Title: How to Share a Cat and Other Life Lessons

Author: Evelyn Fenn

Publisher: NineStar Press

Release Date: 01/09/2024

Heat Level: 1 – No Sex

Pairing: No Romance

Length: 90200

Genre: Contemporary, young adult, lesbian, asexual, aromantic, aroace, over 40s, crafts, knitting, musicians, misunderstandings, coming out

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Description

Seventeen-year-old Nessa Clarkson is full of questions and confusion. How does she fit into the new household Dad is forging with his partner, Cindy, and Cindy’s son? What will being a lesbian mean in practice? And why is their neighbour so reluctant to talk about her past?

Moira Cavendish had been famous for a while, in the 1980s. Then she fled the bright lights of London, leaving only a mystery behind her.

Moira and Nessa shouldn’t have anything in common. But when their paths cross, and they bond over their shared love of knitting and the ginger tomcat that can’t decide whose home is best, they find themselves on intertwining journeys of discovery.

Excerpt

How to Share a Cat and Other Life Lessons
Evelyn Fenn © 2024
All Rights Reserved

Nessa waited to be allowed inside St Drogo’s great hall. On the plus side, milling around like this meant she got to ditch her books and spend a few precious minutes with her friends. On the downside, she was a bundle of stress, nervous energy, and panic, and hanging around outside the exam room had to be the least fun anyone could have with their mates.

Next to her, Meg dropped her lucky ballpoint, swore, bent over to pick it up, and got flustered for an entirely different reason: Tim wolf-whistled.

Meg straightened. Her cheeks flamed but she brazened out her discomfort. She struck an exaggerated pose, hips out and spine twisted in a way that would have pained anyone less limber, formed her lips into a pout, and cooed, “Like what you see, do you?”

Nessa and the rest of the crowd, including Tim, laughed. For a fraction of a second, the pre-exam tension eased.

Meg was Nessa’s best friend. She had red hair, which almost touched her shoulders. It was unfashionably curly and had volume and body, and Nessa envied the way it looked great, no matter how little effort Meg put into styling it. Meg didn’t bother much with make-up either. All throughout puberty, her skin had remained enviably acne free and smooth, and she wore her freckles with pride.

Like Nessa, Meg was also stressing. Nessa could tell by the way Meg was bouncing on the balls of her feet.

If Tim—tall, devil-may-care, and an extrovert—was nervous, he hid it well, and better than his best friend, Tarone, who looked as though he might pass out at any moment. Not surprising, given he was about to sit an art history paper. When it came to the practical side of his favourite subject, Tarone was a force to be reckoned with, but his creativity was offset by his performance at anything more academic. Writing essays was not his strong suit.

Tarone was tall, had brown skin, and almost-black hair. He had caused a minor stir a couple of years before, when in a relationships-and-sex-education class, he had mentioned his dad was transitioning, and he now had two mums. Possibly the stir would have been greater had the lesson not been online in the middle of an English lockdown.

Tarone was fiercely proud of and loyal to both his mums, and they to each other. When the school restarted face-to-face teaching, he’d returned to lessons with a trans ally pin on his lapel, which the teachers told him to remove. Begrudgingly, he had done so, but he made up for his loss by putting an ally sticker on the lid of his laptop where everyone could see it and the teachers couldn’t argue he was violating the dress code.

Nessa not only admired him. She liked him. A lot.

As a friend.

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NineStar Press | Books2Read

Meet the Author

I lived in five different cities, spanning two continents, before leaving crowds and commuting behind and settling somewhere that official statistics describe as “Very Remote Rural”.

I have made up stories for as long as I can remember, and I have been writing them down for almost as long. I cut my creative writing teeth on fan fiction in the days of paper fanzines and, later, online. I had fun but eventually grew tired of playing in other people’s sandpits. Turns out, it’s more fun to create sandpits of my own.

I have worked in the public, private, and voluntary sectors, with roles ranging from number crunching and lecturing to mucking out cowsheds and toilet cleaning. I currently hold down a day job while daydreaming of writing full time.

Evelyn Fenn is a pseudonym. You can find Evelyn on Twitter