Sixteen year old Jacob Smithson has quite a temper. He’s picked on by other kids because he likes boys, and recent fighting has kicked him out of public school. As a last resort, his parents have placed him in the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Boarding School for Boys.<br><br>It’s at his first mass at St. Thomas where he sees Avery Dendritch, a senior who serves as altar boy during the service. When they meet, the attraction between them is hard to deny. The two become fast friends, and as the school year progresses, their friendship deepens into something more. For the first time, Jacob has found a place where he belongs ... and someone with whom he’s falling in love.<br><br>But the other students gossip about their growing relationship, and while Avery can ignore them, Jacob cannot. As the rumors and slurs start up again, can he curb his temper, or will his penchant for fighting get him expelled from St. Thomas, as well?

Without Sin

Jacob glares at his roommate across the table. “You don’t even know him.”


Jacob’s voice holds that undercurrent of anger that Mike will learn about soon enough. It’s the anger that got Jacob kicked out of the public high school last year, when one of the other freshman thought it would be cute to call him a fag.


That had been in the boys’ locker room after P.E. The kid had spent the next hour in the nurse’s office, waiting for his mom to pick him up. He’d needed five stitches across his forehead where Jacob had rammed him into one of the faucets in the showers.


Jacob had spent the rest of the day in the principal’s office, listening as “Dirty Harry” explained to his parents how horrible a child he could be. His therapist had been there, too. She hadn’t mentioned then that he was brilliant and bored. She had just nodded in all the right places, and when Jacob left the school, he had been told not to come back.


Chapter 6