The Golden Hour
By Eliza Crowe
eBook ISBN: 978-1-926647- 68-5
Print ISBN: 978-1-926647- 76-0 (coming soon)
Publication date: April 2009
Publisher: Eternal Press
Length: Novella 97 pages
Heat level: Rated 3 flames
The Golden Hour is an erotica, but not really a romance. Instead, it is an exploration of how sex defines us, particularly in those first years of sexual burgeoning, when it is intoxicating and empowering. It is also a reminiscence. First loves never really go away. Let just get relegated to dreams…or nightmares.
Setting the scene: Malek and Sarah had a passionate and destructive relationship. When they broke up, they promised to meet twenty years later in that exact hour at their favorite restaurant in Nice. Each chapter begins with Sarah waiting for Malek to show up for their date. She imagines all different scenarios for their reunion.
The first of such imaginings is pure romance and is posted on my site at www.elizacrowe.com
This is Sarah’s second imagining of her impending reunion with Malek. It's not quite so rosy.
Excerpt:
August 31, 2025, 5:00pm
Sarah orders another glass of wine. The waiter believes she has been stood up, but she decides to wait a little longer. She thinks about the waiter that was here twenty years ago. He was an old man then, most likely dead now.
Malek might be dead too. She followed his career for a few years but lost track of him after a while. Perhaps he was killed while covering a war. Maybe cancer got him. The thought comforts her. She can go home alone, having kept up her end of the bargain.
She won’t have to risk his rejection again or tell him her terrible secret.
And she won’t feel her gut lurch when he looks in her eyes.
I’m too old for these games.
She pulls a compact mirror out of her bag and checks her makeup. She smiles briefly at herself, looking for lipstick on her teeth.
Not bad. Mature. No, levelheaded, but still pretty.
Not long after, she hears his footsteps on the cobbled street but can scarcely believe they are his. Instead of his loose dancer-like gait, she hears a shuffling clop as if he can’t put his full weight down on one leg.
Sarah watches him approach. He’s a caricature of his former self. His upper lip is swollen and puckered with scars. His hair is cut short and when he takes off the hat--as if wanting Sarah to confront the enormity of his disfigurement--she sees bald patches where his hair has been torn out by the roots. His eyes have no eyelashes. He’s missing an arm.
“Jerusalem,” he says as if it’s a question he has answered many times before. Twenty-eighteen, she thinks. That’s about the last time Sarah remembers his byline appearing in Atlas Magazine.
She doesn’t know what to say. Illness upsets her. She still can’t bring herself to tell people that her husband died with his face in a bowl of pasta. Some things should just not happen.
This should not have happened. She thinks about the vibrant man she knew and can hardly reconcile him to the monster in front of her. He reminds her of an early digital image, when the technology was still young and gross pixelization distorted photos.
“Not what you were expecting, is it?”
“No,” she admits. So many times she played out this reunion in her head. Not once had she imagined this.
“You have a son,” she blurts, not knowing what else to say.
He smiles at her. He's missing several teeth.
Watch the trailer and read another excerpt at Blazing Trailers.
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