Check out my stop on The Art of Hero Worship blog tour!
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The Art of Hero Worship
by Mia Kerick
Genre: NA Contemporary Fiction – LGBTQ
Release Date: October 29th 2018
NineStar Press
Summary:
Saving the one who once saved me.
College junior Liam Norcross is a hero. He willingly, even eagerly, risks his life to save a stranger as a murderous, deranged shooter moves methodically through the darkened theater on the Batcheldor College campus, randomly killing innocent men, women, and children.
The stranger he saves is college freshman Jason Tripp. Jase loses everything in the shooting: his girlfriend, who dies on the floor beside him, and his grip on emotional security. He struggles to regain a sense of safety in the world, finally leaving college to seek refuge in his hometown.
An inexplicable bond forms between the two men in the chaos and horror of the theater, and Liam fights to bring Jase back to the world he ran away from. When Jase returns to school, they’re drawn together as soulmates, and soon Liam and Jase fall into a turbulent romantic relationship. However, the rocky path to love cannot be smoothed until Jase rescues his hero in return by delving into his shady past and solving the mystery of Liam’s compulsion to be everybody’s savior.
IT’S CERTAINLY AN unusual feeling to have your bloody clothes carefully removed by a burly, male stranger. And once I’m stark naked, to have him stand right beside the shower with his hands on my waist, while I do my best to clean the blood off my body—well, this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day. At least not to me. I hang my head and watch as the bloody water swirls around and is swallowed by the drain, and I don’t freak out, mainly because I don’t think there’s any “freak out” left in me. As soon as my head is clean, the guy pulls me out of the shower and forces me to bend at an odd angle so he can examine whatever made my head bleed so much. He studies my scalp for a long time, until I start to shiver and need the spray of hot water to warm me.
When he lets me go, he says, “I think a bullet grazed the top left side of your head. There’s a two-inch scrape there, and it’s kind of deep. The bleeding’s stopped, but you probably ought to get it checked out by a doctor in the morning. It’s pretty nasty.” His large palm finds its way back to my hip. “But dude, I’d say that, overall, you’re pretty lucky, know what I mean?”
Not feeling particularly lucky, I again nod and return to my place beneath the stream of water, wishing I could wash away everything that happened tonight. What’s weird is the deep scrape on my head doesn’t hurt…nothing does; I’m physically numb. I decide at this moment I’m not going to think about the stuff that hurts my mind until we leave this bathroom…or better yet, until we leave this apartment, which represents a short reprieve between the hell of the shooting and the hell of accepting that it was real.
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