Rapture, p.1
Rapture, page 1
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, but there was some comfort in knowing that if I ever wanted to escape my mundane, lonely life where I lived on the periphery of everyone else’s happiness, I could go back to him.
My only regret at the funeral was knowing I never did. And he’d died alone.
Five years and ten months after I graduated, I was sitting at Thomas’s wake, listening to all these bigoted assholes talking about how they wished they had more time with him.
They didn’t know him like I did, and I felt sick with guilt when his lawyer showed up to let me know that I was the primary beneficiary of his will, and apart from a handful of old family heirlooms, everything was going to me.
Of course, I wasn’t surprised by it. I figured he was probably going to leave me most of his stuff since I was the only one who had ever given a shit about him. He still had the pub, though it had been slowly going under for the last four years, but it was all he had.
I had no idea how the whole inheritance thing actually worked, but I assumed that the pub would be put on the market, and I’d get whatever piddly amount Thomas had left after his debt ate away at it. But honestly, I didn’t care. I’d give up everything I had if it meant he’d come back and I’d have a little more time with him.
Or there was some way to turn back the clock so I could make sure he didn’t die alone.
Fuck.
“Poe!”
I turned my head to see my sister staring at me. Apparently, I’d missed a few cues, which was something I was extraordinarily good at. It was a coping thing, my therapist told me when I asked her about it. I thought maybe I had some executive-processing disorder, but it turned out I was on the spectrum, and that was just how I dealt with the sensory overload of being around a shitload of people I couldn’t stand.
Go figure.
“Hey, I gotta go,” I told Nic. “Call you later.”
“Whenever. Even if I’m in the middle of pulling some stuck vibrator out of someone’s ass, I’ll answer your call.”
“Best doctor in the whole world,” I told him with a laugh, then hung up before he could start telling me other stories about current medical trauma.
Standing up, I looked around for my bottle of water, then decided I didn’t care enough to grab it. Now that I’d hung up with Nic, tension was running through my veins, and I tapped a little rhythm against my thigh. The motion calmed me down just a little as I followed Emily through the little archway that led to the dining room.
“Thomas’s lawyer wants to talk to you,” Emily said.
The man in question was short, with that sort of monk-patterned baldness happening right at the crown of his head. It gave his remaining black hair an almost ethereal glow as he sat in front of the window. His suit jacket looked a size too small for him, which made my skin itch, trying to picture what it would feel like to wear something like that.
I showed up in a blazer and a T-shirt because that was as formal as I could deal with, and I didn’t really give a shit what people thought about the flaming homo who became Thomas’s little protégé.
I offered the guy a smile as I sat, hoping it didn’t look like a grimace, though I supposed I could be excused considering the circumstances. No one was supposed to be actually happy at a funeral.
Except for my mom, I guess. And my grandmother. And all my aunts.
Christ.
“Mr. Weston,” he said in a
“Uh. Yeah, that’s me. Well, I guess my dad too, but—”
“Obviously, he doesn’t want Dad,” Emily said impatiently. She was too much like our mom—rude and gossipy. She was also ten years older, so it wasn’t like we ever had the chance to be close. Not that I would have wanted to. The Little Princess was everything I wasn’t—everything our parents had shaped her to be—and I was absolutely fine with letting her be the model child.
I ignored her and turned my gaze to the lawyer guy, meeting his eyes. It disarmed him, and I saw him relax a fraction before I dropped my eyes to the stack of papers he had on the table.
“As you know, you were like a son to Mr. Logan—”
“I think you mean Mr. Weston.” And that was my mom. In no world was I surprised to find her hovering somewhere behind me.
William looked over my shoulder and gave her a flat, unimpressed look. “He took on his husband’s surname when they were married.”
“Married,” she started, but he turned his attention back to me.
“I’m sure it comes as no surprise that he left the bulk of his estate to you, Mr. Weston.”
“He had an estate? Thomas?” Jesus, would she never shut up?
“Yes, ma’am,” Lawyer Guy said, his tone a little icy, and I knew that meant Thomas had told him how absolutely shitty everyone in this family had been. I almost smiled, but I knew it wasn’t appropriate. “He left a small sum to charity, of course…”
“And the rest to—to my son?” she clarified, her voice tight. She was pissed.
I fought the urge to turn and look at her, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know what her face was doing. I didn’t need her polluting this moment. The last bit of Thomas that was left on the planet deserved some peace from the family who had failed him so desperately.
This was almost like a glimpse into my future. I didn’t know if it was comforting to know I might find the love of my life and my place in the world or horrifying because it meant I was also probably going to die alone.
Shit.
