Help celebrate the release of Handle With Care with author Cari Z. and Dreamspinner Press. Read an exclusive excerpt and find out more about this road trip romance below!
Be sure to check out our 4 ❤️ review here.
“Let’s go to the arch.”
Aaron blinked and refocused his attention on Tyler. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Let’s go see the arch. You can go up it, you know. They’ve got a tram and everything.”
“At seven in the evening?”
“They’re open until ten,” Tyler wheedled. “We can watch the sunset or something. C’mon. I’m not ready to go back to the apartment and do old-person stuff.”
“Old-person stuff.” Jesus H. Christ. “You mean shower and sleep?”
“Yeah, exactly. I knew we should have brought my games.”
Aaron rolled his eyes. “You can survive a week without your Xbox.” It was kind of early, though. “All right, let’s go.”
“Yes!”
It was a seven-minute Lyft ride from the restaurant to the arch, and it wasn’t until they were standing at the base of it, waiting in line for their turn to ride to the top, that someone started having second thoughts. Surprisingly, it wasn’t Aaron.
“Shit, that’s high.”
Aaron checked the pamphlet. “Six hundred and thirty feet.”
“That would be a hell of a long way to fall.”
He gently hip-checked Tyler. “I’m pretty sure there are precautions in place up there to keep people from falling.”
“Yeah.” Tyler chewed on his bottom lip as they stepped closer to the entrance. “What about mechanical failure, though?”
“They probably do maintenance on this thing all the time, Ty. We’re not going to plunge to our deaths or anything.” Aaron was actually a little surprised by Tyler’s emerging phobia. “You’ve literally jumped out of an airplane before.” And he had, on his twenty-first birthday, a stunt that Aaron had politely refused to get in on. “How is it that you’re even remotely afraid of heights?”
“It’s not the heights, really. It’s the depths that get on my nerves. And jumpin’ out of a plane, man—that’s not even like falling, you’re too high up to have any sense of perspective with the horizon. It’s more like being in a wind tunnel.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.”
They got their own car on the tram to take them to the top. Aaron sat and Tyler took a spot next to him, but as soon as they were moving, he was on his feet, one hand pressed to the glass of the little window, the other one tapping restlessly against his thigh. “This thing lurches,” he complained after the first thirty seconds. “What the hell kind of engineer designs a train that lurches as you go up? This isn’t a damn amusement park.”
“We’ll be at the top before you know it.”
“Unless we fall to our deaths first,” Tyler muttered. “World’s worst date.”
Aaron chuckled. “Good thing it’s not a date, then.”
“Hell no, it’s not, not if we don’t live through it.”
He reached out and clasped Tyler’s tapping hand. “It’s okay.”
Tyler glanced down. “Yeah? Since when are you the optimist?”
“Since I got a grasp on statistics. We’re going to be fine.”
Tyler didn’t say anything, but he didn’t let go of Aaron’s hand either. By the time they got to the observation deck, he seemed less antsy and tugged Aaron out of their car and over to the larger, western-facing windows. Their timing was perfect—the sun was just disappearing over the horizon. The brilliant blue of the sky was slowly fading to indigo, and the high, quilt-like clouds had turned pink and orange in the fading light. Aaron didn’t think he’d ever been this high up outside of the two airplane rides he’d had in his life, and even then, the view hadn’t been this good.
“’S pretty,” Tyler commented.
“Beautiful.” It felt good, actually—kind of freeing to be so removed from the surface of the earth. Like being a little closer to the sky gave him permission to let his mind wander. Aaron felt tension he hadn’t even realized he was holding in his shoulders suddenly leave, and he relaxed with an almost-orgasmic shudder.
Tyler looked at him and smiled. “Imagine the view from the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower.”
“Ha-ha. Don’t tease me.”
“I’m not teasin’ you. You could go there, y’know. You could go anywhere, see what somewhere farther off than St. Louis has to offer.”
Aaron shook his head. “I can’t picture traveling like that by myself.” Those seemed like once-in-a-lifetime trips, and it didn’t make sense to go somewhere like that when the only person he’d be sharing it with was himself.
“Nobody says you have to be alone.”
Yeah, but it wasn’t like he had prospects beating down his door either. “Let’s look out the other side.”
A fragile heart needs extra care.
Burned-out social worker Aaron McCoy is on vacation for the first time in years—boss’s orders. Road-tripping to his brother’s wedding with his best friend, Tyler, seems a fun way to spend the mandatory two-week leave, and they set out for Kansas—and a difficult homecoming.
Aaron’s mother was a drug addict, and his adorable younger brother was quickly adopted, while Aaron spent his childhood in foster care. As Aaron mends fences, Tyler hopes to show him that this time, he won’t be left behind to face his problems alone.
Aaron’s opening up to how right it feels to be with Tyler and to the possibility of taking the leap from friends to lovers. But along with the wedding celebration comes a painful reminder of the past. Aaron’s heart is still breakable. Can he put it in Tyler’s hands?
Buy links:
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Bio: Cari Z. is a Colorado girl who loves snow and sunshine. She has a wonderful relationship with her husband, a complex relationship with the characters in her head and a sadomasochistic relationship with her exercise routine. She hopes that you enjoy reading what she's put out there as much as she enjoyed writing it in the first place.
Social media:
Twitter: @author_cariz
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