I’ve been in love with my best friend for years.
The problem?
He thinks I’m straight.
And now that I share a dorm with him, his insistent need to cuddle -and lack of clothes- are blurring the careful lines I’ve drawn.
I'm struggling to keep my defenses up.
I love him but I’m afraid.
Afraid I’m not enough to make him stay.
Afraid he’ll rip my heart out.
Afraid he won’t love me back.
But I see a side of him no one else does.
In the security of our room, he lets his mask fall.
Let's me hold him.
Something lurks in the dark recesses of his mind that keeps him from going all in.
He’s just as hesitant about this as I am, but I don’t understand why.
Can I convince him to let me love him the way he deserves…
or will he take my heart and run away with it?
Welcome to Black Diamond Resort and Spa…
After years of drowning myself in parties, hook ups, and pain, all it takes is one viral sex tape to get me thrown on a remote island to disappear for a while.
That or lose my trust fund.
Having to share a room with the one man I let hurt me is my worst nightmare.
I’m the broken shell of the boy he walked away from on the single worst day of my life.
I hate him almost as much as I hate myself.
This island was supposed to be a place I could rest but instead I’m running.
From Asher Vaughn.
From myself.
From the scars on my heart that never healed.
It hurts to look at him and see all the things we never got to have.
But how am I supposed to keep him at arm's length when he watches me the way he used too?
When he touches me? When he calls me his?
We can’t be together, not off this island.
The straight football star and the gay femme son of famous parents.
The media would rip us apart and ruin his career.
I barely survived the last time he left me, can I live through being deserted again?
Charles Preston Carmichael is the most infuriating man I’ve ever met.
I want to sock the golden boy of college hockey right in the mouth.
He enjoys telling me everything I’m messing up. Publicly.
And since he’s my roommate for the next year, I can’t avoid him.
Yet there’s something about him that makes me watch him.
Something dark.
A secret I want to uncover.
When he returns from a weekend away, broken and haunted, I can’t keep my distance anymore.
He needs someone and I’ll be damned if it’s not me.
Soon my life no longer revolves around hockey, but the nightmares he’s living with.
Desperately I want to save him but I can’t, only he can save himself.
Can I watch him destroy himself as he tries to hold tight to the things that matter or will I be the final hit in the destruction of his life?