The Bucket List Read online

  Table of Contents

  Books by Douglas Black

  Title Page

  Legal Page

  Book Description

  Dedication

  Trademark Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

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  Spanish Heat

  THE BUCKET LIST

  DOUGLAS BLACK

  The Bucket List

  ISBN # 978-1-78651-785-2

  ©Copyright Douglas Black 2019

  Cover Art by Erin Dameron-Hill ©Copyright June 2019

  Interior text design by Claire Siemaszkiewicz

  Pride Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Pride Publishing.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Pride Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2019 by Pride Publishing, United Kingdom.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorised copies.

  Pride Publishing is an imprint of Totally Entwined Group Limited.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book”.

  When Kade tackles the bucket list his friends created for him after he’s been dumped, nobody could have predicted how it would transform his life.

  When Kade Doherty’s long-term partner walks out on him, he expects sympathy from his friends. Instead, fearing Kade’s life has been stagnating, his friends make him a bucket list. Kade isn’t convinced a list of outlandish leisure pursuits—some of which he’s never even heard of—is going to do much good, but to keep the peace, he decides to play along.

  Unbeknownst to Kade or his friends, doing so sets Kade on a collision course with Blake. Blake may not have directly featured on Kade’s bucket list, but his Australian accent and surfer-boy looks have featured in enough of Kade’s sexual fantasies over the years to convince Kade to keep following this new, unpredictable path.

  To Kade’s surprise and delight, it is a path that brings him a taste of happiness he didn’t know he was missing—a taste that threatens to be stolen from him when his ex makes an unwelcome return to the scene. Kade might have been having the time of his life with Blake, but he hasn’t been completely honest about his recently ended relationship or the origins of his bucket list.

  Will Kade be able to convince him to stick around when Blake learns the truth?

  Dedication

  For Mike

  Trademark Acknowledgements

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Aladdin: Disney Enterprises Inc.

  James Bond: Ian Fleming

  Levi’s: Levi Strauss & Co. Corporation

  Valium: Roche Products Inc.

  Google: Google Inc.

  Baby, It’s Cold Outside: Frank Loesser

  Land Rover: Jaguar Land Rover Limited

  Thermos: Thermos LLC

  Boy Scouts: Boy Scouts of America Corporation

  Disney: Disney Enterprises Inc.

  West Highland Way Race: West Highland Way Race Committee

  The Great Dictator: Charlie Chaplin, United Artists

  Coney Island: Roscoe Arbuckle, Paramount Pictures

  Ford: Ford Motor Company Corporation

  Rescue Remedy: Bach Flower Remedies Limited

  Arran: Isle of Arran Distillery

  Chapter One

  The List

  Kade looked up at the unfamiliar façade of the building in front of him. If he hadn’t just checked his location for the third time using both the sat-nav on his phone and the one in his car, he would have sworn he must have taken a wrong turn when he’d reached the unfamiliar streets of Glasgow’s East End.

  Unlike the supermarket he normally frequented, this one had no branding or signage to speak of. There were no garish colors and definitely no cheesy logos. If the market had an official name, the owners clearly didn’t think it was worth sharing with their customers.

  The building looked like a windowless warehouse, and the car park, devoid of neatly painted grid lines and pointless shrubbery, was just a gravel-covered, pothole-ridden piece of ground hemmed in by a giant metal fence. If it hadn’t been for the steady stream of people coming and going through the single-door entrance, Kade wouldn’t have known if the store was open or closed.

  He sighed and leaned against the bonnet of his car. All he really wanted to do was get back behind the wheel and drive back to what was familiar. The temptation was almost overwhelming. It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been enough changes and uncertainties to deal with recently without dragging the weekly shopping into the mix. He pulled out his phone and scrolled until he found Ian’s number. His friend answered on the second ring.

  “I’m standing outside an Asian supermarket. Are you happy now?”

  “That depends,” Ian said. “Are you actually going to go inside or are you just planning on standing in the car park, biting your bottom lip and looking at your feet?”

  Kade looked up from his boots and removed the phone from his ear momentarily so he could stare at it instead. He heard Ian’s laughter through the handset.

  “Fuck you very much,” Kade said under his breath when he put the phone back to his ear.

  “And you. I’ll see you tonight. I’m impressed, you know. Doing two things outside of your comfort zone in one day? Hell, the council must be pumping chemicals into the water again.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Very original. You’re a funny guy.” Ian was still laughing when Kade rang off and slipped his phone back into his pocket.

  Ian’s jokes weren’t funny to Kade at the moment and his behavior had nothing to do with too much fluoride in the city’s water supply, as Ian well knew. Instead, it had everything to do with that stupid, bloody list.

