Peak of love wildflower.., p.1
Peak of Love (Wildflower Book 1), page 1
Peak of Love
Wildflower
Book 1
Zoe Lee
Copyright © 2024 by Zoe Lee
Published by Foolish Endeavors, LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental. This book is licensed for your personal use only. This book may not be resold or given to other people.
This work is 100% human created.
Cover Designed by Samantha Santana @ Amai Designs
Copy Editing & Proofreading by JJ Edits
Formatting by Leslie Copeland
Contents
Synopsis
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue #1
Epilogue #2
About the Author
Also by Zoe Lee
Synopsis
When Skylar moved to Wildflower, Colorado for grad school, the last thing he expected was to be suddenly single and… running over a tortoise on his new bicycle? Good thing Ezra, the local veterinarian, is also a sexy, older man. Ezra is the quiet type, and straight, but that won’t stop Skylar’s delicious crush or Ezra’s curiosity from climbing the peak of love!
Peak of Love is a standalone low-angst, small-town romantic comedy featuring a bi awakening, talkative/quiet pairing, and a tortoise named Scooter and a dog named Rocky.
Chapter One
Skylar
“Updating the dating apps with a new bio. Ugh, that sounds redundant,” I muttered, pacing the unvarnished, creaky wood floors of my very cool new place. “Twenty-eight, gay, bottom mostly, but not a sub. Mono, will date a poly guy.” I paused like I was giving a speech or doing a comedy routine, even though there was no one here to listen—not anymore, that cheating bastard. “Will date you if you can bake. Or if you like to get baked, which I can legally do now that I’m in Colorado instead of Florida.”
Stopping next to the rustic-chic fireplace I wasn’t allowed to use, I blew out a breath.
“Moved to Colorado two months ago for grad school. Found the shitstain who was supposed to be my forever on the faux fur rug I bought him as a gift, getting spit-roasted.”
I seriously considered using that as my intro. It perfectly expressed my state of mind, but also my quirky sense of humor. You couldn’t keep me down for long, even if you could make me mad enough to slander your sexual skills vaguely across social media.
But okay, maybe I wasn’t ready to swipe right yet.
If I was in Florida, I would go to the salon and paint my nails a violent red, then my squad would come over to burn all of the crap the shitstain had left behind. It was a lot of crap because I’d booted his ass out within twenty minutes of walking in on him, telling him whatever he didn’t take with him in the rideshare was mine now.
If I was in Florida, my squad would tell me I was so much better off single, they’d always hated him, and who cared about him because I had a killer career as a fashion editor. I wouldn’t have corrected them for the millionth time that I wasn’t a fashion editor, I wrote commercial white papers, which my squad didn’t think was sexy. They didn’t think coming here for a two-year masters program in comparative literature was sexy either.
Tragically, my squad was a thousand miles away and thirty degrees warmer.
I zipped over to love and comment on their latest photos, but my thumbs froze a millimeter above my screen. Before we left Florida, I’d bragged non-stop for weeks and weeks about how amazing and life-changing moving here was going to be. I’d bragged about how we could have sex in hot springs—or next to them, I still hadn’t researched the hygienics—and ski and not have to shave my chest because it wasn’t always beach season.
“Fucking fuck,” I hissed.
New plan.
“Start grad school and make tons of new friends. Have big adventures like mountain biking or hiking mountains that are fourteen thousand feet tall. It can’t be that hard, I did that class once where you ride the stationary bike but stand up on the pedals half the time.”
Feeling inspired, I kept up my monologue aloud to no one.
“Go to hot springs for a weekend, because yes I fucking can go to romantic getaway destinations alone. And if I happen to find some super rugged, hot cowboy to call my bucking bronco and ride until I fall off, that would be the feather in my cap.”
Yeah, I wasn’t going to let the shitstain ruin this for me.
I’d been talking about leaving Florida to see what else was out there in this big world since I was a ditzy, dreamy, English lit major in undergrad. A drafty, uninsulated attic on the eighth floor of a Victorian house with no elevator where I wrote ‘angsty’ poetry had been the most exotic thing a gay boy from Tallahassee like me could have ever imagined.
So I wasn’t going to squander this chance—and it was going to be even better to do it single in a place where no one knew me or had any expectations. This cute little town named Wildflower, with trendy shops, farmers markets, and oddly post-modern apartment buildings, surrounded by farmland and those oil things that looked like a hammer on a pole lazily pistoning. There were gun racks on trucks parked at coffee shops with pride flags, and the cleanest country bar to exist outside of movies had monthly drag shows. I couldn’t pass up the chance to figure out what the hell was going on.
Maybe it was all the weed?
I didn’t know enough people yet to have gotten an accurate picture. Maybe Colorado was like Amsterdam, where everyone came for the marijuana and the locals made tons of money off it, but didn’t really partake. Or maybe the state was shaped like a square because it was constantly hot boxed. I snorted at my own joke… and I wasn’t even high.
