The Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Lucky (Montague Siblings, #1.5)

by Mackenzi Lee

Though I could live happily forever on this diet of Cyclades beaches and domed roofs bluer than the sky and grapefruits picked from our courtyard for breakfast, halved and salted and spraying sticky juice that stays on my fingers all day.

Men my size were not meant to be firing rifles. I’m far too small and delicate.” “Yes, those are most certainly two words I would use to describe you.”

“You deserve a reward for all I put you through.” “You’re my reward.” “What a rotten reward I am.” “Not to me. Why do you think everyone needs some sort of recompense for being around you?” he says, his voice so gentle I almost start to cry.

And it’s going to be a disaster. But that’s all right, because we’ll have each other, and there’s no one on this goddamn planet I’d rather be a disaster with than you.”

I am overwhelmed with how much I love him. It floods me and overflows. It feels like I made the ocean.

I would teach my body to regrow my heart each time I gave it to him, over and over and over again. Heart after heart after heart—every one of them his.

I wish I could travel backward in time and tell Monty of two years ago, lying on the lawn of his father’s house with a black eye and a dawning realization he was falling in love with his best friend, that someday he’d be here. It would be years of drinking too much, falling asleep calculating how much arsenic he’d have to take to make certain the job was done, letting himself be groped by strangers in the backrooms of bars. Maybe I’d go even further back than that—to Monty at twelve, or thirteen. That masturbating little bastard could have used a good buoying up, a promise to carry in his pocket that it wouldn’t always be loneliness and hard hits and worrying he was catching some venereal disease from a girl he’d just met. Someday, you little twat, I’d tell him, it’s going to be more. It’s going to be better, and so will you. Where we start doesn’t have to be where we end up.

“When you spend months on the sea with only men, you’re no stranger to sodomy. Believe me. Plenty of sailors take up with each other, and you’re not the first I’ve interrupted by mistake. So you’ve not shocked me. And you’ve not surprised me either.”

“Then maybe I should have said it to you sooner—you needn’t hide around us,” he says. “I’m sorry you ever felt you had to. And that the world makes you feel as though you have to.”

“I love you,” I say quietly. “You know that?” “And I you, my darling boy.”