Angel Voices
One frigid winter night a week before Christmas, college student Will stumbles into a church during choir practice, bruised by his own father’s hands. He’s out of the closet now—there’s no going back since his fundamentalist father learned the truth—but he’s also out of a home, a family, and a future. Will has nowhere to turn. No one to care.
Except . . . Will’s roommate, Quinn, cares. Maybe too much. He’s been attracted to Will since they moved in together, but never dreamed his crush was gay. With Will’s life in pieces, Quinn doesn’t want to push. He also knows he has more experience than Will, who’s never even been kissed.
Then Will’s father makes a reappearance, and Will has to learn to trust his heart more than the voices of his past. But it’s the season of miracles, faith, and hope, and Quinn is determined to teach Will how to love and be loved.
(Note: This is a revised second edition, originally published elsewhere.)
This title comes with no special warnings.
Caution: The following details may be considered spoilerish. Click on a label to reveal its content.
Length: Novella (15k to 45K words)
Heat Wave: 4 - On-screen and mildly explicit love scenes
Erotic Frequency: 2 - Not many
Genre: contemporary, drama, new adult, romance
Themes: abuse, acceptance, angst, college life, coming of age, coming out, family, first love, first time, fitting in, friends to lovers, holiday, hurt / comfort, illness / injury, interracial/multicultural, religion, reunion, self-confidence, self-discovery / self-reflection
Settings: Alabama, college, hospital / clinic / medical office, place of worship
Chapter One
Light and music streamed out of the church, stained glass casting long flares of color on the snow, a luminous accompaniment to the sounds of the organ and angelic voices drifting through the open double doors. The angels obviously needed practice; they would sing a line, then stop a moment while an invisible conductor made an inaudible comment, then sing the line over and maybe, maybe, get as far as the next line before stopping again.
Will stood in the purple light emanating from around some saint’s head and listened a moment, caught in the tenuous beauty that contrasted sharply with the ugliness he felt. He ached all over, his feet throbbing in time to the pounding in his head, his hands, his chest, his heart. The church was the first open place he’d seen in his eight-mile-plus walk—at least the only open place he’d seen that wouldn’t require cash outlay of some kind for food or drink or a ticket. He could keep walking—his dorm was only across the campus, but all the way across campus, and he was tired, and cold. And tired. So, without even thinking much about it, he climbed the two steps up to the broad church porch and went through the open, welcoming doors.
The lights in the nave of the church were on full, though the ones up around the altar were dark—except for that red one that he knew was something important, but didn’t have the energy to think about. He wasn’t religious—his parents were, but theirs was a different faith than the one this church housed. Their religion didn’t live in tall, cathedral-like places like this, with colored glass, lamp-like chandeliers, and wood carvings and statues. Theirs was cold and modern, at least in terms of the buildings.
This place was foreign, but it was warm, despite the open doors. The wood pews looked worn and well used, golden in the lamplight. The lamps cast pockets of shadow where they weren’t quite as bright, like back here in the very last row, over by the wall, underneath the balcony where the choir was practicing. Will gratefully slipped into a pew, leaning back against the warm golden wood and letting his duffel fall onto the floor beside him. It was so weird to be happy to just sit down.
He’d come in during one of the quiet moments. Now that he was inside, he could hear the voice of the director or conductor or whatever the head person of a choir was called, but he still couldn’t quite understand what he was saying. Then the voice stopped speaking, and Will heard the faint rapping of his stick or baton or whatever. The choir burst out singing again.
The acoustics inside the church made the sound richer and more beautiful. He listened, dazed by the purity of it.
And then a single voice, male, clear, powerful, and impossibly sweet, rose over the rest in a solo that sent a shudder through Will’s heart: “Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices . . .”
Will took his frozen hands from his jeans pockets, put his striped wool scarf over his face, and started to cry.
***
“Okay, okay,” Bennigan said, waving his hands absently. “Fifteen-minute potty break, then we’ll go through the rest of the program. Quinn, good job on the solo, but I still think you need a little more punch on the ‘fall’ so that it really stands out. Wake the sleeping millions, got it?”
