Kaiden turned heads everywhere he went. Twenty years of sexy, smart-tongued, intelligent, goodness. But he was in love with the wrong man. The love of his life was already taken by someone he couldn't fight against. When the twists of life rip his lover off his hands, death doesn't seem like a remote solution. Until a new player joins the game, making Kaiden question what sacrifices he's willing to make for love. WARNING: This is a manxman / boyxboy story with explicit sexual content. ***PRIVATE CHAPTERS*** This story has chapters that Wattpad classified as PRIVATE. So you have to become a follower in order to read them. To find them, do this: FOR WEB USERS: Expand the Table of Contents on THIS page (the page that has the button START READING), and you'll see Chapters 5 and 8 marked as private. Select the chapters from there and you should be able to read them. Once you press "Start Reading" you won't see those chapters listed in the Table of Contents. You have to be on THIS page to be able to select them. I know, so user unfriendly. FOR APP USERS: For those of you reading from iOS or Android, use the wattcodes, which are Chapter 5: 20340460, and Chapter 8: 20341306. Cover by DUHTitan from BooksieSilk.com. Image credits - Johann Marx at www.johannmarx.com 3/17/2018: NOTE TO NEW READERS: If you start reading this story after February 2018, please be aware that I was on a hiatus of +3 years between Chapter 27 and Chapter 28. So if you notice a change in style or inconsistencies in the story, feel free to point them out to me.

To his peers, Liam Kingsley has it all-girls, good looks, loving parents, and a best friend that'll fight for him until the death. Little does the school know that Liam's faking it. Faking it all. Fearing the loss of everything he's worked so hard to achieve, Liam forces himself to constantly keep up the act of a charming young bachelor. But when Liam becomes friends with the mysterious Connor Hawkins, a dreamy eyed misfit, he begins to lose all the control he's worked so hard to maintain for seventeen long years. Eventually, Liam realizes he knows very little about the mysteriously quiet boy, despite all the years they have attended school together. Connor breathes new life into Liam, and soon Liam discovers that when love, lies, and lust intertwine they can have consequences. Consequences he's not quite sure he's ready for just yet.

Haunted. Terrified. Alone. Those three words seem to be the only emotions that seventeen year old Gabriel Adams knows how to feel. At the age of thirteen, when other boys were chasing after pretty girls and playing in the dirt, Gabriel had been kidnapped and molested. Now, several years later, Gabriel still can't return to the normal life he'd lived before the Incident. He's terrified of the dark, and even the daytime gives him anxiety attacks. Gabriel hates being touched. A simple brush against him will set him off into spasms while panic quickly takes over his mind. It seems as if nothing will relieve Gabriel from the constricting, painful claws of the man who'd done him harm, and Gabriel is becoming desperate. That's when Evan Ricci steps in. Evan, a stubborn yet surprisingly selfless teenager, moves to the small, quiet town of Clydesdale Heights. When Evan sees a small, awkward blond haired boy carrying pop boxes across the street while he's bringing moving boxes into the new house, he decides to help him. Things don't go exactly as planned, though, and their relationship begins with a rather rough start. The two eventually learn to bond, and Evan helps Gabriel learn to deal with the psychological consequences of being molested, which eventually blooms into an understanding so deep they can't imagine themselves with anyone but the other. A hint of infatuation sparks up, but not quite yet will the love blossom out like most. Their love will take time. And lots of patience and persistence, too.