Ellis Parker is a lucky man: he escaped his persecuting family, survived his tour of duty, and met Maxwell Clark in the city of New Amsterdam. Clark showed Ellis more than the ropes: Clark helped Ellis figure out who he is -- a gay submissive with a massive fixation on a beautiful, mysterious ballet dancer named Bryn Rothe. Ellis knows a Good Man when he sees one, and he wants nothing more than to score a first date with Bryn.<br><br>Little does Ellis know that Bryn has a violent past that is crawling out of shallow graves to haunt him. Even his hectic schedule and beloved stage aren’t enough to distract him. It’s impossible for Bryn to figure out how he feels about Ellis with his demons between them, but when Ellis saves Bryn not once but twice, Bryn is forced to admit that there’s something about Ellis that Bryn might not merely want but need.<br><br>Together, they journey to the scene of Bryn’s original crime -- Charles Towne, South Carolina. There they will dig up secrets that might explain Bryn’s tortured life but might also be his -- and Ellis’s -- undoing.

Earthquakes

Nope. It was what Bryn had said on the bed.


“You can fuck me, but it can’t mean anything.”


Such a statement raised a very important observation: if Bryn could fuck Ellis but nothave it mean anything, then that meant at some point Bryn had thought that if they did fuck, it wouldmean something. Anyone in Ellis’s life other than Clark would likely tell Ellis that was idealistic overthinking, but to Ellis, it made perfect sense. The guy didn’t have people over. He was clearly as physically desperate to get him some as Ellis. He was standoffish, prickly, and extremely busy, which would make him think a relationship was impossible. And if Bryn was the kind of man who only did relationships, as he’d implied in the car when he said he didn’t fuck anybody, much less Lucian, then Bryn likely only had sex with people who mattered to him.


Chapter 38