“Yes, sir!” Quinn saluted in cheerful mockery and headed to the stairs from the choir loft, beating the rest of the group to the door and lunging in his usual headlong way down the worn stairs.
“One of these days you’re gonna fall and break your neck,” Sean said behind him.
“Not him,” Ellen said in disgust. “Leads a charmed life.”
“I do, I really do,” Quinn agreed, and opened the door out into the nave, the rest following, chattering, as he led the way to the restrooms at the rear of the church.
On his way back, as he wiped his hands on his sweatshirt because the stupid blow-dryers in the bathroom never dried properly, he saw the figure huddled in the very last pew on the far side of the nave. He would have just taken the figure for a street person who had come in to get warm, but it wore the green, blue, and orange striped scarf his roommate Will had worn over his denim jacket when he’d left that afternoon for the holiday break. Quinn had said something about the jacket not being warm enough, and Will had just muttered that he had a ride home.
The response was typical of Will—their conversations tended to be brief at best. Not that Quinn minded; Will was a quiet, considerate roommate, tidy and undemanding, if impossibly shy. He was nice to look at, too—a bit gangly, like most teenaged guys, but with a strong bone structure under his pale skin, hair the color of autumn leaves, and eyes the green of spring.
The guy in the corner had Will’s untidy dark-red hair and the denim jacket. Quinn frowned. That didn’t make sense—when Will had left, he’d had his duffel with him and was clearly going home. Had his ride fallen through? Why hadn’t he gone back to the room, then?
“Will?” he said quietly, crossing the flagstone aisle to the pew where Will sat.
There wasn’t any answer. Was he asleep? Quinn slid down the pew to his side and sat, touching his shoulder gently. “Will?” he said again.
Will started, and looked over at Quinn in a disoriented panic.
Quinn’s hand fell away. “Holy fucking shit, Will, what happened? Were you mugged?”
Will’s face was a bloody mess, the skin blooming with bruises, his nose swollen, crusted with blood, and muddy with tears and dirt. His hands, too, were dirty, and red with cold. He reached up and pulled the scarf away from his face. His mouth was swollen, the lip split. “Quinn?” he said in confusion.
“Yeah, kid, it’s me. What happened? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Will sat up straighter, winced, then shifted away from Quinn’s reaching hand. “I’m okay. I just stopped in—I heard the singing. It was good.”
“What happened to you?”
Quinn looked up to see Bennigan standing in the aisle on the other side of Will. “Were you mugged? Do you want us to call the police?”
“No, no police.” Will put his hands up and shook his head. “It’s nothing. I’m fine. I just . . . I just fell. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, and that’s not from a fall. I thought you were going home. Were you in some kind of accident?”
“We need to call his parents,” Bennigan said.
“No! No parents! It’s nothing!” Will stood up, waving his hands frantically in denial, then went pasty beneath the bruises and collapsed into Quinn’s arms in a dead faint.
Chapter Two
Will’s hands were burning. Someone had set them on fire, and they were burning. The skin was melting like the bad guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and pretty soon they would disintegrate. He’d never be able to draw another straight line, and there went his engineering career, and his father would be so pissed.
He could see it now, the old man’s face livid purple with rage, his big hands coming up in fists and smashing into his nose. God, that hurt, but he could still breathe, so it wasn’t broken, wasn’t that how it went? Then the other fist into his gut so the breath shot out his mouth, and then the blows coming fast and furious, punctuated with screaming. His or someone’s, with foul words he’d never heard his father say before coming from his father’s mouth.
“No,” he moaned, and something cool touched his forehead.
A soft voice said, “It’s okay, Will. It’s okay.”
He opened his eyes to bright whiteness and confusion. After a moment, he recognized the voice. That was Quinn—they’d been roommates for the last couple of months, his freshman year at college.
