Lou Sylvre - YES.pdf

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For brave survivors, and for Nancy, Blitz, and Mom
Acknowledgments
For help in the creation of Yes , particular thanks to all the Dreamspinner
Press staff for dedication, encouragement, and hard work, to Reese Dante
for yet another amazing cover, and to Anne Barwell for a helpful and
encouraging early read.
From the Author
In this book, Luki Vasquez has cancer, but that’s not what this book is
about. Yes is about Luki and Sonny loving, learning, growing, living.
When I first told readers about this story, I asked, “What would you tell
Luki and Sonny to help them get through?” I’ve abbreviated a couple of
savvy responses.
From Clancy Ellis: Live each day one at a time, live as normally as
possible where treatment allows, and never stop showing you love and
care for each other.
From Kim Moore: No one has any idea how to handle these situations.
Not even the people right in the middle of them. You do the only thing you
can. Which is love and laugh, because what everyone needs the most is to
keep on living.
I truly hope you read Yes and enjoy it for the love story that it is. Thank
you.
—Lou Sylvre
Yes
1
Chapter 1
F IVE years since I’ve smoked a cigarette , Luki marveled. He still wanted
one every day when he woke up, and he ordinarily laughed at himself for
it. But now, it just wasn’t funny. Six years he’d been with Sonny—his tall,
dark-eyed, beautiful husband—five since the wedding, five since he
smoked. He’d stopped because Sonny cared. He’d stopped because after
they’d rescued themselves from a sociopathic bomber, it seemed stupid to
further tempt fate. He’d stopped because after Delsyn, Sonny’s beloved
nephew, died slowly from injuries to his brain, and after Luki and Sonny
had themselves narrowly escaped death on a mountainside, Sonny needed
to know Luki would be there.
“Stop smoking those fucking things,” Sonny had said. “I love you.”
Over and over he said it until Luki could no longer pretend not to
understand. So much had happened. Sonny had lost so much. He wanted
Luki to be his sure thing.
Luki had stopped smoking, but maybe he hadn’t stopped soon
enough.
Mom , he thought. The word conjured her image, or perhaps it was
the other way around, but there she was, smiling before him—at him—
with her wide Hawaiian smile and her jet-black hair falling down over her
shoulders in smooth waves. He buried himself, in memory, in the comfort
of her great, round bosom. Felt the strength of her arms, the sway as she
rocked him and sang a song of Lanai, her much missed island home.
But then he heard her cough. Felt her wracked body as she tried to
hold him when it was all she could do to breathe. Felt her soft, sagging
flesh, her bony arms jutting against him. For all that those arms had lost
their comfort, he’d hoped as a child they would hold him anyway.
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