My fate decided, I went back to the dating apps and dove into updating them for real.
Chapter Two
Ezra
I cupped the tiny kitten in my hands while my son Dov used the warm, weak spray hose to rinse the pet shampoo off her. The kitten mewled, flashing a rough bubblegum pink tongue and canines like snake fangs, shivering as the suds washed off her.
“Seriously, Mom’s had a ton of boyfriends since you split,” my daughter Naomi told me in the earnest but totally condescending combination only pre-teens could do.
“Well, I’m just fine,” I tried to derail her. “Get the towel and wrap her up, sweetie.”
Sighing like I was the impossible one, she bundled up the kitten and cradled her against her chest. “Dad, I know you don’t need to be in a relationship to be happy! Mom would disown me if I believed that. We need to make ourselves happy, then we can—”
“Merge our happinesses,” Dov and I joined in, all of us reciting their mom’s favorite way to describe love. I knew what she meant, but it didn’t resonate with me. If you merged things together, didn’t you lose the individual colors or flavors or personalities?
As I finished rinsing my hands, I looked over at my kids, now sitting on the counter on top of the cabinets storing animal cleaning and grooming supplies. The kitten was on its back, boneless, draped across their knees, her white tail swishing contentedly.
“It’s just that since Xerox moved to Denver last year, you’ve been…”
Naomi looked at Dov, who shrugged and finished for her, “A hermit.”
“Hermits are cool,” I said, crossing my arms.
I didn’t want to explain how I felt like Xerox—my best friend, who had the nickname because he was the younger identical twin, a perfect copy of his brother who happened to slide out first—had dropped me after he moved. I didn’t want to affect the beautiful idea they had that their best friends now would always be their best friends. They thought they could go anywhere, be anyone, be with anyone, and those friendships wouldn’t change. I wanted it to be true, but once Xerox had moved, we stopped hanging out.
“Yeah, but hermit crabs outgrow their shells and need to find bigger ones to make their homes,” Naomi said with all her young wisdom. “So they fit right.”
“Wow,” I deadpanned, “that’s really subtle. Are you sure you’re your mom’s daughter?”
“You’re hilarious,” she deadpanned right back, only she rolled her eyes magnificently.
Taking a second to appreciate my kids, I told them, “Thank you for checking up on my emotional well-being. But things are good with me. Even if I had some wild, grown-up life, I’m not telling you two about it. Now let’s put the kitten with her siblings and head out.”
They ran off with the kitten and I started my end of day ritual for my veterinary clinic, including talking to the overnight staff person. Naomi always had to say goodbye to all the animals who were staying here, recovering from surgery or waiting to move to an animal shelter, while Dov pretended he didn’t do
Once everything was done, I drove us all to my house.
It was a small two-bedroom house on a couple acres adjoining one of the valley’s many open spaces, loud with owls at night and peaceful during the daytime. There wasn’t much extra space when the kids were here and they complained about sharing a room. But they loved the yard with the trampoline, swingset, grill, and permanent fire pit, and sometimes complained just so I’d tell them if they didn’t like it, they could camp out there.
We got pizza delivered and I let them argue over what to put on, since it was a Friday night and they didn’t have anything planned for tomorrow except waffles.
After we watched a painfully clichéd teen action movie, I packed them off to their room, knowing they’d sit up and bicker, and probably worry some more about me.
I took a beer onto the front porch and wondered if I should text Xerox, who I hadn’t heard from in over a month, even though I didn’t have anything new to tell. My life was the same as it had been for years. Except for when my precious children reminded me pointedly that there could be more to my life, I preferred it quiet. Yeah, sometimes I wanted more people to hang out with than my kids, but I was introverted and busy enough that thinking about it made me tired.
“What depressing bullshit late-night thoughts,” I mumbled, going inside.
Chapter Three
Skylar
Turned out, mountain biking on dust and gravel trails was not like that class at the gym on the stationary bike, even though I stood up and sat down just as much. My ass usually liked being split open by something hard, but this was not the good kind of getting fucked.
But I was determined to get the hang of it… and right now there was no one on this trail to laugh at me or yell at me as they rode around me because I was going too slow.
Grunting and gasping a little, I jerked to a stop to chug more water.
“Holy sweaty balls,” I yelled, “I’m so out of shape.”
The land judged me. It looked kind of like a desert in old Western movies, like a lot of orange-y dirt with bushes and grass growing in clumps, but I didn’t think it was really desert. It looked like I was in the warm-up hills to the mountains, but space was so vast out here, I could have been a day’s bike ride from reaching the actual mountains, who knew.
It made my throat dry and my lungs shrivel up, but it was fucking beautiful.
Sure, Florida had the ocean, but it had alligators and spray tans, too.
Cracking my neck, I put my water away and hopped back onto the evil bike seat. I was on a loop trail, because I was a total newbie and didn’t want to get lost and wind up a “yet another inexperienced hiker/biker was found dead of exposure today” story on the news.
