Higuys! I'm so excited to be part of the Wattpad Block Party for the third timeand I hope you enjoy my post! Today I'm sharing a sneak peek of my upcomingnovel, Between the Lines. The story will be posted once Shrinking Violet and BlueChristmas are finished, hopefully before April NaNoWriMo rolls around (forwhich I want to write the Turning Point sequel). I hope you like this sneakpeek / promo. This book is going to be a bit of an experiment, following theofficial Wattpad guide for success – that mostly means shorter chapters! Thisbook will most likely be shorter and faster paced than my others (we're talking70-90k as opposed to 110-150k ... or 250k in the case of TNT and HOH!) and 

Milo Kennedy knows exactly what he wants from life. He just doesn't know how to get it.

Just two terms into a new job at a notoriously difficult high school, he feels completely out of his depth. Teaching is his passion but the staff don't like him and the kids don't respect him: it's a far cry from the last school he taught at. He's not used to dreading work each morning, but a lot has changed over the past few months. He got as close as ever to having it all, and now he's back to square one.

Milo needs a win. It's his flatmate's idea for him to start a school book club: it's something for him to do, and way to help the kids that bother to show up. He doesn't expect any to come, let alone read the book, until the school decides to pair the club up with the school's mental health service. Sometimes a book is the best therapy, after all, and Milo is happy to share.

Especially when he meets the new counsellor. Suddenly he has someone to sit with at lunch and a newfound belief in love at first sight. He just wishes Aaron worked more than ten hours a week.

"I'M DONE. I'M so done. I am so done. I am so fucking done."

Milo looked up from the recipe he had torn out of the newspaper. He had managed to tear straight through half the ingredients too: he was winging it. The concoction in the pan was either going to be a delicious casserole or virtually inedible.

"As in finished? Or fed up?" he asked. His glasses threatened to slip off his nose and when he lunged to stop them from plunging into the pan, he dropped the recipe. The thin sheet slipped under the counter, where it would no doubt gather dust until someone gutted the place.

His flatmate hauled her bag onto the kitchen table with a grumpy grunt. "As in I am so done."

Her words didn't answer his question but her tone did. Milo turned his back on the bubbling sauce and folded his arms, meeting Victoria's eye. She never actually let him call her Victoria, though. Only her parents had that privilege. To everyone else, she was Vix.

"What happened now?" he asked. Vix was a drama queen: loud and proud, she captured the attention of any room she entered.

"Two. Fucking. Buses." She jabbed two angry fingers in his direction. "They just sailed right past me." She harrumphed again, shrugging her shoulders to shake off her irritation, and raked a hand through her hair. The colour was always changing. Right now it was a calming shade of deep blue, though she would no doubt change it before the month was up. "Got their number plates, though."

"I smell a couple of complaint letters."

"Damn right you do." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to cleanse her lungs and inhale the scent of Milo's cooking. When she had calmed herself down, she took off her cat-eye glasses to wipe rain from the lenses. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing," Milo said. "Nothing. I'm fine."

Too much. He knew that. Vix did too. She scoffed.

"Liar, liar, pants on fire," she said. "You only cook when you're annoyed. Bad day?" She glanced at the clock. Ten to six. Milo had been home from work for over an hour.

"Every day is a bad day," he said.

Vix raised her eyebrows and cracked a smile. "And you call me the drama queen. You love teaching. You're always going on about that. What can be so bad for so long?"

"These kids," he muttered. Turning down the heat to a gentle simmer, he joined Vix on the other side of the kitchen. "I think some of them might actually be the devil reincarnated. Lucifer is taunting me, parading about in the skins of a thousand twattish kids."

With a snort, Vix shook her head. "What'd I tell you when you first said you want to be a teacher? Kids are d-"

"Kids are dicks, I know," Milo said, "but they're not. They're kids. These ones are just a particularly bad batch. And the staff might be worse."

Vix winced. She folded her arms on the table and let out a heavy breath. "It'll get better," she said, but she had been saying that since September. It was April now, and the only thing that had got better was Milo's navigation of the sprawling school.

St Joseph's Secondary School was a big step down from Greenfield Academy. Milo had got comfortable after five years teaching at the selective academy, where most of the students had been eager to learn and they had all passed a surprisingly rigorous examination to get in. Every background was represented, intelligence the only common thread, and he had loved turning up each day.

Until budget cuts had seen him out of a job, and St Joe's had been the only school with an opening.

As far as Milo could tell, it was a dumping ground for teachers who didn't care about their jobs and students who were a hair's width away from landing themselves in juvie. The last thing he wanted to do was to box every pupil into the school's reputation, but he had yet to meet one to prove him wrong. They cared far more about bullying him and each other than passing their exams.

"I'm not sure how it can get better," he said, meeting Vix's gaze with a hopeless one of his own. She had been his best friend for seventeen years, ever since they had been two awkward eleven-year-olds starting at a new school. Children could be cruel, and they had been instant outcasts: to them, Vix was the geeky fat girl and Milo was the nerdy gay boy.

The segregation hadn't lasted long. Just long enough for them to find solace in each other.

"You gotta pull your sack out of the gutter, Milo," she said, tutting at him. Her caring side was a fleeting one, usually overwhelmed by her brash bluntness. "You either suck it up and deal with it, or you make the staff like you. Or they make the kids like you."

"I think this is going to be my last term," he said. He stood again, resting his hand on Vix's shoulder for a moment before he launched away from her to pour himself a glass of wine. "I'll suck it up until July and then I'm finding a new job. Maybe I should be a chef."

"God, no. You can't cook, babes. You really can't cook." She nodded at the bubbling pan. "You know we're going to be getting a takeaway tonight, right?" Turning her head over her shoulder, she yelled, "Hey! Sunny! Whaddaya want for supper?"

