Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Jimmy
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, 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.”
I didn’t have words big enough to hold what I wanted.
Like I wanted everything, and I was terrified of all of it.
I wanted to stop time in this room and lay my cheek where his heart thudded and believe that this was holy.
Then I wanted to unlearn every sermon that ever taught me how to hate the parts of me that lit up at the sight of a beautiful man.
More than anything, I wanted Lucien’s mouth on me.
“Do you want this?” he asked again, his voice breaking around the question. I felt it shiver through him, then through me. He wasn’t unaffected; he was holding on by the same frayed thread I was.
I pulled back enough to see his face. Up close, he was devastating—eyes gone dark, lashes low, mouth soft and hungry all at once.
A pulse beat in his throat. Lucien looked…
scared. Not of me. Of himself, maybe. It made something fierce and protective flare in me—that a man like this could look at me like I was something worth trembling for.
I turned my head and kissed him.
The kiss wasn’t careful. It wasn’t clean.
It was messy and real and tasted like the life I’d been starving myself out of.
Lucien opened for me, and then I was wrecked by the wet heat of his mouth and the slow drag of his tongue.
I gasped, then the angle shifted, and I felt him everywhere—chest to chest, hip to hip, the hard line of his erection stamping its shape against me.
The world tilted, colors too bright behind my closed eyes, and I didn’t care if the floor fell away as long as his mouth stayed on mine.
Lucien’s thumb stroked my cheekbone, and the tenderness almost undid me more than the heat.
He was asking and answering a question with his mouth- I want you, do you want me?
My body shouted yes in every way it knew how—breathless, shaking, and pressed up tight to him like we could knit ourselves together through fabric and will alone.
I didn’t think about hell, or about Daddy. I thought about the taste of Lucien and the way his breath hitched when I slid my palm up the hard plane of his chest to the steady thud of his heart.
Lucien broke the kiss first, barely, our mouths still brushing, breath mingling. His eyes searched mine as if he were hunting for doubt and finding too much desire instead.
“Jimmy,” he murmured, voice trembling.
“Yes,” I breathed, the word raw. “God—yes.”
Lucien’s hand found mine. The next thing I knew, he was leading me out of the kitchen. The air around us felt too thick to breathe. My heart hammered in my chest, and every step up the staircase was a slow surrender to something I couldn’t name.
He didn’t pull; he guided. His thumb traced slow circles against my knuckles, a silent promise that made my throat ache.
The stairs creaked under our feet. The world had narrowed to the sound of his breathing, the rough slide of our palms, and the tremor in my legs that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with wanting him.
We reached the landing. Lucien turned left, pushed open a door, and light spilled in from the tall windows.
His bedroom.
It hit me all at once—this was where I wanted to be more than anywhere else on earth.
The realization came with a rush of shame and longing that nearly dropped me to my knees.
The room was warm, the bed neatly made, dark sheets against pale walls, and the scent of him was everywhere—cologne and cedar and something wilder underneath.
Lucien let go of my hand. Then he reached for the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head in one smooth motion, then tossed it to the floor.
For a second, I just stared.
His body was everything I’d ever been afraid to want—lean muscle, dusted with dark hair, skin the color of sunlight through whiskey. A faint scar crossed one rib like a secret. His chest rose and fell, and my breath went with it.
Lucien didn’t speak. He stepped in closer, caught me around the waist, and kissed me again.
The kiss was rougher now, desperate. His mouth claimed mine, and I couldn’t stop the soft sound that escaped me.
The world dissolved into sensation—his heat, his scent, the weight of him pressing me backward until my calves hit the bed.
Then, Lucien lifted me off my feet.
He set me down on the mattress, the springs sighing under us. His mouth was still on mine, slower now, tasting, mapping, learning. Lucien’s large hands framed my face like I was something precious, and for a dizzy, perfect moment I believed it.
Then it happened.
The image slammed into my mind so hard I gasped. Daddy’s face—his eyes cold, his mouth a straight slash of fury. His voice followed, booming from the pulpit and the back of my skull all at once.
Abomination. Perverse. You’ll burn.
Scripture reeled through me like a whip. Better to pluck out the eye that offends. The wages of sin is death.
My body went stiff.
Lucien froze above me, sensing it immediately. “Jimmy?” His voice was soft, concerned. “Hey—something shifted. You okay?”
I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even look at him. My lungs wouldn’t work. The room tilted; the air was wrong.
“I—” I pushed at his chest, weak at first, then harder. “I can’t.”
“Jimmy—”
“I can’t!”