Quinn was a music major and also a freshman. Will remembered his father’s disdain for him and his complaint that Will should have had his own room and not have to share with a “fairy-assed colored boy”—but Will was on a scholarship and didn’t have anything to say in the arrangements. The scholarship required he live on campus for the first year, despite his family living in the area—another thing that annoyed his father—and the college gave him no choice as to roommates.
He’d done what his father had told him, though, and kept to himself, watching with envious eyes as Quinn made friends with everyone on the floor while Will quietly rejected any overtures of friendship toward himself. It had been so hard—Quinn was witty and outgoing and so damn, damn beautiful, with his tawny skin and bright dark eyes and silky brown curls, soft, loose, and tipped with gold. He’d never seen hair like that on a guy before, and he wondered if Quinn’s mixed race was the source or if he colored it that way.
Those pretty eyes weren’t so bright now; they were dull with worry and fatigue.
“Quinn?” It hurt to talk; his head felt stuffy and his throat was sore. And God, his head ached—hell, everything ached.
“Shh. It’s okay. You’re gonna be fine.” Quinn reached out and touched his forehead again, his hand cool against Will’s burning skin. “You’re in the hospital—you passed out at the church last night. Do you remember?”
Will remembered being at the church, remembered Quinn’s worried face and the other, older guy, and talk of calling his parents—shit! He struggled to sit up, panicking that any minute his father was going to come through that door and he would be so pissed . . .
Quinn pushed him back down embarrassingly easily. “Hey, don’t go anywhere!”
“My parents! Did they call my parents?”
“No, bud.” The word had a faint accent Will couldn’t place. Will hadn’t noticed Quinn having an accent. “We didn’t. You freaked out when Bennigan mentioned parents, so we didn’t. We brought you here instead. Do you remember that?”
Will shook his head, but the movement only made it hurt worse. He heard a whining noise and realized it was him. “I just remember the church.”
Quinn gently cupped his cheek and said again, “Shh, it’s okay. Can you tell me what happened? You wouldn’t let us call the police, either.”
“I fell,” he said dully. He sort of remembered saying that before.
“Right,” Quinn said, and his voice was flat. It didn’t sound right; Quinn’s voice was part of what was beautiful about him, so lively and expressive. Quinn MacLachlan didn’t do flat. “You fell multiple times on your face, gave yourself a mild concussion, and banged up your own damn ribs.”
Well, that explained why it hurt to move. “Oh,” he said.
“Will.”
He opened his eyes again—when had he closed them?—and looked up into Quinn’s face. The shards of anger he saw in Quinn’s eyes faded and were replaced by concern. “Did your father do this to you?”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
“Shit,” Quinn said. He smoothed the hair back from Will’s forehead. “How did you get back here? Did you even make it home?”
“Yeah,” Will said, leaning into the caress like a cat seeking petting fingers. “It— He— I—I walked back. I didn’t have any money for a cab or a bus or anything. Just my duffel bag. I didn’t need any money over break because one of the guys from my church goes here and gave me a lift home.”
“Didn’t you have your ATM card or anything?”
“I don’t have one. Dad . . .” He didn’t finish, but Quinn nodded as if he knew what he was going to say. “I have a checkbook, but there wasn’t anything open.”
“It’s okay—wait a minute. You walked back? I thought you lived in Airport Heights.”
“I do. I did. Yeah.”
“That’s got to be ten miles from here. You walked the whole way? Through those neighborhoods?”
Will sighed and didn’t answer.
“Oh. Well, good thing you were smart enough to figure I was at rehearsal.”
“I didn’t. It was just . . . open. Warm. I was cold and tired.”
“Fuck. Will . . .”
“I just want to go home,” Will said plaintively.
“But I thought—”
“No, not there. Home. The dorm. Can we just go home now?”
Quinn’s eyes were bright again, but it seemed to be from the wetness in them. “Sure, bebe,” he said in a husky voice not at all like his usual smooth tenor. “We’ll go home.”
Word Count: 14,900
Page Count: 66
Cover By: L.C. Chase
ISBN: 978-1-62649-493-0
Release Date: 11/26/2016
Price: $0.99