  The bucket list. His bucket list. Only it wasn’t really his at all, because Kade hadn’t had any say in whether or not he needed a bucket list to begin with, let alone what he wanted on it. Ian and his boyfriend, Paul, had drawn it up the morning after Kade had shown up on Ian’s doorstep, shouting, ranting and crying because Niall had left.

  Niall was supposed to have been it for Kade. They’d met at Gl
asgow University and been a perfectly sensible match. They’d enjoyed similar childhoods, held the same values and political opinions and had strong work ethics. When their friends had been in bar at the student union, doing their best to annihilate their livers, Kade and Niall had been in the library, putting in long hours most weeknights and over weekends.

  They had both graduated with honors on the same day, and just a few years later, they were working for the same accountancy firm in the city, making enough money to afford a nice flat in Glasgow’s West End and two cars. Hell, they’d even had a goldfish.

  In short, they had done things properly. They might not have been living the most exciting, adrenaline-fueled lives imaginable, but they had been comfortable and secure, and they’d managed to get through eight years together without ever encountering a single bump in the road—not until Niall had walked through the door three weeks earlier to announce that the relationship wasn’t working for him anymore then promptly walking back out.

  And, somehow, that horrible night, when his life had been turned upside down and the future torn away from him, led to Kade standing outside an Asian supermarket at eleven-thirty on a Saturday morning.

  Ian had come up with the bucket list to help Kade to start living a more interesting, exciting life. ‘Shop in an Asian supermarket’ had been at the top of page two. Kade thought excitement was rather a lot to expect from a place that sold food, but it had been one of the more doable items compared with, say, ‘Go lava chasing’, so Kade had decided to tick it off. He wasn’t completely committed to the idea of the bucket list—in fact, not at all—but panicking over it was helping take his mind off Niall.

  Kade sighed and headed for the entrance before he could change his mind. ‘Weird’ didn’t come close to describing this new approach to living. ‘Bonkers’ was closer to the mark.

  Chapter Two

  Mixing with Strangers

  The first thing Kade became aware of after the door had swung shut behind him was how cold the market was—so cold that he fancied he might almost be able to see his own breath when he exhaled. A fine, wet mist hung over the front half of the store, and Kade found the cause when he saw the fresh produce section. Small pumps had been fitted to the shelves there, and those pumps were intermittently spraying cold water over the fresh fruit and vegetables. Kade did a double-take. They certainly didn’t have a set-up like that in his regular supermarket.

  A group of children seemed to have invented a game that revolved around grabbing items for their parents without getting sprayed. Or maybe, judging by the sleeves on one girl’s T-shirt, the object of the game was actually to try to get wet.

  Regardless of the temperature, the place was a hive of activity. Kade had expected the inside of the store to be as sparse as the outside, but although the aisles were wider than Kade was used to, most of them were jam-packed with people, trolleys and unattended baskets. The shelves were overloaded with stock and produce was piled high, likely to maximize space. At the end of each aisle, pallets were stacked with multipack boxes of soy sauce sachets, bottles of water and juice and the sort of cardboard, plastic and foil containers used by takeaway restaurants.

  Kade decided to grab a basket and start on the aisle closest to him. He would work his way toward the meat and fresh vegetables.

  In his usual supermarket, Kade had managed to get the weekly shopping down to a fine art. He could be in and out in twenty-five minutes, and he had a route around the store that he followed religiously. If something wasn’t on one of the aisles Kade had already planned to go to, then clearly that product wasn’t really needed. Here, he was flying blind.

  The first aisle was filled with packets of rice and noodles. Rather incongruously, there was also a small section displaying bags of German pasta. Kade gave that a wide berth but threw a few different types of rice into his basket before heading on to the next aisle to poke around among the tubs of dried shrimp and seaweed. He had no idea what he was supposed to use either ingredient for, but he chucked them both into his basket anyway.

  Before Niall had left, they had been systematically working their way through the recipes in a Venetian cookbook, so their diet had been mostly focused on fresh fish, homemade tomato sauces, pulses and caponata. If Kade was going to make use of this week’s shopping, he was going to have to look up a lot of new recipes when he got home.

  The next aisle Kade came to held an array of glass bottles so vast that he wondered if he had stumbled into the alcohol section. He couldn’t believe how wrong his first impression about the shop being sparse had been. The place was a veritable Aladdin’s cave.

  There was an aisle that seemed entirely dedicated to woks of all sizes. These were piled between delicate soup bowls with matching spoons and large metal pots that looked like they might once have been used to boil missionaries in the tropics. Kade couldn’t imagine what size a restaurant would need to be to require a pot that big.

