Three Wrong Turns in the Desert by Neil Plakcy
I don’t know if that was intentional but I found this novel by Neil Plakcy quite funny and light. Apparently an adventurous story, Aidan Greene, English teacher who finds himself in the middle of an anti-terroristic action in the Desert, is not exactly the hero you would expect.
Aidan is running away from a broken heart and a monogamous relationship lasted 11 years. In Tunisia waiting for a teaching job to start, he meets Liam, a former Navy SEAL who survives with odd jobs as bodyguard. As Aidan is not your typical hero man, so is Liam: he mistakes Aidan for the man he has to protect, and while he is drinking wine with him, the other one is killed in the street outside the bar.
In a way or the other, the two of them end up together, trying to accomplish a mission that apparently no one asked them to pursue. Instead of using hi-tech gadgets or secret connections, they mix up with a group of tourists in a bus up and down unlikely stops.
I liked both characters: Aidan is a former globetrotter, and probably also an easy lay, who spent the last 11 years being a kept boy for a wealthy businessman; when he had no more the age, and maybe also bored by what his life had become, Aidan ran away searching for the same adventures he had when he was still a pretty and young boy. He has no more the age, and the body, but nevertheless he tries the role. Liam on the other hand has the right training, and sometime I felt like he was trying really hard to be in the role, but I have always felt like what he really wanted was the white fenced little cottage Aidan has just left behind.
Aidan and Liam are apparently completely different, but in the end they are searching the same thing. For this reason they rightly click together from moment one, and even if they were running away from both killers and policemen, not knowing who to trust, I have always had the idea that what they would really like was to be the sweet and cute couple of American tourists they were pretending to be. Strange was, Liam has never asked to Aidan to stay with him, but it was obvious that this was not a passing adventure and that for Aidan would have been impossible to go back to his ordinary life once the adventure was over.
Aidan and Liam are not young or inexeperienced, and so sex between them was always easy and good. Even if Aidan has spent the last years being an apparently reserved and quite middle class man, his young years of freedom are still simmering, and when he meets Liam he is more than ready to awake again his passionate nature. True, sex with Liam is good and without strings attached, but I think that in the end, it’s so good since both Aidan than Liam has recognized in each other a soul mate.
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