NEW RELEASE and UPCOMING EPILOGUE
Book Title: Hilarina and the Ogre (and an extended epilogue, The Ogre Comes Home)
Author and Publisher: October Arden
Cover Artist: Dhananjaya
Release Dates: September 15, 2026 (The Ogre Comes Home: October 13)
Tense/POV: Close third, past tense, alternating POV
Genres: MM Contemporary Romance with dark elements
For Hilarina and the Ogre: Friends to lovers, found family, ace/demi spectrum romance, protector hero, first love, bullying, size difference, hurt/comfort, dark themes with a hopeful core.
For The Ogre Comes Home: Reunion romance, hurt/comfort, amnesia, recovery from trauma, meeting the parents (again), marriage proposal, domestic intimacy
Heat Rating: 2 flames
Length: 81 000 words (17 000 words for the epilogue)
It is a main story, plus an epilogue with no cliffhanger.
Goodreads
Hilarina and the Ogre | The Ogre Comes Home
Buy Links - Available in Kindle Unlimited
Hilarina and the Ogre | The Ogre Comes Home
A ballerina, an ogre, and a love that refuses to stay forgotten.
Blurb
Hilary Davis knows how to disappear.
After years of being mocked as "Hilarina Ballerina," he's perfected the act. He has a popular girlfriend he can't stand, friends he doesn't trust, and a strict rule never to dance where anyone can see. It's a brittle kind of safety, but it's all he has.
Then he meets Trenton Wells.
Massive, solemn, and the school's most devoted outcast, Trenton doesn't play by anyone's rules. He reads through every class, speaks with unnerving calm, and sees straight through every mask Hilary wears — including the ones Hilary himself doesn't know he's wearing.
What starts as a simple trade (calculus tutoring for ballet lessons) becomes something neither of them can walk away from. Choosing Trenton means losing every shield Hilary built to survive. But as the town's cruelty sharpens from slurs to violence, Trenton is willing to become any kind of monster to keep Hilary safe, and Hilary will tear his own world apart to stay at his ogre's side.
What they don't know yet is that some devotions outlast memory itself — and some damage can only be undone by the people brave enough to keep choosing each other.
Spanning youth and adult trauma, Hilarina and the Ogre is a dark, fiercely tender queer romance exploring the scars of first love, the fragile hope of second chances, and the unyielding weight of an absolute love.
The Epilogue
Trenton Wells remembers everything now.
The family that loves him. The years of forgetting. And the man who followed him across state lines, through seven separate lifetimes, without once giving up (even when it nearly destroyed him.)
So coming home should be the easy part, but Trenton can't stop tallying the cost. The fifteen years of life Hilary spent chasing him. A body that still flinches at the wrong touch. And an arm that aches when it rains, a permanent reminder of the night that shattered them both.
Hilary doesn't want his guilt, he wants his ogre — whole, present, and done apologizing for the things that were never his fault.
The Ogre Comes Home is the story about what happens after the rescue, and the fumbling, fierce, and sometimes ridiculous work of re-building a life with the only person who matters.
Excerpt
The next day was worse. They were smart enough to take their bags with them when they went to lunch, but when they returned to the classroom, there was semen on their desks and smeared into their textbooks. Hilary probably would have recognized it for what it was regardless, but the empty condom wrappers helped. It brought the fear back, and not lightly. He couldn’t afford to replace his textbooks.
When he went to Varda, he struggled to keep his voice even. “Knock it off.”
She turned those pretty eyes up at him. “Knock what off?”
“Do you know how expensive textbooks are?”
“I can think of one way for you to get money.”
He might have taken her up on it. It wasn’t just his own books that had been ruined, after all. But Trenton took him by the wrist and dragged him away. “Don’t talk to her.”
“She’s responsible for this. If I accept her offer—”
“And for the rest of the year have her around while I’m with you? Don’t. I’ll buy the books.”
Hilary had to ask. And it wasn’t because of the condoms or the spray paint. “Do you—” But he had no idea how to make the words come out. How did you form words like that? And say them out loud?
But Trenton knew what he was asking. “So to be in your life I have to want to fuck you? Is that it?”
The boy didn’t shout the words. His voice was even as always. But he was angry, and it frightened a weenie like Hilary to hear it. Even knowing the anger wasn’t directed his way, and that Trenton was the only person in school who cared about him, it was frightening. “It’s just that you’re nice. You’re too nice to me. And the things you say. No one else says things like that.”
“Yes, they do.”
“In books, but not—”
“I’m not going to be an asshole just to fit your notion of friendship. I finally found you. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to find you.”
That was just more evidence against the boy. Trenton could have grabbed him by the face and shoved his tongue down his throat, and it wouldn’t have been more shocking to Hilary than those words were. But Trenton still wasn’t done.
“People like me—we don’t get chosen. We live our quiet lives just trying not to take up space, hoping to get through each day so we can disappear into a book by the end of it. But you chose me. When you came to talk to me, and when you asked for help with the math. You didn’t mean for it to become anything. But what else could I do? I had to try. With you—because it was you—I had no choice but to try.”
Hilary’s eyes were prickling. It was the words, yes. Words he’d never heard in his life. But also the tone. Trenton was still calm, or trying to be, but it was like he’d spent the whole morning reading aloud; his voice was hoarse with it.
Hilary was forced to look down, unable to meet that earnest expression head-on. “I’m ordinary. I’m so ordinary, Trent. I’m not even smart, why would you—”
Trenton hugged him, though it was more accurate to say he grabbed him, those arms like a vise. “I wanted this,” the boy said, meaning the embrace, “I wanted to do this since the night of the party.”
That was impossible to believe. “While we were sorting through the garbage?”
“When you offered the trade. To teach me while I taught you.”
So even earlier, then.
“But that was selfish,” Hilary objected. “I needed you more than you needed me.”
“I’ll always need you.” Trenton’s face was in his shoulder, a little muffled, but not enough to obscure the words.
It left Hilary helpless, his hands raised, hovering there at the boy’s back. “This isn’t normal. What you’re saying—whatever’s happening—”
“And you want to be normal, do you? Because you were enjoying it so much. Your girlfriend and your fake friends.”
It came again—that urge to hit Trenton. No, not hit him. Hilary wasn’t sure what it was, but it made his hands clench, and finally, finally, he was able to grab hold, his fingers crushing Trenton’s shirt in his hands. “I’m not worth it. You’re going to see. You’re going to be so embarrassed when you wake up and realize.”
“Then let me be embarrassed,” Trenton said. “I promise you’ll be waiting longer than I will.”
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