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

“But he took me to dance. I started when I was two. I sucked. I got better. And when I got good, Mother started showing up. ‘Look at my boy.’ Her boy. She never, ever claimed to be my mother unless I was impressing somebody else. She used to make me call her Elizabeth. She gave up when I wouldn’t do it. But you’ll see. You’ll meet her.”


Ellis distinctly remembered a time when he would have killed to know so much about Bryn directly from the source. “I could, I don’t know, stay at a hotel or something?”


Bryn finally looked at Ellis. “What do you want? You always know, so…tell me.”


“I…I want to be there for you. If my dad died, I’d be fucked up for all the wrong reasons. I’d be happy about it. I think you’re fucked up on this for weird reasons too, and I guess I just want to tell you that you’re not alone in it.”


Chapter 62