If you could save someone's life, would you? Anyone's? Ali's older brother has a swastika tattooed on his knuckles, a prison ID number for nearly beating an immigrant to death, and spent his teenage years ruthlessly persecuting Ali for being gay. Blood may be thicker than water, but Ali has spent most of his life desperate to prove he is nothing like Tony. A committed vegetarian, charity-supporter, and blood donor, Ali would do anything for anyone. Ali may share parentage with Tony, but he’s determined not to share anything else if he can help it. So when Tony contracts leukaemia, and Ali is the only match for the urgently-needed bone marrow transplant, Ali is caught between two equally awful choices: to refuse and condemn a man to death, or to donate. And in donating, save the life of the man who nearly murdered Ali's Iraqi boyfriend?

Thicker Than Bone

But it wasn’t—at all—and that was the best part, the part that made that love seem so certain. The sensation that this was a secret, and the knowledge that it wasn’t. The part that made him say, “We could.”


Ali’s hands were suddenly on his shoulders and mouth against his ear. Yazid felt the, “Really?” more than heard it, and could read the soft shiver in Ali’s skin. Hope. Want. And a little bit of desire, in the way his legs were starting to shift around Yazid’s hips, and his hands kneaded rather than simply gripped.


“Really,” Yazid whispered, nosing at Ali’s cheek and running a hand through the soft hair on his chest. Yazid could feel Ali’s heart here, picking up now, feel his breathing and his life. He dropped his mouth to kiss that long neck, and could smell sex and strawberry ice-cream, the remnants of their Christmas Day together. His first Christmas. The best one, until next year with Ali all over again.


Chapter 63