BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT!

I’ve waited years to be able to finally say this to you—you, specifically, this wonderful group of people who have supported my writing for so long:

My debut novel, A SERIES OF ROOMS, will be available later this year.

On the night of his twenty-first birthday, a domino effect of unfortunate events leads Liam Cassidy to a chance encounter with a stranger: shared refuge in a bar bathroom. For a brief moment in time they hide away in the comfort of commiseration, each with their own reasons for avoiding the party outside the door. When they part ways, Liam expects that to be the end of their story.

He definitely doesn’t expect to find the same stranger waiting in his hotel room that night.

The young man is revealed to be a sex worker, hired without Liam’s consent—a thoughtless joke of a birthday gift from his friends. But it doesn’t take long to realize something nefarious lies behind the boy’s circumstances. Hungry, guarded, and jumping at shadows, it’s clear he is in need of a break, and Liam finds himself in the unique position to grant him one.

Drawn together by their mutual need for escape, the two of them fall into an arrangement of weekly meetings inside the cheapest hotel rooms Chicago has to offer. The encounters are not sexual in nature, but an unexpected intimacy blossoms between them over time.

For one of them, it’s a night of guaranteed safety. For the other, it’s the first real friendship he has ever known.

But soon, the realities that exist outside their secluded series of rooms begin closing in around them, reminding them that they can’t live in a bubble forever.

Déjà-Vu

Part of Fifty-Eight Days. Takes place after this chapter. 

ALSO, if you have not yet read the BEAUTIFUL, BRILLIANT fanfic of these two by @writereleaserepeat, do yourself a favor and click this link. 

WARNINGS: Suicide attempt & aftermath, talk of mood stabilizing medication, post-capitivity, implied/referenced past sexual assault, severe PTSD, panic attacks, med whump, needles. 

The sense of deja vu didn’t escape him. Grayson and Elijah had been here before; a lifetime ago, somehow squeezed into the same calendar year, in a hospital room thousands of miles away.

Back then, Grayson was the one in the chair, Elijah in the bed—tangled in wires, freshly broken, and medicated after nearly dislodging his IV in an effort to evade the doctor’s touch. Grayson didn’t know at the time—couldn’t have known—that it would be one of the last times he saw Elijah in the following months. That once they were separated, he wouldn’t see him again until he showed up in the doorway of Grayson’s hospital room last night like a ghost from a dream.

Now, Grayson was wide awake while Elijah dozed in the chair beside him, camped out in the spot he hadn’t left all day. His arms, sheathed in a dark zip-up, were crossed tightly over his stomach. Something broke inside Grayson to see he still slept in the same position he’d witnessed in captivity—defensive even in rest.

Watching him from across the room, Grayson found himself re-memorizing every inch of him. From the black hair that had grown out, strands slipping free from the bun at the nape of his neck, to the pale ridges of his knuckles grasping at the material of his sweatshirt. And all he could think was how much he did not deserve this. Did not deserve him.

He forced himself to look away.

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