Bailey Aldrich has catalogued four hundred and twelve bird species across three continents. He has identified a Lesser Spotted Woodpecker by call alone, in the dark, during a thunderstorm. He has spent eleven hours in a marshland hide on cold tea and one granola bar and called it a fine afternoon.
He is not, as a rule, flustered by anything.
He is, however, currently hiding behind a potted fern using two thousand dollars' worth of Austrian optics to watch his next-door neighbour.
Justin Miller has lived next door for eleven years. He is objectively, taxonomically, insufferably difficult to classify - too kind for the simple categories, too attentive for someone who is supposed to have moved on, and entirely too present in Bailey's field notes for a person who is meant to be a neighbour and nothing more.
Bailey is a scientist. Scientists observe. They document. They maintain distance.
They do not fall in love with their subjects.
(Probably.)
The Birdwatcher's Guide to Justin is a story about the gap between seeing clearly and understanding what you see - and the considerable amount of scientific self-deception required to pretend the data isn't pointing exactly where you think it is.
Autorentext
Maria Rose fell in love with M/M romance after getting completely obsessed with Thai BL dramas (and honestly... she has zero regrets). When she's not writing, she's probably reading fanfiction "for five minutes" (three hours later she's still there), collecting fictional boyfriends, and turning every cute glance into a full romance plot.