ethan and Rhett were probably the perfect couple of a romance novel, 10 years ago. Rhett was a bisexual man, divorced with a daughter, and he fell in love with Ethan, two years older; when they went to live together, Rhett’s daughter was eight years old, and Ethan was as much as a father for her as Rhett was. Their life was so perfect that they even decided to buy an home together, maybe doing a step longer than the leg, but they were happy, in love and thinking to have the life in front of them.
10 years later, Rhett’s daughter went to college, giving them maybe more space but also unbalancing their family steadiness. Ethan was never the man to speak aloud his feelings, preferring to show his love and interest with passion and sex rather than words. Rhett instead is the overthinking type, always playing scenarios in his mind and really needing to hear aloud that he is wrong, than his worst scenarios are not the reality. The situantion went to hell faster than expected and they are now a broken couple with only a lease to bound them together. To help them paying the lease, and in this way to reach faster the point when they will be able to go separate ways, they decide to rent a room to another gay friendly man.
Kieran is more than gay friendly, he is plenty interested in playing with both of them and without strings attached. He has no problem to switch between them and even to be simultaneously shared. And here is the second point I liked about this story: this is a menages a trois and it’s not. I think Kieran represents the “distance” between Ethan and Rhett, and, even if it sounds strange, and worrisome, he replaced what Ethan and Rhett missed when Rhett’s daughter moved out of home, the reason to be together. Now don’t get me wrong, there was nothing of sexual in the relationship between fathers and daughter, and it’s all about sex with Kieran, but in a way or the other, their daughter and Kieran represent the padlock to bound together the two men.
The real relationship is between Ethan and Rhett, Kieran is a, willing, tool. Kieran is not a permanent addition to the family, at least not in an exclusive way; he can be a good friend, but Kieran will have, sooner or later, to go out and search his own soul mate. But in the meantime he can help Ethan and Rhett to find again the right balance to start the second part of their life as a couple, no more dads and perfect family picture, but now more than 40 handsome men with still a lot of years in front of them to be happy together.
http://samhainpublishing.com/romance/the-distance-between-us
Amazon: The Distance Between Us
Amazon Kindle: The Distance Between Us
Paperback: 216 pages
Publisher: Samhain Publishing (June 7, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 160928125X
ISBN-13: 978-1609281250
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