Undefined Terms

Undefined Terms is Book 2 of The Carrick Brothers: an opposites-attract queer romance with a non-binary lead, set in Manchester, between site manager Ron Carrick and Welsh writer Celyn Beynon, and a complete love story you can read on its own.

Good money. Good project. Close to his brother.

Those are Ron Carrick's three reasons for two years on a Manchester building site. The fourth isn't on the list. For more than a year of weekend visits from London, the fourth has been sitting at the corner table of a Northern Quarter bar with a laptop and a pot of tea, and Ron has stayed at the counter and never once crossed the floor.

Then one night the bar is full, Ron is standing with his jacket on like a spare part, and Celyn looks up from the laptop. 'That stool looks uncomfortable. There's a chair here.'

Celyn Beynon is from north Wales, writes horror between shifts at a restaurant, paints their nails postbox red and puts on eyeliner over a day's stubble when the day calls for it. Ron is twenty-seven and has only ever been with women. He has a file in his head for everything. Not one of them fits Celyn, and Celyn has no plans to fit one.

What starts at a corner table runs straight into the rest of Ron's life: the lads on site and their opinions, his dad's long silence with Ewan, the name Celyn's family in Beddgelert still use. The heat comes early. What takes Ron the whole book is saying any of it out loud.

In geometry, an undefined term is one you never define. You build on it.

Good to know

• Reading order: Book 2 of The Carrick Brothers, and it stands alone. Book 1, Proof by Contradiction, is his younger brother Ewan's story; Book 3, Carried the One, is the last. Celyn's side of this same story is the companion novel Second Person, best read after this one.
• Point of view: Ron only, first person, present tense.
• Heat: open door and explicit, between consenting adults; they switch.
• Ending: happy ever after, no cliffhanger.
• Length: a full-length novel of about 107,000 words, in British English.