A moment of quiet passed before the third flatmate in their two-bed flat emerged. Mi-sun snuck in like a cat, silent wherever she went, but she could hardly blend in when her hair was a vibrant shade of magenta. Somehow she made her oversized granny glasses look good.

The three of them were a walking advert for Specsavers.

"Not Mexican," she said, glancing from Vix to Milo and back again. "I'm on ... not the best terms with Mexico."

To say that Milo didn't understand Mi-sun would be the understatement of the year. He had a feeling she was from an entirely different planet and she unnerved him a little, but she was Vix's other best friend so by default, he had to love her. The two girls had been thrown together as flatmates at university, when Mi-sun had been an international student from South Korea who hardly spoke a word of English, and she had never looked back.

Milo wouldn't be surprised if she had been kicked out of the country.

Vix laughed. "Ok. No Mexican. I don't think there even is a Mexican takeaway near here anyway. Just lemme know what you want, or it's whatever Milo's made."

Mi-sun widened her eyes and stared at him. "Mexico would be better," she said. She slinked past him, her bare feet making no sound on the wood. "Curry will be good. With the cream, and the ... the nuts." She made a circle with her hands. "The hairy nuts."

"Ok, a Kerala chicken curry for my shining sun," Vix said with a teasing grin. Milo didn't dare call Mi-sun anything but his name for fear she might smother him in his sleep. He had known her for seven years and lived with her for nearly one, and he wasn't even close to figuring her out.

"Milo?"

"Yes?"

"Indian?"

"I'll have a korma," he said, and he glanced at his attempted casserole. He had only made it to give himself something to do, and he had only used leftovers in the fridge and the pantry. Not all of it could be guaranteed to be in date, and some of it had been a total gamble. Mi-sun was the only half-decent cook in the flat, and she got almost all of her ingredients from the Korean supermarket in town.

Mi-sun slipped into the seat at a right angle to Milo, fixing him with an intense stare. "You don't like your children," she said. Her voice was too serious for his liking, and she was leaning a little too close. She was full of plans and schemes. Almost all of them were illegal, or just plain scary.

"I don't want them dead," Milo said. Mi-sun leant back and held up her hands. When he grimaced, she gave him a bright smile. It changed her face completely, pushing dimples into her freckled cheeks.

"I kid you," she said, and then she laughed. "Ha! See? A word joke."

It was hard not to at least crack a smile. She had a talent for terrifying and amusing him in a very short space of time.

"Milo's just having a crisis," Vix said. "He has no friends and the kids don't like him."

"You have us," Mi-sun said. She pouted, her eyebrows pulling together high above her huge irises. "Are we not friends?"

He felt bad for a moment. Yes, of course she was his friend. He was fine being friends with a potential psychopath. "Yes, you're my friend," he said, "but I don't have any work friends. The staff have worse cliques than the students and I'm not in any of them."

"You're your own clique," Vix said.

Mi-sun buried her nose in a Korean-language book she had left lying on the table, and she quietly clicked her fingers.

"You just need to do something," Vix continued. She was well used to Mi-sun by now. Not only did they live together, but they shared a room. Technically, the flat was supposed to have two tenants but the landlord didn't seem to care: he had turned a blind eye when a morose Milo had moved in over the summer and in exchange, he only answered the phone half the time.

The move wasn't Milo's choice. As much as he adored his best friend, he had hoped that by twenty-eight he could be living independently, but his demotion and a badly timed break-up had forced him to show his hand. His ex-boyfriend had paid more than half of the rent: he could afford to stay on alone in the flat they had shared for over a year. Milo couldn't. He was out. Out of a job; out of a relationship; out of a place to live.

It would be a stretch to say things were looking up.

"Like what?"

Vix shrugged. "Get involved. Make them like you. You can't mope around like this for another three months. Start a club or something."

Milo snorted and stood to get rid of the disastrous casserole. Thinking back on the cooking process, some of the quantities didn't quite add up. He didn't dare taste it.

"I think I'd be even more of an outcast if I tried to start a teacher's club."

"No, you fuckwit." Vix grabbed the pan before Milo could try to dump the boiling sauce into a thin plastic bin bag. "A student club. It'll give you something to do, and you can find some of the less dickish students. Any kid that goes to a voluntary school club isn't going to be the type to pick on their teacher."

Milo paused, losing himself in thought. "I don't know," he said after several seconds had passed. "I think it's probably best if I just keep my head down and finish the year, and get out when I can."

"You do books," Mi-sun piped up. She held out her battered novel, though Milo couldn't make head or tail of the hangul. "Do a club for books."

"Yeah!" Vix cried out, pointing at the book. "You should start a book club. If any kid shows up, you'll already have something in common and it's not like they're gonna stop you from making a club. It's just an extension of your job – aren't you supposed to get kids excited about reading?"

Milo nodded. Literature was his passion. Teaching was his dream. He had wanted to be an English teacher ever since his own had inspired him: he knew he owed it to himself to do whatever he could to realise that dream.

"One child." Mi-sun held up a finger and held him in an unblinking optical headlock. "That's all you need to make a difference."

***

i hope you liked this sneak peek of Between the Lines! i'm excited to write another male MC, and another bxb (mxm?) novel, and to try out a slightly different style and length of chapter / novel. if you want to keep up with sneak peeks into my life and writing alike, make sure to check out my personal and wattpad social medias below!

★ ★ ★

ENTER THE WATTPAD BLOCK PARTY GIVEAWAYS BY CLICKING HERE:

Shortened Link to Blog: https://goo.gl/oCHaqH

OR HERE:

Regular Link to Blog: http://kellyanneblountauthor.blogspot.com/2018/01/wattpad-block-party-winter-edition-iv.html