Promo Post: The Cool Part of His Pillow

Title: The Cool Part of His Pillow  
Author: Rodney Ross
Genre: Contemporary, Little Romance, Male/Male
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Novel: 340pgs


Purchase Links: Paperback, Ebook

Book Description:
The midforties are that time in a gay man’s life when his major paradigm shifts from sexy to sensible. But when Barry Grooms's partner of twenty years is killed on Barry's forty-fifth birthday, his world doesn’t so much evolve as it does explode.

After navigating through the surreal conveyor belt of friends and family, he can't eat another casserole or swallow much more advice, and so, still numb, he escapes to Key West, then New York. He embraces a new mantra: Why the hell not? He becomes so spontaneous he's ready to combust. First, he gets a thankless new job working for a crazy lady in a poncho, then has too many drinks with a narcissistic Broadway actor. Next, it's a nude exercise class that redefines flop sweat, and from there he’s on to a relationship with a man twenty years his junior, so youthfully oblivious he thinks Karen Carpenter is a lesbian woodworker.

Yet no matter how great the retreat from the man he used to be, life's gravity spins Barry back to the town where he grew up for one more ironic twist that teaches him how to say good-bye with grace.
 

Excerpt

I push away the toss pillows plumped horizontally under the duvet to approximate a body alongside my own. 

I hate this foam memory mattress. I wish we’d kept our very first lumpy, concave mattress. Andy’s dent would still be in it. I could sink into it, let it swallow me up.

I will never again hear him whisper into my ear, “Sleepy time now.”

I will never again feel his heartbeat when he wakes from nightmares, holding on to a spindle of our headboard.

I will never ever again kidnap the cool part of his pillow. It was just one push/pull in our 23 years of push/pull continuum. When my own was airless and warm, I would find that unoccupied part, I would slowly pull the pillow toward me until his shoulders grazed my breastbone, nestle my head behind his and go to sleep. It didn’t stay cool for long. I’d restlessly return to my own, or he’d wake enough to take it back with a grouchy harumph but two, three times a night my right hand, like a divining rod jerking toward a source of water, would go wandering for fresh, for safe, for cool. It was like winning a prize. I will miss those two big heads full of alpha male dreams sharing one pillow.

Now it’s all mine.

I can have as much cool as I want, can dominate every bit, which is very different.

About The Author

Rodney Ross lives in Key West, Florida.

He is a former advertising Creative Director, so he's accustomed to making shit up and spouting useless hyperbole.

Past achievements include multiple ADDY Awards and an optioned screenplay and play (both currently unproduced).  Other screenplays earned Honorable Mentions or runners-up citations in the Monterey County Film Commission, FADE-IN and the LGBT One-In-Ten Screenwriting Competitions. In other words: always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Until now.

E-Mail:  RodneyTRoss@aol.com

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/RodneyTRoss

 

YouTube Promos: https://www.facebook.com/RodneyTRoss

 

TWITTER: @RodTRoss