Filthy
Shannon Mather picks up other people's garbage for a living. Then one morning, the garbage gives him $186,400.
He should turn it in.
Instead, he takes it home.
Then he calls Kelley Lablanc.
Kelley has been in Shannon's life for nine years. They've been friends. They've slept together. They've shown up after breakups, bad shifts, family problems, and nights when going home alone seemed like a worse idea than going home together. They know exactly how the other likes to be touched and have somehow managed to avoid a serious conversation about what any of it means.
So naturally, Kelley is the first person Shannon calls when he needs help deciding what to do with nearly two hundred thousand dollars that absolutely does not belong to him.
Kelley thinks Shannon has lost his mind.
For a while, Shannon thinks he may have gotten lucky.
Then the dead man's family realizes what was accidentally thrown away.
The questions start almost immediately. Shannon's supervisor wants to know what he saw. His coworker remembers him climbing out of the truck. The family wants its property back. There are cameras on houses, paperwork to fill out, people comparing stories, and a growing number of opportunities for Shannon to tell the truth.
He keeps choosing the next lie instead.
And Kelley, despite all his better judgment, doesn't stay outside the mess for long.
What begins as a terrible decision over a bag of cash starts reaching into everything the two men thought they had under control: their jobs, their families, their bank accounts, their reputations, and the strange nine-year relationship they have both been pretending requires no explanation.
Because money is easy when it's hypothetical.
So is morality.
So is love.
It gets harder when the money is sitting on the kitchen table, the police are asking questions, somebody you love needs help, and the person beside you knows exactly what you did.
FILTHY: A Love Story is an adult contemporary gay romance about working people, bad decisions, sex that has always been easier than honesty, and what happens after the fantasy of getting everything you want turns into the reality of having to live with what you chose.
It's about bills. Jobs. Mothers. Lawyers. Grocery-store cake. Garbage trucks. Sex. Shame. Forgiveness. A crooked fence that really should have been fixed years ago.
And two men discovering that building a life together may be harder than stealing $186,400-but considerably more worth it.
The manuscript ultimately gives them a genuine long-term domestic future rather than treating the crime as the whole point; by the end, the money has become part of the history they survived rather than the thing defining them.
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