I missed him. And the guilt of not seeing him enough was starting to overwhelm me.
The pain was sudden and kind of profound, and I felt a rushing anger at all of these people, because how dare they make this a goddamn spectacle.
“Poe,” Emily warned, and I realized my breathing had gotten a little heavy.
It had been years since I lost control of my temper. My fingers tapped on my thigh as I counted to ten, and then I looked up at Lawyer Guy. “What’s your name?”
He flushed. “I’m so sorry. My name is William Vale.”
That was better. It settled something in me that felt a little topsy-turvy. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Vale. What, um…what do you need from me, exactly?”
“A few signatures and to make sure you understand your role in all this. Your uncle has left you his pub. The—ah…”
“The Q Inn,” I filled in for him. I’d spent quite a few nights curled up in one of the empty booths with my headphones on tight to block out whatever game Karl was listening to, finishing up econ homework that made me want to pull my own face off because I was terrible at math.
The name of the pub was obvious. Thomas had meant for it to be obvious. It had been a safe space for all the young men like me and all the old men like him who had nowhere to go and no one to give a shit whether they lived or died. It was a rebellion. It was a fuck-you to all the people who had rejected him and cut him off for all of his life.
And hearing my mother scoff made me smile.
“It’ll take some doing, of course. Getting all the paperwork to transfer the title and everything. And it might be a daunting task, taking it on considering the state of things.”
“I know,” I told him. The pub had been failing since Karl died, and though I hadn’t been there in far too long, I knew that in his last months, the doors had closed and remained that way. It was a shell of its former self, and I wasn’t sure there was anything left to save. But I didn’t want him laying out Thomas’s sorry financials out there for everyone to start judging, and I was pretty sure the look on William’s face told me he understood. “I’ll, uh…I’ll figure it out, I guess. I mean, I should probably sell it, right?”
“I can’t advise you on that either way. I’m sorry,” he said, and he sounded it. “But I will say that he’s also left you a decent sum of money. He had some investments,” William said with the smallest smile. “It’s enough for some basic renovations and maybe to hire someone to teach you the books.”
The idea was…well, frankly, it was fucking insane. I was just getting the hang of paying my credit cards and student loans before they started calling me and harassing me for being late, and he was suggesting I take over an entire business. On my own.
I was a glorified IT guy.
But God, the very idea of letting some stranger come in and gut the place and turn it into some god-awful juice bar or something that Thomas would have hated? My stomach twisted, and I felt another rush of grief because, damn it, he was the first person I would have called to ask what the hell I was supposed to do.
“Why don’t you come by my office next Monday, and we can go over the details,” William said. He dug into his wallet and passed a card over to me. It was thick, black, embossed. It felt nice in my hands, and I rubbed my thumb over it. “You live close to the pub, don’t you? You’re not back here.”
I wasn’t near the pub anymore, but I was close enough. I could take the train. “That’s no problem. When do you want me?”
“Just call my assistant, and she’ll find a time that works for both of us.”
“Thank you,” I said.
William nodded and started to rise, gathering the papers, but he froze at the sound of my mom’s voice. “Is that all?”
William blinked at her. “Ma’am?”
“He didn’t leave anything to anyone here?” She put her hands on her hips, and she was making that face that said she was going to have a complete meltdown that would have rivaled any of the ones I had when I first started puberty. “After all these years—”
I snapped. “Do you really want to go there? Do you want to bring up what all of you did to him?”
Her jaw snapped shut. “We tried with him, Poe.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. They tried? She couldn’t possibly be that delusional. “You gave him an ultimatum. Just like you gave me,” I said. I was surprised at how even my voice sounded, but that just told me I’d fall apart later in the safety of my apartment. “You told him to hide in a fucking closet for his entire life or that he was out.” Her cheeks went flaming red, and I took a breath, ready to continue her evisceration, but William cleared his throat, stopping me.
I turned just as he pulled out a stack of sealed envelopes and set them on the table. “He left these, actually, but I’d prefer if you waited until I left before reading them.”
My mom paled, and while sometimes I missed a lot of cues about what was going on, I understood this. He was about to drag them from beyond the grave, and God, I loved him even more and hated he wasn’t here to see this.
“Would you like to walk me out, Mr. Weston?”
“Can you call me Poe?” I asked. “Half these people here are Westons, and I really don’t need to be reminded that I’m related to them.”
He gave me a thin-lipped smile, but it didn’t look cruel. I think maybe his lips really were just barely there. “Poe. Of course.”
I followed him to the door, and we stepped out onto my grandmother’s rocky driveway and under the shade of a tree, which barely took the edge off the summer heat. Thomas really had picked a crappy season to die.
