Second Person

You watch them work. It does not occur to you that they are watching back.
Celyn Beynon owns one good eyeliner, a name their family refuses to use, a novel nobody has read, and the corner table of a Manchester bar. Four nights a week they sit at it and write. For a year, a large silent man has been drinking at the counter on the far side of the room, and has never once crossed the floor.

Ron Carrick told this story in Undefined Terms: the counter, the silence, the months of almost. He told it the only way he knows, one load-bearing word at a time. What he never knew is that the person at the corner table had clocked him on the first night, and that one of his own gestures had already found its way onto the page.

The eyeliner lessons on Rhi’s bedroom floor. The first walk out of the door daring the street to say a word. The rules written for a man too careful to break anything. The exact cost of being the person everyone looks at and nobody sees.

Celyn’s side of the slowest burn in Manchester: funnier, sharper, and closer to the bone, from the first borrowed mirror to a kitchen in Beddgelert at Easter.

Second Person is the second of the Missing Terms companion novels: the two quiet halves of the Carrick family, telling the story from their own side. It can be read alone, but it is built to be read after Undefined Terms.

MM/NB romance · non-binary lead · builder and writer · slow burn · opposites attract · found family · explicit · HEA guaranteed