As many of you know, I’ve been deep in the writing cave working on my upcoming MM romance novella, Original Sins. This book is incredibly close to my heart. It dives deep into the lives of two men caught between who they are forced to be for the world, and who they are when the lights go out.
Today, I wanted to share an exclusive, unedited chapter excerpt with you.
To set the stage: Pastor Harrison Cole has lived his entire adult life divided in two—the holy shepherd on the pulpit, and the man who hungers in the dark. He lives by a strict set of self-imposed rules to survive. Feel nothing. Get dressed. Leave immediately.
But tonight, in an anonymous hotel room twelve floors above a quiet Midwestern town, a stranger is about to break every single one of his rules.
I’m skipping past the heat of the encounter today to show you what happens afterward—in the quiet, terrifying vulnerability of the wreckage.
Read the excerpt below, and let me know what you think in the comments!
EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT: ORIGINAL SINS
Afterward, we lay in the wreckage of the bedding, not touching, both of us breathing like men who’d run a never ending race. The room was dark. Outside the window the prairie night was enormous and black, and the only light was the red eye of a smoke detector.
And I did what I always did, afterward. I reached for the rule.
I cannot feel anything.
That was the rule, the one that had kept me alive. My body could have its fever, once or twice a year, in the dark, with strangers—my body was an animal, and even animals must occasionally be fed—but my heart stayed locked. My heart was not permitted at the table. I took the fleeting thing, the encounter, the hour of mercy, and then I got dressed, got out, and I let the door shut behind me. I would not, could not look back, and above all, I felt nothing.
It was a good rule. It had never once failed me.
But it was failing me now.
I lay in the dark beside this man whose name I would never know, and I made the mistake of turning my head to look at him—the profile of him, the unafraid line of him, the rise and fall of a chest that had a real face attached to it—and something moved through me that had no business in my chest. It felt so vast and so warm and so far past the borders of anything I’d ever been allowed to feel that I, who made my living and my lies out of words, couldn’t find a single lie to hold it.
This wasn’t lust; lust I understood. It was not even the worship; I’d survived it. This was quieter and infinitely more dangerous. It felt like a door I’d kept locked my entire life, swinging open onto a room full of sunlight.
This is all I get, I reminded myself. One night, with a stranger in the dark and then the long flight home and the lights and the countless lies. These few moments are all a man like me is allowed—a fleeting thing, a sensual communion taken in secret and then a lifetime of standing in front of my congregation pretending I’ve never felt a thing for another man. I should get up, get dressed, and go.
I didn’t get up.
And then the man turned his head on the pillow, and in the dark I felt more than saw him close the last few inches between us, and he kissed me—softly, this time, with nothing in it of the appetite that had wrecked us both. Just his mouth resting warm and certain against mine, unhurried, asking nothing. A kiss like an absolution. A kiss like being told, without a single word, that I was permitted to exist.
No one had ever kissed me like that. Not in thirty-five years.
And the seawall, which had held against the flood and the fevers and the breaking, did not hold against that. Against tenderness it simply gave way, and I felt my eyes sting hot in the dark and was grateful he couldn’t see the tears sliding down my cheeks.
Maybe, I thought, and the thought was so forbidden it frightened me worse than anything we’d done. Maybe I could let myself feel something. Just for a little while. Only for tonight, in this dark room where no one knows my name and the rules can’t reach me—maybe I could let the door stay open for a little while longer. A single, fleeting, unrepeatable taste of the one thing I’d never once let myself desire.
Freedom.
I kissed him back, letting the tears flow, and for the length of that kiss I wasn’t Pastor Cole, or my mother’s son, and I was not lying to everyone I knew.
We lay like that a long while, and I waited for the shame to arrive the way it always did. It didn’t come. What came instead was his voice, low in the dark, pitched soft so as not to break whatever it was we were lying inside of.
“Can I tell you something stupid?” he murmured.
“That depends entirely on how stupid.”
He huffed a small laugh, and I felt it more than heard it, a warmth against my shoulder. “We’re never going to know each other’s names. Right? That’s the whole arrangement. Two gray squares in the dark.”
“Um, I guess. That’s the arrangement.” Even saying it cost me something I hadn’t expected it to.
“So here’s the stupid part.” He shifted, and I felt him turn toward me on the pillow. “That means I could tell you anything. Anything true. The realest, ugliest, most honest thing in me—and tomorrow you’ll be a stranger, and it would be like I’d never said it at all. I could finally tell the truth to somebody, because you’re the one person on earth who can’t use it against me.”
