Exclusive Excerpt from Ted of the d’Urbervilles

by Rob Rosen

I crawled through the busted-out window of the deserted house, catching my foot on the jagged sill. In I tumbled, landing with a dull thud and a loud oomph on the junk-ridden floor. Sighing as I righted myself, I managed a “Ta da,” if only for the benefit of the scampering roaches and other assorted vermin I shared my home with—home of course being such a subjective word. Hovel was more appropriate. Dump, yes; dump definitely would’ve worked, too. Hey, let’s also throw in some nifty adjectives here, just to better paint the picture: ramshackle, bleak, moldy, and, um, demolishable. Not that the last one was a word, but this wasn’t a home either, at least not mine, at least not legally, so we’ll go with it.

All that is to say…“My name is Ted d’Urbervilles and I am a squatter.” A mosquito admired my candor as he also admired my jugular. I swatted it away as I hopped up and dusted myself off. I would’ve taken a shower, but the shack—yeah, shack would’ve worked, too—didn’t have running water. Running mice, sure, but water, not so much. Dripping water, but only when it rained. As for electricity, well, at least I could plug my iPad into the wall at the nearby gas station. FYI, I found said device. FYI, I found it sitting on a table at Starbucks. Finders keepers, losers can go buy another fucking iPad. Last FYI, for now, I also showered at the gas station. Or at least sinkered. Which was also not a word so much as a way of life, what with my life being quite, uh, sunk.

By some sort of miracle akin to Moses’s parting the waters—had the hovel/dump/shack had any water, when it didn’t rain, that is—the place did have an Internet connection. Sort of. That is to say, somewhere within some sort of radius of me and my vermin friends there was a person with an Internet connection and a password that was indeed password. Ergo, I had Internet because the nearby he or she was a moron.

So, there I stood, iPad on the counter, the only light that of the screen, illuminating my face as I perused. Porn. Because when you’re dead broke and sucking on a McDonald’s ketchup packet as a midday snack, porn is pretty much the only thing that gets a guy through the day. And night. And, uh, morning. Porn and ketchup. That’s what my life had become. Me and the mice. I wondered if mice liked gay porn. I’d have to ask them. They tended to come out at night, just after I’d come at night and had then huddled myself in a corner.

God, I wished for a fucking break. Or some bread to spread the ketchup on. Or for a blanket, as the corner was rather drafty. Or for a roof that didn’t leak. Hey, even the Internet was spotty, but wasn’t that par for my fucking course? Par and birdie and eagle. Heck, it was a hole in one, and holes I had plenty of: in the roof, in the walls, in the floor, in my ramshackle, demolishable life. Yeah, that last one especially.

Ding.

I craned my neck up from the drafty, dusty corner. “Ding?” I again hopped up. My ears went left to right and back again. Where had the ding come from? As my ears came to a standstill, my eyes landed on my still glowing iPad. It had been on when I found it. I’d quickly changed the settings so it wouldn’t turn off. So long as it had power, I didn’t need the password.

I walked to the glowing device, my nightlight, my connection to a world I no longer seemed to inhabit. Poverty, as it turns out, tends to relegate you to the seedy recesses of the world. I glanced at my surroundings. “Seedy,” I lamented. I then glanced at the iPad. I’d checked my Gmail earlier. There had been nothing but spam. Numerous people offered me ways to break my timesharing lease. Seemed to me, I was already on borrowed time, which was far more sad than ironic. In any case, I now had a real email, my first in longer than I could remember.

I had no family. My friends had vanished just as my money had. That was also more sad than ironic. Still, I checked my Gmail when I could, if only for consistency’s sake. And now I had an email from one Maximillian Ditmore, Esquire. Maximillian didn’t write for the magazine, namely said Esquire, but he did practice law. Turned out, my cousin Mortimore had died. Turned out, I had a cousin Mortimore. I didn’t know what to be more astonished by, that I had a cousin or that someone could name a child Mortimore. I read further. Didn’t take me long. There was to be a reading of the will, and that was about all Maximillian had to say.

About Ted of the d’Urbervilles

Ted is an orphan, a young gay man living on the streets following the death of both his parents. Hope seems futile, though hope is exactly what he finds when a surprising email informs him that an unknown wealthy relative has died, that a reading of a will is soon to occur clear across the country. Ted will inherit something, but what that something is remains to be seen.

Benny is a young, homeless drug addict, straight except for when cash is involved. Benny has never had a reason to be hopeful about anything until a chance encounter with Ted.

Both men are soon traveling together from state to state, making ends meet however they can, rushing to the reading of the will that may or may not change both their lives forever. An unexpected friendship quickly forms, and then just as unexpectedly blossoms into something more as their adventure ultimately leads them to their fates.

At turns darkly funny and tragic, deeply erotic and poignant, Ted of the d’Urbervilles uniquely shines a light on the phrase Love is Love—though who they will find it with remains a mystery until the very end.

Available at: Amazon

About Rob Rosen

Multi-award-winning and best-selling author/editor/anthologist Rob Rosen is the author of Sparkle: The Queerest Book You’ll Ever Love, Divas Las Vegas, Hot Lava, Southern Fried, Queerwolf, Vamp, Queens of the Apocalypse, Creature Comfort, Fate, Midlife Crisis, Fierce, And God Belched, Mary, Queen of Scotch, and Ted of the d’Urbervilles. His short stories have appeared in more than 200 anthologies. You can find 20 of them in his erotic romance anthology Good & Hot. He is also the editor of Lust in Time: Erotic Romance Through the Ages, Men of the Manor, Best Gay Erotica 2015 and Best Gay Erotica of the Year, Volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Please visit him at Blog/Website | Facebook