I huffed and puffed until the last mile, where I got to chill out and coast downhill, wondering idly how badly I’d hurt myself if I hit a rock and got catapulted off the bike.
Just when I thought I’d done it, I swerved to avoid a fucking squirrel and hit something else. I crashed over sideways like a drunk guy thinking he’d made it to bed, only to bounce off the corner and flop uselessly like a beached whale on the floor instead.
Stunned, I lay there, one foot and leg kind of pinned under the bike. I took stock: My junk was bruised, but it already had been. One pedal had scraped my knee, but there was no blood. My palms burned, but I squirted water on them and they felt better right away.
It was only as I struggled to my feet that I saw the turtle.
I yelped, “Turtle?”
Okay, it was definitely a turtle. Mostly brown with some green, hiding in its shell except for one leg sticking out. And it looked… not right.
“Shit, fuck! I hurt a turtle!”
After looking around wildly for help, I shook my head. “You’re going to have to save it,” I declared. “There’s no ambulances for turtles. Or convenient park rangers.”
Did turtles bite? Were there park rangers out here?
I dusted myself off and considered the logistics.
Finally I moved things around in my backpack so the big pouch was empty, then carefully edged closer to the turtle, who didn’t move at all, poor little thing. I had no idea how to pick it up. If I grabbed only the shell and lifted, would that hurt, like trying to pick a person up using their hair? Or was it like picking up a tiny dog by one of those body harness things, where the weight was evenly distributed so it was fine?
Nope, I didn’t want to risk hurting the turtle more.
Bending over, I laid the backpack on the ground, lifted up the top, and then sort of… pushed the turtle from what I thought was its back end. Its other legs shot out and scrambled, but it wasn’t like it was a crab or something fast, so I got it in there okay.
I zipped up the pouch halfway, glad it had two zippers, and slipped it on over my torso so it was a messed up version of a baby carrier. The turtle moving around in there against my stomach was the weirdest thing ever, but at least it wasn’t wailing like a baby.
Not wanting to shake it too much or get thrown off the bike again, I walked my bike the rest of the way to the parking lot, which luckily only took fifteen minutes.
I unzipped the backpack more and set it on the floor in the backseat, then brilliantly searched for the nearest vet’s office. Because I let the internet overlords spy on me, it organized my results based on my GPS location and I tapped the first one so my directions app would tell me where to go. I drove about four miles an hour since the road was empty and it only took another ten minutes to pull into the parking lot of Peak Veterinary Clinic.
I parked, then went around to get the turtle, who hadn’t moved.
I decided to take it as a sign that this was a very smart turtle, not a very dead or maimed turtle. I took my backpack in my hands like it was a box with a cake in it, closed the car door with my foot, and burst into the vet’s office ass-first like I was on fire.
“Uhh,” said a very nice male-sounding voice behind me.
Whirling, I held out the backpack like an offering. Or… a bomb.
“What do you have there?” the voice asked in mild amusement.
I looked up and… Well, hello there, handsome. He was older than me, wiry underneath his tee shirt and khakis, with a deep tan and dark hair and eyes, his mouth quirked.
No, focus, this is an emergency! I scolded myself and then blurted out, “It’s a turtle?”
“Is that a question?” he asked, and in any other moment, I would’ve swooned at the slightly judgy way he’d called me out for my incorrect intonation.
The other person behind the desk tried to smother her snort.
“It is a turtle, or maybe it only was a turtle.”
Humming, the man came over to take the backpack from me gently. “Let’s find out what’s going on,” he said, moving smoothly and gently, somehow, but not slow, and turned into an exam room that looked almost exactly like a people doctor’s exam room.
After he set down the backpack, he snapped on plastic gloves and extricated the turtle, setting it down on the shiny metal exam table more suited to a large dog than a tiny turtle.
“Did I—is it dead?” I asked with a crack in my voice, wringing my hands like some old maid about to go into hysterics. “Because I was biking and I hit it! Why was a turtle on a hiking trail?” I asked, my voice rising in panic. “I was out there trying to get closer to nature, you know, not… not murder a poor hapless turtle just inching along its long life.”
Chapter Four
Ezra
I gave the younger guy with the undercut a big side eye at his “get closer to nature” crap, even though he did look pretty miserable, red and sweaty and rocking from foot to foot. Usually I didn’t want to pamper adults who were being silly, but I could see he was really worried that he’d hurt an animal, not inconvenienced by having to deal with it.
So while I did my examination, I reassured him, “She’s alive… and a tortoise.”
“Thank God,” he exclaimed. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I’d killed an animal, turtle or tortoise or anything else, well, except a spider. It’s the first sign of a budding serial killer. I don’t want to accidentally turn into a serial killer. Not that an accidental murder makes me an accidental serial killer. Shit, I’m so freaked out.”
