Begin Again

Begin Again is a high-heat contemporary M/M romance set in Dublin and County Wicklow across three weeks of very late autumn. Evan Barrett is twenty-nine, American, three years into a life in Portobello, and four months out of a relationship that taught him to treat his own appetite as a problem to be managed. Nolan never broke his heart in one dramatic act. Nolan simply corrected him—about food, about noise, about wanting—until Evan learned to apologise before he asked for anything.

Cian Kavanagh is thirty-one, a lead climbing arborist from near Enniskerry, and the first man in years to send a message with no hedge in it. One coffee. Half five. Twenty minutes and either of them can call it. What unsettles Evan is not that Cian is direct, dominant, and built by outdoor work. It is that Cian pays attention without grading him for it—remembers what he ordered, asks before he touches, and laughs without making the laugh cost anything.

The romance moves along a real map. Evan walks from Portobello to a café by the Grand Canal. He takes the DART south to Bray and learns that the fantasy of a man in work clothes comes attached to wet gear, early alarms, a family, and a business decision Cian has not made yet. Travel runs in both directions, and every trip south is part of the proof.

This is a story about a man learning to ask for more and then stay in the room after he gets it. It is told in single close third through Evan, which means Cian is known the way we know people in life—by what he does, what he says, and what he refuses to take back.

The first four chapters are free to read here in full. The story continues in the Reading Room.