You Trust Pain

FIRST BOOK IS DONE BUT I AM POSTING AS I COMPLETE FIANL(hopefully!) DRAFT FOR RIGHT NOW & THAT IS CHAPTER ONE AND TWO ONLY

I started writing You Trust Pain on Reddit with the full intention of creating shameless, mostly plotless smut. It was my first real attempt at writing smut, and apparently I am incapable of leaving well enough alone, because almost immediately I started caring far too much about these characters. Before I knew it, Ellie and James had completely taken over my brain, developed histories and wounds and complicated motivations of their own, and what was supposed to be something fun and filthy became a story I couldn’t stop thinking about.

That obsession turned into more than 125,000 words, with their story now looking like it will span a duet of two full-length novels.

I wrote the majority of those words during an incredibly intense stretch of nearly two months, sometimes writing one or two very long chapters every single day. Eventually, I had to step away for a while. Somewhere along the way, Ellie and James stopped simply being characters I was writing and began revealing pieces of myself that I hadn’t completely healed yet. Writing them became unexpectedly personal, and I needed time to breathe, recharge, and put some distance between myself and the parts of this story that hit closer to home than I ever anticipated.

The beginning of You Trust Pain is intentionally very dark and heavily focused on the erotic side of the story. But as I kept writing, it unraveled into something much larger than what I originally imagined. Beneath the darkness, obsession, power, sex, and morally complicated choices, this became a story about trauma, trust, shame, love, survival, and what happens when two deeply imperfect people try to understand each other’s wounds while carrying wounds of their own.

I feel an enormous amount of tenderness for these characters. Even when they make terrible decisions, hurt each other, or completely frustrate me. They became real to me in that strange way fictional people sometimes do, and I care very deeply about giving their story the ending it deserves.

That’s a large part of why I’m finally bringing You Trust Pain here. After taking some time away from it, I’m ready to return to Ellie and James, revise what I’ve already written, and push myself to finish the story that started as an experiment and somehow became one of the most personal things I’ve ever created.

If you decide to come along for the ride, just know that this story gets messy, dark, uncomfortable, emotional, and very human.

And I hope you come to care about them even half as much as I do.