Monthly Archives: October 2025

Lately, I’ve been living in black and white.

When I’m not writing, I’ve been watching old films from the 1930s—those moody, atmospheric pictures where shadows tell half the story and desire hums just below the surface. There’s something intoxicating about that era. The way the camera lingered on a trembling hand or a cigarette burning. The way emotion had to be suggested, not shown. It’s sexier because of what’s left unsaid. It forces the viewer to use their imagination.

I didn’t plan for it, but those movies have started bleeding into my writing of Devil’s Advocate. The story has that same smoky tension—two men circling something they both want and fear, trapped between sin and salvation. It feels like an old black-and-white film playing on a loop inside my head.

When I picture Lucien and Jimmy, I see them in that hazy chiaroscuro light:
Lucien framed in half-shadow, his eyes catching just enough glow to look dangerous.
Jimmy, trembling, the moral world he’s been raised in collapsing around him like a cathedral in flames.

Every whispered word, every near-touch feels cinematic—like one of those moments just before the censors cut away, leaving the audience to imagine what happens next.That’s what Devil’s Advocate is to me:
A love story shot in metaphorical black and white, where the sin isn’t desire—it’s denial.

The following is an excerpt from Devil’s Advocate, which releases on Halloween 2025.

Lucien’s arms were solid bands around my back, his chest a wall of heat I could lean into or break myself against, and for a second I forgot how to breathe. I pressed my face to the place where his neck met his shoulder and smelled only clean skin with something darker underneath: smoke, spice, and the faintest trace of kitchen grease, which somehow made him more real. The throb of my pulse synced to his heartbeat, steady and thunderous, and the world went quiet except for that sound and the tiny, ragged breaths scraping out of me.

I was grateful. God help me, I was so grateful he’d crossed that room and put his arms around me when I was shaking apart. A minute before, my daddy’s voice had been chewing me up from the inside, and then Lucien’s hold came down like shelter. He said nothing at first. He just gathered me in his arms like he’d been waiting to, like I’d fit there all along.

And I was embarrassed, too—humiliated that he’d seen me like that, weak and small and scared. I never wanted him to think of me that way, as the boy who flinched when a man raised his voice. I wanted him to see the good parts: the music, the patience, the part of me that showed up at the food kitchen because I believed kindness was holy. But there I was, clinging to him like a drowning man.

“Hey,” he murmured against my hair. “I’ve got you.”

Something broke open in my chest.

The gratitude spiraled into something else—something hotter, heavier. It started at the base of my spine and streaked forward, a live wire snapping under my skin. I became aware of everything about him at once: the width of his shoulders, the way his breath stuttered, the heat rolling off him like summer pavement. My fingers curled into the back of his shirt and felt muscle under the cotton. He was so solid, filled with promise and danger, and the nearness of him hit me like a storm.

My breathing went ragged. I tried to slow it, count it, hide it, but the more I tried to get a grip, the worse it got. Sweat gathered at my hairline and slid along my temple. My skin prickled like I’d stepped out of my body and every nerve had come alive. And then I realized—mortifying and undeniable—that I was hard. Not just a little. Not just that shy ache I knew how to will away. My dick was straining against the zipper, urgent, a pressure that bordered on pain, and I was pressed against him with nowhere to hide.

I told myself to think of something else. Math problems. Sermon notes. Hymns. I tried to hear “How Great Thou Art,” and all I heard was the steady drum of my pulse. And the feel of his hand rubbing circles at the small of my back, slow, steady, possessive in a way that made my knees weak.

Temptation wasn’t a whisper anymore. It was Lucien.

And then it hit me—Lucien was trembling. Just a little, but I felt it, a fine shiver running through him that set off a matching quake in me. His thigh shifted between mine, and I went dizzy. The world narrowed to the slide of his breath along my cheek and the hot, unmistakable pressure pressing back against me. 

Lucien was hard too. 

The knowledge lanced through me, sweet and terrifying. I’d never been more aware of another man’s need in my life.

“Are you okay?” he whispered.

I opened my mouth and found nothing but a sound I didn’t recognize leaking out of me—a broken little gasp that turned into a groan. It crawled out of my chest without permission, honest and helpless, and the second it left me, I felt him respond. His grip flexed. His breath caught. The hardness of him nudged against me, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut against the way it ricocheted through my body.

“Jimmy.” My name, dragged out of him like it cost. “I want you.” He said it haltingly, careful and fierce all at once. “I want you so bad it feels like I’m coming apart. But if you’re scared—if you don’t want to—say it. I’ll stop. I need you to want me too. This doesn’t go one inch further unless you want it.”

The floor seemed to tilt. A man like him, all hard edges and masculine, handing me the reins—I didn’t know what to do with the power of it. The ache in me swelled, thick and tidal. I clutched his shirt tighter, breathing open-mouthed against his throat. My heart hammered.

Not forcing. Not taking. Only offering himself.

My mind split clean down the center.

On one side was heat, near unbearable pressure, and a promise I could taste.

On the other side—memory. It rose up mean and bright, a projector bulb burning through the dark.

Saul’s laughter in our garage the summer I turned sixteen, dust motes floating like glitter in hot light. We’d taken apart the lawnmower because we were dumb and bored and everything felt possible. He’d had oil on his jaw, and I’d wiped it off with my thumb, and we’d paused like the air had gone syrup-thick. He’d said, “If you don’t want to—” and I’d cut him off with my mouth because I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to feel.

We were clumsy. It was nothing like the slick sin Daddy warned about from the pulpit. It felt like a firefly landing on your knuckle—shocking and wonderful, light with nowhere to go but inside your skin. Our teeth bumped. We figured it out, and the world didn’t end.

Until the side door slammed open. Daddy’s silhouette cut the light, and then his voice was everywhere, a flood that drowned me.

 “Abomination!”

He came at us so fast I didn’t have time to beg. Saul scrambled back, knocking the wrench set onto the concrete with a scatter of clanging metal. Daddy’s hand caught my arm, and I remember the shock more than the pain at first, the disbelief that this was happening, that my father’s hand could feel like a stranger’s. 

Saul ran. 

The sound of his sneakers slapping the driveway was the loudest thing I’d ever heard until the belt was louder. Leather and rage, over and over, a rhythm I still sometimes felt under my skin when I tried to sleep. Daddy panting, quoting scripture between blows like a man trying to baptize me with pain. 

“Better to enter heaven maimed—better to cut it out—better than hellfire!” The words tangled, becoming one long sentence that meant only this: You are wrong. You are broken. God hates what you are.

Afterward, there was the quiet. The slick mess of tears, the sting that didn’t stop, the coppery taste of blood in my mouth where I’d bitten to keep from screaming. Daddy kneeling beside me, gentling his voice, telling me he loved me, that he had to do it, that love corrected error, that he’d saved me from damnation. He prayed over me while my body shook. 

“You’ll thank me one day,” Daddy whispered, and I nodded because there was no other answer allowed.

The flash of memory snapped away, and I was back in Lucien’s kitchen, wrapped in arms that held but didn’t hurt, hearts colliding instead of fists. My skin burned with the echo of old pain and the fresh blaze of desire. I pressed closer, greedy for comfort, greedy for him, and hated myself for wanting this even as it made me feel alive.

“Tell me what you want,” Lucien said breathlessly. “You get to choose, Jimmy.”

Preorder your copy of Devil’s Advocate now. It’s available at all major online bookstores.