  He was so distracted with trying to read the broken English descriptions on the shelf-edge tabs and trying to plan a route around the rest of the store that when he reached out to grab a random bottle of fish sauce, he brushed his fingers against something infinitely more human than a glass bottle.

  Kade looked up and flinched away when he found his hand resting on a stranger’s bare forearm. He reddened, although he had no idea why. He fought to get his gaze off the floor as he mumbled an apology. The effort of looking up was met with a lazy shrug and a sloppy smile.

  “S’all right. No harm done.”

  Kade didn’t have to fake his smile when he heard the man speak. He had always liked Australian accents, and although this man’s sounded a little faded, it was still strong enough to get Kade thinking about all those sex-on-the-beach fantasies he had enjoyed over the years.

  Sue him if that sounded like a cliché, but his obsession with the land—and the men—Down Under had started when he’d been a horny teenager, and it was yet to leave him.

  Back in the late nineties, just around the time when Kade had worked out that he was gay, his mum had decided that watching three hours of homegrown soap operas a day was no longer enough.

  She’d started to watch shows imported from Australia. Kade, sitting in the living room doing his homework, had watched them too and quickly realized that the Australian actors were much better looking than their British counterparts and seemed, mercifully, to be working with a much more limited costume budget. Thus, a sexual fantasy was born.

  Kade gave the man another smile before nodding and stepping around him to focus on the different bottles of soy sauce. Eyes that blue had never figured in any of Kade’s sexual fantasies. The man must have been wearing contacts, Kade decided as he loaded sweet, dark and light soy sauce into his basket.

  There is no way that shade of blue is natural.

  As he was heading back to get the fish sauce he had forgotten about, Kade got a funny feeling he was being watched. He turned, and at the end of the next aisle, Mr. Australia was standing, looking at him. Kade quirked his head. Normally, his initial reaction to a stranger staring at him was to throw a glare and stalk away, but he didn’t. Instead, in homage to his fourteen-year-old self, Kade stood tall, pulled back his shoulders and winked. Then he walked away.

  Kade was glad the man only had a view of his back. He started cringing as soon as he’d turned around. He couldn’t remember the last time he had winked at anyone—wasn’t even sure he ever actually had. He turned into the next aisle and busied himself looking through bags filled with what the tabs described as ‘dried fungus’. It didn’t sound particularly appealing, but Kade picked up a bag anyway. In his defense, his mind was elsewhere.

  ‘Mr. Australia’ wasn’t too bad a description. The man was tall, broad-shouldered, nicely muscled and very tan. But he was wearing flip-flops. Flip-flops, in Scotland, in November. Clearly the man was lacking a bit of substance in the upstairs department, but Kade doubted the same could be said for down below—not judging by the way the man filled
out his baggy jeans.

  Kade shook his head, trying to shake the thoughts away as he headed for the back of the store. Beside the normal butcher’s counter were three rows of glass tanks filled with water and fish. In one, a selection of sea bream swam around in cramped conditions. In another, lobsters wandered the floor of a tank while crabs dozed in the corners. Kade had never seen anything like it in a supermarket before.

  He didn’t know how long he had been standing there, just watching like a kid in a pet shop, when he felt someone crowd in behind him. He knew, without turning around, that there was a tall, muscular Australian very confidently invading his personal space. He thought about that wink. Stupid. Stupid. Warm breath danced across the back of his neck as Mr. Australia muttered into his ear.

  “At least you know it’s fresh.”

  Kade hesitated a moment, suspended in uncertainty before he turned. Mr. Australia made no effort to step back, and Kade found himself incredibly close indeed—so close that, even in the cold of the store, Kade could feel the warmth radiating from the man’s body. The broad shoulders and chest made for a distracting combination, but Kade forced his gaze north to look into those too-blue eyes. He nodded. “Guess so.”

  “You getting anything?”

  Apart from an awful lot of heat spreading between us?

  Kade shook his head. “Don’t think I fancy chasing a live lobster around my apartment as a prelude to dinner.”

  Mr. Australia laughed. He had a nice laugh—nicer than Niall’s, who made a sound similar to a barking cough, which gave the impression that rather than being amused, he was trying to clear his throat of something unpleasant.

  “That could be pretty fun entertainment for a dinner party. My mum used to do something similar when I was little. She’d sit me down on the kitchen floor then put a lobster beside me to see what it would do. More often than not, it chased me.” Mr. Australia paused for a moment, looking thoughtful. “That sort of thing would probably earn you a call from the animal rights brigade now.”