Rapture

Rapture E.M. LINDSEY Rapture E.M. Lindsey Copyright © 2023 All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, places, jobs, or events is purely coincidental. Cover by: Sleepy Fox Studios Editing: Sandra with One Love Editing Content warnings and information: on page violence including gunshot wounds, stab wounds, and a beating (none between MCs), references to Mafia and crime families, homophobia, past religious trauma in the form of child abuse and child neglect, and on page death of a non-MC. Contents EM Lindsey Links Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Epilogue Halo Afterword Also by E.M. Lindsey About the Author EM Lindsey Links EM’s Discord EM's Patreon EM Lindsey's Website Free Short Stories EM Lindsey's Amazon Account EM Lindsey on Instagram EM Lindsey on Bookbub Chapter 1 “Have you thrown anyone into the sun yet?” I laughed softly, shaking my head in spite of the fact that Dominic couldn’t see me through the phone. I would have preferred to FaceTime, but the bastard was on lunch. It wasn’t the first time I resented the fact that my best friend in the world became a doctor instead of something more menial that allowed us more time together. And it wouldn’t be the last. “No,” I told him. “The ocean?” “Too far for that.” I was in the middle of the US, about as far away from any substantial body of water as a person could get. And I couldn’t wait to leave. “Have you ever been to a funeral?” Nic sighed. “Kelli and I went to the one for her grandpa a couple of years ago. But he was an angry old bastard, so no one was really sad. They kind of used it as an excuse to have a family gathering.” I understood a little too well. That’s exactly what this felt like. Social requirements at funerals were always the most confusing thing in the world to me. People spent half their life talking shit and hating the person they were now sobbing over as they lowered their casket into the ground. Then, like a light switch, the wake became some sort of fucked-up family reunion. “At one point, my mom had dragged the kids to the cemetery hill to take family photos because the backdrop was ‘too lovely to pass up.’ Like seriously, what the fuck?” Nic laughed softly. “Do you look constipated in them?” “Buddy. She knew better than to ask me to join in,” I reminded him. I didn’t want to be here in the first place. I was the first person living an openly queer lifestyle since my uncle Thomas had come out and had been subsequently excommunicated—so to speak. She used Thomas as a threat about what could happen to me if I didn’t stay in line and refrain from flaunting my “lifestyle” in front of impressionable children or whatever. Like the internet didn’t exist. But in all honesty, the threat of being cut off was more of a promise than anything. It would have saved me the trouble of quietly slipping away and letting them forget I existed. But what else was I supposed to do? They were too old to change, and I was too tired to keep trying. And it wasn’t like it mattered. My relationship with my parents had inevitably shifted long before I was out of the house, and she never failed to remind me that until I was a legal adult, she held all the power. When my mom caught me making out with my best friend two days after my sixteenth birthday, I spent the next eight weeks sleeping on his couch before she invited me back home with the condition that I tell no one. Ever. At all. That forced recreation of her private don’t ask, don’t tell lasted until my eighteenth birthday, which I celebrated on my new college campus. Someone tagged me in a bunch of photos at a gay bar where I made out with at least six absurdly hot dudes who I think were the go-go dancers that night. At one point, there were body shots. And me deep-throating a banana that had come in one of my friends’ daiquiri. Needless to say, shit hit the fan, but being uninvited from the world’s most boring, sanctimonious Christmas wasn’t exactly a hardship. And that year, I got a text message full of typos from Uncle Thomas asking me if I wanted to spend the three and a half weeks the dorms were closed at his place. He and his partner lived above the bar they owned, half an hour from campus. It was a shorter drive at any rate, and I got to meet Karl, who was about a decade older than Thomas and had a mouth like a goddamn sailor. I immediately fell in love with the both of them—in that platonic, can this be my future sort of way. They became my family in ways that no one had ever tried—not even when I was little and attempting to fit in with the family status quo. Life was good. It was warm and it was comfortable and it was happy. And even when Karl died, Thomas was still there for me—quieter than before, and more subdued, but ever present. Five years later, I finished my master’s degree, and I got a job six hours away. Nic finished medical school, he and Kelli got married, she popped out a chubby-cheeked little girl, and I became a godfather. I didn’t see Thomas that often,