A Sharp Endless Need sneak peek

an excerpt of the prologue

Hey there! My second novel, A Sharp Endless Need, comes out in just five days—on May 13. You can pre-order it wherever you get your books, however you read them (I’m especially stoked about my audiobook narrator—they did an incredible job).

As a thank you for being my subscriber, I wanted to share an excerpt of the prologue, just for you. It’s not one of those prologues that you can skip either; it’s essential to the story and the characters. The book is structured like a basketball game, so it’s only fitting that the prologue is called “Pregame Pump-Up.”

I hope you enjoy.

Pregame Pump-Up

We wanted legacy. Liv and I, we wanted our names in bright lights, our names in everyone’s mouths. Names people would remember. No just on the tip of their tongues, no let me get back to yous; none of that shit.

We wanted fans so loud everything went quiet inside our heads. For a while, we might have had them.

We made canvases of our bodies. We sweat and we cried, rivulets flowing down face and chest and limb. We boasted bruises from hard-earned buckets, birthmarks we gave ourselves.

We moved with animal instinct, smooth like panthers going in for the kill.

We won loose balls, and if we didn’t win them, we caused tie-up after tie-up, wet bodies coalescing on the wood floor: rip, rip, roar. When the game was on the line, and when it wasn’t on the line, we sacrificed our bodies. Not because we were told to, but because there was no higher honor. We sacrificed our bodies for something not quite holy, not quite mortal. Where does the body end and immortality begin? We wanted to find out.

On offense, our passes were so sharp they could cut through butter, handles so smooth we lulled our defenders to sleep with the rocking. On defense, we had magic hands, fly-quick hands, hands tugging jerseys and pestering shorts, hands that swatted, hands no one could swat. Hips pressed against glutes, bodies that wouldn’t budge an inch.

We wanted to live forever. Who could blame us? We wanted to live ball in hand, ball against backboard, ball licking the bottom of the net. We wanted to be in history books. For what? We didn’t know. We certainly weren’t the first to do anything—not to ball, not to win, not to lose, not to suffer, but that didn’t matter. To us, basketball was a historical record of all the ways a body can move with and for another. What could be better than the strange and perverse pleasure of being known?

If we couldn’t live forever, we at least wanted pleasure, in big dripping buckets.

More so, we wanted the knowledge that we were still capable of enjoying our pleasure, that pleasure itself hadn’t become yet another goal to work toward.

Dizzy with fervor, we knew nothing of moderation, of balance.

We wanted excess. More trash-talking, more chest-thumping, more bumping and grinding. We drove hard, we drew fouls. We stomped our feet and raised our fists in celebration.

We wanted to make sure our opponents could feel us coming. We wanted their student sections to heckle us, tell us we were pieces of shit with no outside game, no heart, no skill. We liked the taunting; it gave us all the more reason to pin our hands behind our backs and raise our middle fingers when the refs weren’t looking.

On the court, we were married. The referee whistles like wedding bells ringing inside our chests. Only, we didn’t call it a marriage. We called it shared language, tongue-heavy language, locked-and-loaded language, the most reliable form of communication. One bound not by syntax, but by rhythm, by the beat, beat, beat of human music, by the simultaneous seeing and knowing of another.

The game bonded us in a way words could only dream of. And if we had an animal instinct, a panther prowl on the court, then basketball had a hound dog nose. It could sniff out and track our desires before those desires had even arisen in us. That’s what we needed, what we counted on.

Some people said basketball was like dancing, you needed rhythm, you needed to feel the ball’s desire like you needed your heart to beat right, but we knew, in the deeps of our hips, that basketball was even more erotic than dancing; it was a collaboration, a mutual creation, a way of fucking without touching.

Anddddd that’s where I’ll stop. Thanks for reading, thanks for supporting me. If this excerpt entices you, please pre-order.