Ticking the Boxes (Gold Coast Collage #2) - L.J. Hayward

Sean Sale has life worked out. It’s about ticking the boxes. Checking off the events that mean you’re alive and functioning and, well, normal. At twenty-six, Sean has a handsome fiancé, an adorable fur baby, and a job he loves. Tick, tick, tick: life accomplished. That is, until it’s all ripped away from him. Broken-hearted and homeless, he ends up at the Wild Pines townhouse complex, his last-ditch effort to find a place to live and start afresh. Meeting the hot, kind manager, Lucas, wasn’t on his checklist, but Sean’s very okay with this unexpected event.

Lucas Harrison sees life as a road with roundabouts, hairpin turns, and detours. He’s certainly taken more than a few detours in order to get where he is now, managing Wild Pines and raising his eight-year-old niece, Amy. There are things from his past Lucas would rather not have to face again, but when he finds Sean on his doorstep in desperate need of help, one of those things—a hopeless crush on Sean—crashes right back into his life. This time, though, Lucas isn’t going to let his fears stop him from having someone just for himself.

As Sean starts to build a new life, Lucas and Amy become an important part of his world, and Lucas feels the same way about Sean. However, their past experiences threaten their future happiness, making it hard for them to form a real connection. How can they each find the strength to confront their issues and be worthy of each other?

SEAN SALE WORKED OUT life rather early. It was all about ticking the boxes. The milestones everyone held up as proof of being alive and functioning and, well, normal.

Get an education. Get a job. Get a spouse. Get a couple of kids. Get a mortgage. Get a condition. Get funeral insurance. Boxes ticked, start the music, cue the wailing.

Life.

Apparently.

However, as he’d grown up, he’d thought his list would be a little bit different. Get an education. Get hot pants for partying wildly. Get cocktails with dirty names. Get a job. Get all the anonymous nightclub-toilet sex. Get a life partner, or maybe two. Get fabulously old.

Turned out Sean was much better at the first checklist. The hot pants had only ever made one appearance at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras that one time he, A, could afford to go and, B, was single enough to mingle, wink wink. The cocktails were put aside when he decided he didn’t like himself when drunk, and anonymous sex in nightclub toilets was messy and awkward and never had the bits Sean really liked, which were the foreplay and cuddling afterwards.

Somehow, it all worked out. At twenty-six he had his education (which didn’t really help in his chosen, much-loved job), a handsome and on-his-way-to-rich fiancé, an adorable two-year-old fur baby, and a mortgage that scared him whenever he looked at the balance owing. He hadn’t managed to tick much off the hot-pants list, but he could live with that. Probably.

None of which explained how, months later and freshly turned twenty-seven, he was sitting alone on the bottom step of the locked stairwell in the Surfers Paradise Crowne Plaza wearing only gold hot pants, head buzzing from too many Dirty Cowboys, reeking of sex, and hoping like hell that, A, someone found him soon and, B, he never, ever had to see anyone ever again.

SEAN STUDIED HIS REFLECTION in the mirror in the ground floor staff toilet at the hospital, making sure his eyeliner looked good. The new blacker-than-black shade made his big blues pop and his lashes look about a mile long. He fluttered them at himself, then ran his hands through his hair, making sure it was still fabulously high. A gleam from his engagement ring—platinum with an inlaid band of rose gold—made him smile. Just the memory of Brett asking him to marry him was enough to make Sean feel all fluttery, because the thing Brett Fellows did best—apart from filling cavities—was romance.

They’d been standing on the balcony of their Southport apartment on moving-in day, at sunset when the ocean was lit up in pale purple, dark blue, and soft pink, flutes of champagne ready to toast the start of their cohabitatory bliss. Brett had linked their arms together with a look of absolute earnestness on his face. Sean had laughed at him, because he was always so serious, and then it had started raining rose petals.

Literally raining rose petals. Red, white, yellow, pink, and shades Sean hadn’t known existed, falling