Before the shadows of an ancient, reality-bending forge closed in, and before a predatory love systematically dismantled his world, there was only Jimmy Davidson in the neon-drenched haze of a Detroit dance floor.
Celebrated as "Detroit’s Prettiest Little Heartbreaker" after a fateful amateur night, Jimmy’s breathtaking beauty was supposed to be his armor against a harsh world. Instead, it became the catalyst for a harrowing descent through domestic trauma, forced addiction, and into the jaws of a cosmic, supernatural power.
Read the exclusive opening excerpt of Book One below, and witness the glittering night where the legend was born—just before the cracks began to show.
THE GYM - BOOK ONE: DETROIT'S PRETTIEST LITTLE HEARTBREAKER
PROLOGUE
He didn't feel beautiful that night. He felt like a boy in a borrowed shirt standing too close to a door he wasn't sure he'd been invited through. Sarah had done his hair. Andrew had picked the shirt—pale blue, fitted, the kind that required a body worth showing—and Jimmy had stood in the bathroom mirror for four full minutes arguing with himself before deciding it didn't matter how he looked because he wasn't going to talk to anyone anyway.
That was the plan. Don't talk to anyone. Stand near the wall. Go home.
The night at Threshold had arrived like most consequential things do—dropped into his life by someone else's impulse, dressed up as a joke. Sarah and Andrew had entered his name in the amateur contest between laughs and cheap drinks, scrawling it on the sign-up sheet while he was in the bathroom, presenting it to him as a fait accompli with identical grins that dared him to be a bad sport about it.
“Absolutely not,” Jimmy said.
“Already done,” Sarah said immediately.
“Take it back.”
“Can’t,” Andrew said with a solemn shrug. “It’s in pen. Legally binding.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It absolutely is,” Sarah said. “I saw it on Judge Judy.”
Jimmy stared at both of them. “You guys are assholes.”
“We’re visionaries,” Andrew corrected.
“Well, unfortunately, you were born with a face that violates several municipal noise ordinances,” Andrew added, casually reaching over to steal a sip from Jimmy’s glass. “So that option is no longer available on your menu.”
Jimmy looked so genuinely horrified by this that Andrew softened immediately, reaching over to grab Jimmy’s shoulder, giving it a solid, grounding shake. “Hey. You’re gonna be fine.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Look at the guys signing up!” Jimmy hissed, nodding toward the stage where two bronzed men in body oil were stretching like Olympian sprinters. “I don’t belong up there. I look like I got lost on the way to a public library.”
Andrew exchanged a quick, deliberate look with Sarah across Jimmy’s head. There it was again. That reflexive self-erasure Jimmy did so naturally it was like breathing—making himself small, hiding inside a collar, pulling his chin down before anyone could accuse him of taking up space.
“Jimmy,” Andrew said softly now, the deadpan humor easing into something gentler, though his eyes remained sharp. “You walk around like you have absolutely no idea what you look like. It’s almost rude to the rest of us.”
That landed. Jimmy looked down at his sneakers almost immediately, his jaw tightening as he bit back a response. Jimmy genuinely did not understand the quiet, tectonic shift that happened in a room whenever he walked into it. He thought the silence was an accusation.
Sarah’s expression changed too, her chaotic energy smoothing out into an ache that made her reach out and fuss with a strand of his dark hair—the hair she’d spent twenty minutes obsessing over in her bathroom earlier.
Jimmy let out a breathless, reluctant laugh, rubbing the back of his neck, uncomfortable now in a way that made both of them ache for him. “You guys are so dramatic. Seriously, unhinged.”
“We’re not dramatic, we’re visionaries,” Sarah corrected, a wicked, triumphant grin breaking across her face. She stepped up, clapped both hands firmly on his shoulders, and spun him around toward the flashing club lights. “Now, stop disrespecting the pale blue shirt Andrew spent forty minutes picking out for you, get your gorgeous ass up on that stage, and go let those thirsty Detroit boys objectify you like God intended!”
Twenty contestants began the night beneath fractured beams of color. One by one, the crowd decided. Not cruelly—just honestly, the way crowds always are when given permission to choose. By ten o'clock there were twelve. By eleven, seven. By midnight, the heavy white spotlight narrowed down to only three.
Dennis Armbruester. Cameron Creevey. And... Jimmy Davidson.
The contest was Ms. Crystal's domain, as Threshold itself was Ms. Crystal's domain, as Detroit's entire queer underground had been Ms. Crystal's domain for longer than most of the people in this room had been alive. She was the city's reigning queen—not by appointment but by unanimous, unspoken agreement, the kind of authority that doesn't require a crown because everyone in the room already knows.
She was sequined and towering and magnificent, a woman who had survived decades of nights like this one and loved every single person who had ever stumbled through Threshold's doors. Detroit had given her everything, and she had given Detroit herself in return.
When she held a microphone, rooms didn't just go quiet—they stopped breathing.
Ms. Crystal tapped the mic twice. The dull thump-thump echoed through the subwoofers like a heartbeat. The DJ cut the music down to a low, throbbing bassline, letting the tension fill the air like static. Two hundred people leaned forward over the railings and squeezed around the stage, hanging on her every breath.