I lay very still. He had no idea—none—how close that came to my own truth. “All right,” I said, and my voice was not quite steady. “Then tell me something true about yourself.”
A long pause ensued, and I wondered if he’d chickened out. Finally, he took in a deep breath and began to speak.
“Somebody tried to love me once,” he breathed. “Really tried. And the whole time, I was just—waiting. For the catch. For the day he’d figure out I was a bad investment and leave. So I kept one foot out the door for both of us. I made sure he could feel it, too.” Another deep breath. “And when he finally left, you know what I felt? Relief. Because being right hurt less than being left.”
He was quiet a moment.
“I’ve told myself ever since that wanting somebody is the stupidest thing a person can do. It’s the easiest way to get destroyed there is. And I’ve built a whole—an entire life out of not needing anyone, and I wear it like it’s a fucking virtue.” His voice dropped, almost too low to catch. “And then you opened that door tonight, and I’ve spent the last few hours terrified, because I don’t want you to leave. Jesus, I don’t even know your name.”
It landed in the dark between us and sat there, and I understood that he’d handed me something real, and that the only decent thing—the only honest thing—was to hand him something back.
“My turn,” I said, and I told him a true thing about myself.
“I’m fake, like, the fakest man you’ll ever meet. It’s a version of me that stands at the front of a room and every person in that room would tell you they know exactly who I am. But not one of them has ever met the true me. Not a single one. I’ve been performing this character for so long I’ve forgotten where he stops and I start.” My throat closed. “You’re the first person in longer than I can say who’s touched the actual me. Whoever that is.”
In the dark, his hand found mine.
He didn’t make anything of it. Didn’t squeeze, didn’t lace our fingers like a vow. He just slid his palm over the back of my hand where it lay between us and let it rest there. And I—who had been preached at, prayed over, photographed, fundraised upon, and managed by my own mother for thirty-five years—could not remember the last time anyone had simply held my hand in the dark for no reason at all except that I was there and they wanted to.
I had to look at the ceiling and breathe.
“You should know,” I said, when I could, “I don’t do this part.”
“What part?”
“This. After.” I made myself say it. “I leave. Always. The second it’s over I’m dressed and gone before the other man’s caught his breath. I don’t—” the word came out cracked, “—I don’t get to stay.”
I felt him take that in. And then, instead of arguing, instead of wheedling, he did the only thing that could possibly have undone a man like me: he made it easy.
“Then don’t stay,” he said gently. “Just—don’t go yet. There’s a difference. You don’t have to decide to stay the night. You just have to not get up in the next minute. And then not the minute after that.” He turned, and drew my arm over him, and settled his back against my chest as though it were the most natural arrangement in the world, fitting himself into me. “See? Nobody stayed. We just didn’t leave.”
And God forgive me, I didn’t leave.
I wrapped myself around this stranger in the dark and held on, and the rightness of it was so total, so foreign, that for a moment, I genuinely did not know what to do with my own body. I’d held people before—congregants weeping at the altar, my mother gripping my arm for the cameras—but I had never been the one allowed to simply close his arms around a warm and willing thing and hold on.
His heartbeat slowed under my forearm, then his breathing went long and even. And I lay there in the dark feeling something I had no precedent for, no scripture for, no sermon that had ever prepared me to survive it: happiness. Real, unbearable, doomed happiness. And grief, exactly equal to it, riding alongside it. In a few hours the sun would come up over Nebraska and I’d become Pastor Cole again, and this man would become a stranger. The door would slam shut, and I’d carry the memory of one held hand to my grave like a stone in my shoe.
This sweet man was now asleep. I could tell by the weight of him. My own eyes were going heavy at last. As I slid down into the warm dark after him, with his heartbeat under my arm and his hair against my mouth, one last thought followed me down into slumber.
What would it cost me to feel like this for the rest of my life? And—the more dangerous question, the one I fell asleep still holding—was there any price on earth I wouldn’t pay to keep feeling this?
Original Sins is a forbidden, emotional, high-stakes MM romance about breaking the rules to find out who you really are.
If Harrison and his stranger grabbed you by the chest, you can lock in your copy right now. Preorders mean the absolute world to indie authors and help give a book the best possible start on release day. It’s available at all major online bookstores including Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, Nook, and Smashwords. Preorder Your Copy Today!
Ian O. Lewis and Luke Jameson 