Undone

by C.B. Potts

Everybody wants to be somebody's priority -- eventually. Rusty's slowly coming to accept the fact that he's less important than his partner Steven's aspirations to join the werewolves' political elite. Jeff has taken a back seat to the cubs his lover Paul is raising with someone else. Each has been given tacit permission to look elsewhere: what happens when they find each other?


This story is also included in Exchange of Power Anthology.

21 pages, ebook

First published September 15, 2015

About the author

CB Potts is the author of Recovery, Recovery Ranch, and Gadarene (with Tina Anderson), and a bunch of other stuff. She writes from her home in the Adirondack mountains, splitting her time between fiction, marketing, and therapeutic humor. Find out more from her blog: cbpotts.livejournal.com

Reviews

[Serena Yates · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a happy story, nor is it a romance in the traditional sense. It is about power and the consequences of werewolf - or human, for that matter – politics. It is about Jeff, a powerful pack lawyer, and Rusty, who owns a garage, coming to terms with the reality of their lives, which is spouses with different priorities, and settling for what they can have instead of going after what they really want. While the rebel in me wanted things to end differently, ‘Undone’ is the more realistic version of what might happen in reality, and it does explain the characters’ feelings and motivations really well. Be warned: there is cheating in this story.

Rusty loves working on engines, but his husband is into politics and has bigger plans. Jeff is a lawyer and quite powerful within the pack, but his husband of thirty years wants kids, and has set up a family that will always be his priority. Both Rusty and Jeff are fed up with their situations, but neither is ready to rebel. After all, they have each other to get them through the dry patch.

The very sad truth is that they are both men who would rather not upset the status quo – if for slightly different reasons. Jeff loves his husband, and has settled into accepting that “the kids thing” is something he won’t be able to change. Rusty still hopes that his husband’s political ambitions will come to an end, at which point he can have him back. I wanted to yell “You fools!” at both of them, and that just goes to show that the characters are well drawn and the story is realistic.

If you prefer your stories to be on the realistic side, if you want to find out why someone might “settle” for what life is like rather than “rebel” and change things, and if you don’t mind cheating and a very bittersweet ending, then you might like this short story.


NOTE: The anthology this story was published in has been provided by Torquere Press for the purpose of a review on Rainbow Book Reviews.