Her voice cut through the heavy air like a blade through silk.
"Gentlemen," she purred, lingering on the word until the crowd let out a collective, hungry murmur. "Shirts off, please."
Jimmy heard the command and felt the floor tilt slightly beneath his boots.
Around him, Dennis moved instantly, yanking his tank top over his head to reveal chiseled, gym-honed abs. A chorus of loud cheers and whistles erupted from the front row—“Flex for 'em, Dennis!”—and Dennis offered a confident, practiced grin.
Cameron Creevey went next, peeling his shirt away with a slow, agonizing showmanship, rolling his shoulders and running a hand through his hair. The crowd ate it up, howling and cat-calling as Cameron smirked, already looking like a man who believed the crown was a foregone conclusion.
Jimmy stood still for one long, suspended second. Then he did it anyway.
The air of the club hit his skin and he resisted every instinct he had to fold his arms across his chest, to make himself smaller, to apologize for taking up space. He had spent his entire life making himself smaller. He stood there instead. Bare and terrified and trying very hard not to show either.
A sharp, collective gasp rippled through the front row, followed by a sudden wave of raucous cat-calls.
“Holy shit, look at the dark-haired boy!” someone roared from the bar.
“Jesus, who let the angel out of church?!” a voice shouted from the balcony, followed by a piercing, wolfish whistle. “Give him the key to the city, Crystal!”
A violent, scorching heat rushed up Jimmy’s neck, flooding his cheekbones and burning all the way to the tips of his ears. He blushed beet red—a deep, visceral flush that stood out bright against his skin under the white spotlight.
He tried to put on a "sexy-face," but he lost control and his face broke out in an enormous, toothy grin.
The crowd went wild for it.
They devoured the contrast. In a room full of cocky, seasoned performers strutting for validation, Jimmy’s raw, genuine shyness was electric. The crowd stomped their feet against the floorboards, whistling, laughing, and screaming encouragement.
Beside him, Cameron’s smug smile faltered for a fraction of a second, his jaw tightening as he registered where the room’s gravity had just swung.
Ms. Crystal raised one long, gloved hand, and the roaring noise instantly died down to a sharp, expectant hush. The audience hung in suspended animation.
Slowly, deliberately, Ms. Crystal began her walk down the line. Her sequined gown caught the strobing lights, throwing shards of silver across the dark stage.
She paused in front of Dennis first. She reached out, tapping his chin with a long, ruby-red acrylic nail. She gave an appreciative nod. The crowd roared in agreement.
She stepped over to Cameron. Cameron puffed his chest, flashing a razor-sharp, winning smile. Ms. Crystal offered him a slow, knowing smirk, but her sharp eyes were already drifting sideways before she even finished her step. Cameron went rigid, his smile freezing in place.
Then she reached Jimmy—and stopped completely.
The silence in Threshold was absolute. You could hear an ice cube melt into a glass at the back bar.
Ms. Crystal moved around Jimmy in slow, deliberate circles, a queen surveying a kingdom she had built out of sequins and survival. There was something ceremonial, almost predatory, in the way she studied him—like a jeweler who had stumbled across a raw, flawless gem in the dirt and could not quite believe what the light was doing inside it.
She stopped right in front of him. She reached out with two gloved fingers and gently tilted his chin up, forcing his eyes—wide, dark, and overflowing with terrified wonder—to meet hers.
Jimmy was still blushing furiously, his chest rising and falling fast, but he didn't pull away.
Ms. Crystal leaned close to his ear, then turned back to the crowd and let out a low, satisfied hum into the microphone. The hum vibrated through the floorboards.
She turned to the stage assistant, reaching into the velvet box, and lifted the massive, glittering rhinestone crown high into the fractured beams of light. The rhinestones caught the spotlights, bursting into blinding stars above her head.
The crowd held its collective breath. Hearts pounded in sync with the low sub-bass.
Ms. Crystal brought the microphone back to her lips, letting the silence stretch until the tension in the room felt ready to snap.
"Detroit's..." she began, her voice booming over the speakers, "...Prettiest... Little... Heartbreaker!"
CRACK. The room didn't just applaud—it erupted into absolute pandemonium.
The DJ dropped a deafening, bass-heavy beat, and two hundred people started screaming, pounding their drinks against the bar, and jumping until the floorboards shook.
The heavy rhinestone crown touched Jimmy's head, tilting crookedly because nobody had ever put a crown on him before, because he had no idea how to carry something that bright.
The title rang out like a spell cast into the rafters, and Jimmy—who had never in his life heard a room call his name—blushed so hard it physically hurt. Down in the front row, Sarah and Andrew were screaming themselves hoarse, leaping into each other, laughing, crying, and pointing up at him like they had just discovered a new constellation in the sky.
Jimmy stood beneath the blinding white light, hands shaking at his sides, surrounded by the deafening roar of strangers who had just claimed him. Beside him, Cameron Creevey stared at his profile, jealousy burning slow, bright, and bitter enough to survive the dark.
And underneath the shaking, underneath the heat burning in Jimmy's cheeks, something fundamental shifted inside his chest. For the first time in eighteen years, the eyes landing on him didn't feel like an accusation. They felt like a door opening into the light.