Promise in a Kiss

Title: Promise in a Kiss
Author: Piper Vaughn
Cover art: Aisha Akeju
Publisher: Less Than Three Press
Buy link: Buy Link Promise in a Kiss
Genre: Contemporary M/M Romance
Length: Short story/6,000 words/20 PDF pages
Rating: 3 stars out of 5

A guest review by LadyM

Review summary: After a promising start, the story moves into territory of coincidences and fails to deliver a satisfactory conclusion.

Blurb: At the age of ten, Darren promised he would love his friend Adam forever and that they would someday marry, and sealed the promise with a kiss. One month later, his friend was gone, and their promise lost to the passage of time.

Years later, Darren cannot forget that long ago promise, and at the urging of a friend, decides to take a chance and track down the boy he once loved…

Review:

I have read a few short stories by this author and I enjoyed them a great deal. The blurb and unconventional cover were additional reasons that attracted me to this story. However, the story fails to deliver a satisfactory conclusion, primarily due to a series of coincidences which seemed artificial. If this was a story with a clearly defined “fairy tale” feel, I probably wouldn’t mind so much, but, as it is, I was mildly disappointed.

The best things about Promise in a Kiss are the author’s fluid writing style and the very beginning of the story, which was truly beautiful. Darren, a ten-year-old boy, makes a promise to his friend Adam that he will marry him when they grow up. Set in a stormy night, this scene showed the innocence of these boys, the purity of their feelings and the children’s unwavering trust in the future. I was captured and I wanted to know what that future held for them.

Fifteen years latter, Darren is a reporter living with Kim, his roommate. We learn that not long after the night from the beginning of the story, Adam went with his family to live in Tokyo. Darren never saw him again. Time did its thing and Darren can’t even remember Adam’s last name. But, the memories of that night and their time together persist. We also learn some things about Darren’s family situation. His only surviving relative is a grandfather, who is dying from Alzheimer’s disease. Darren seems lonely, dedicated to his job and it is no wonder that Kim manages to convince him to use his holiday to find Adam and see if something of their past survived.

Darren is a likable character and, even in a short story, one cannot help but want the best for him. Unfortunately, once he starts the journey – things go downhill. One coincidence follows another: the men’s mirror searches, their disappointing results and, finally, their meeting at the Tokyo Airport. The story ends with this meeting, with nothing more than a decision that the two men will explore the possibilities among them. On its own, the ending would not be a problem. After all, this is a short story. However, everything that preceded it wasn’t sufficient to make me believe in their future, nothing that was good enough answer to that first, lovely scene. Also, Adam is too undeveloped a character to inspire any attachment in a reader or explain his own search for Darren. I would have liked if we got some interaction between Darren and Adam to give us some insight in their possible future.

I have another complaint, though the other readers might not feel the same. Adam is half-Japanese and he spends more than half of his life in Japan. There is nothing inherently Japanese about him, not in the way he is behaving or living or talking. Again, I understand that this is a short story, but, if something is mentioned in the story, I expect it to be used. Additionally, I had a problem with Miyu, Adam’s pushy neighbor, who behaved unlike any Japanese woman I’ve ever heard or read about or met in person. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there are pushy women in Japan, but Miyu seemed like an American (or insert other western nation here) with a Japanese name tacked on.

Overall, the idea of the story, if not exactly new, was promising and I liked Darren from the first page. But, the final result is simply asking for more: some exposition, additional interaction between the characters and, above all, some explanations that would smooth those jarring coincidences. Still, this is a short, clean story, suitable for reading between longer works. And, who knows, maybe this is just a story for you and you will enjoy it more than me.