Standalone Contemporary RomanceHe found me in blood and tears.I stayed with him through darkness and fire.We loved each other in the moment between innocence and bitter truth.We were the kids easily ignored, who grew into adults we hardly knew. We weren’t meant to last forever. And we didn’t. He ran away.I tried to move on. Yet I never stopped thinking about the boy who had fought to keep me …
Yet I never stopped thinking about the boy who had fought to keep me alive in a world that would have swallowed me whole. He was the past that I buried, but never forgot.
Until the day I found him again, years after believing I had lost him forever.
And in cold, resentful eyes, I saw the heart of the man who had been everything when I had nothing at all. So I vowed to hold onto the second chance that was stolen from the children we had been.
Sometimes fate is ugly. Life can be twisted.
And who we are can be ruined by who we once were.
For two people who had survived so much, we would have to learn how to hold on before we were forced to let go.
trigger warning- contains mature themes that are intense and imply abuse, though are not graphic
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What an amazing story…so sad at times but so beautiful…wonderful characters..great writing…loved it..was sad it had to end
The Nobility of Yoss
This read was an achingly beautiful portrait of the inherent goodness and yes, nobility of a street hustler, a male prostitute. Initially I could barely wrap my head around what I just read.
From the first, I was fascinated with the story of heartbreak that held the female narrator captive for 15 years. She alternates her story from the time she first met her “Yoss” so named after Joseph Heller’s protagonist, Yossarian in “Catch-22”; and her present circumstance in divorcing her husband. She is the social worker employed at the hospital where her Yoss has just been admitted to the ICU badly beaten and unrecognizable. He has landed on her desk as one of her cases. She realizes who he is by the distinctive tattoo on his neck.
As the story begins, we learn some unsavory facts about who Yoss is and how he came to be beaten and left for dead on the street. It is revealed very quickly in the read that he was hustling his services to a man. We learn that he has been chronically homeless. As a romantic hero, the reader cannot help but notice that other than physical beauty, this even marred by scars, Yoss has little else to recommend him…no worldly possessions, no home, no formal education. But he is and always has been her heart.
Then as the story unfolds with visits to the past by our heroine, Imogen. We discover how this man came to live on the streets as a child. How he did not go to school as is the birthright of every American child. He was thrust out in the streets and learned to survive and keep beauty, hope, loyalty and his humanity alive even though he felt no choice but to compartmentalize and trade his precious sexuality for the safety and security of his street family…a ragtag bunch of forgotten runaway youth who felt it necessary to live on the streets.
Imogen at 16 felt unloved, unwanted and unseen even by her mother whom she desperately loved and wished for her to love her in return. She ran away from home one final time and held on stubbornly to an existence on the streets, despite the indignity and daily ugliness she witnessed living homeless on the street. From the first, Yoss came to her aid just as she was going to be assaulted and he brought her under his protection. He was still a child himself in many ways. He recognized himself in her fear.
The author describes in chilling detail the indignities of homeless street life. And even so, we become enchanted with the blush of first new love that both these homeless teens experience. Yoss is her everything. He makes sure she is fed as best he can on the street. She never has to compromise herself like he needs to when the street protector and pimp calls for him to go. He tries is best to see to her comfort as much as he can. All the while he begins to need her and the comfort the mere touch of being close to her brings to him after a night of abuse by the child molesters. She knows the reality of his nightmare. As she falls deeper in love with him, she wants to jealously claim that part of him that he trades away for their survival.
Imogen tells the reader from the first that Yoss had promised to run away from it all with her. They were to go away and begin again somewhere new. He told her to wait for him and he never showed. He abandoned her and she was left with no choice but to go home. She never ever recovered from this “perceived” betrayal through completion of high school, through college, her first job and through her marriage. She never recovered from loving him. She felt as if he took the promise of “One Day Soon” away from her. No matter how much he had come to depend on her love to sustain him, he knew, unlike him, Imogen could very well go home.
In many ways as a man literally dying, Yoss is growing up and appreciating the possibility that no matter the reason behind his decisions, he may have not gotten it quite right. Perhaps even some of his decisions had done harm to Imogen. As readers we cannot judge him too harshly, because his life was defined for him by his usefulness as a protector and he was loyal in his calling…noble in his dedication to give his all. He is dying because he fought for his beloved and those he felt fealty toward the only way he knew. The only way he was taught as a child, by giving himself over to the predators. Any repulsion the reader felt in the beginning fades entirely in the beauty of this man’s sacrifice…his many sacrifices and the nobility of such a man.
This is a beautifully told story of finding light in, not so much darkness, but finding light in the dry, grey bleakness of daily living that lacked the spark of “feeling” for Imogen…and light in the bleak dullness of the isolation and loneliness experienced by Yoss The story was difficult to read, but anyone with even the smallest romantic notion in their heart, could not put this story down until it was finished. The end…I must keep secret; because, the breathtaking goodness of a second chance…of One Day Soon is reading until the very end.