Jason M Buss | Updates

SPELLWORK FOR INCORRIGIBLE BOYS - Coming Soon!!!

Jason M Buss — Thu, 3 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some places don't reform you. They unmake you.

Michigan's Upper Peninsula, June 1987.

Sixteen-year-old Max Miller is driven north by his own father and handed over to Shepherd's Timber Ranch & Refuge — a "camp" for boys who've been caught loving the wrong person. Here, devotion is enforced with a ruler's edge, sin is tallied in a ledger, and the counselors have their own quiet, clinical ways of making a boy forget who he is.

But the ground at Shepherd's Ranch doesn't behave the way it should. Frost clings to the fence line in the height of summer. The swamp past the tree line has a heartbeat. And somewhere beneath the chapel and the barn and the counselors' cold half-truths, something far older than the camp has been waiting for boys like these to find it.

With three other boys who refuse to break — and a small-town librarian willing to teach them what the church never wanted them to know — Max starts learning the old ways his captors would call witchcraft. As the full moon rises and the boundary between worlds wears thin, the boys of Shepherd's Ranch will discover that the only thing more dangerous than what's buried under that ridge is what they're capable of once they stop asking permission.

Spellwork for Incorrigible Boys, a novel by Jason M Buss — coming soon.

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A REVIEW OF JASON M BUSS' GAY URBAN HORROR FANTASY EPIC "THE GYM" by Terry Bauchard

Jason M Buss — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Masterpiece of Queer Retribution and Radical Grace: A Review of The Gym Tetralogy

Jason M. Buss’s four-book saga, The Gym (comprising The Rise & Fall of Detroit’s Prettiest Little Heartbreaker, Beautiful Wreckage, Pride & Punishment, and Full Circle), is a staggering, monumental achievement in contemporary queer literature. It seamlessly fuses the suffocating reality of domestic trauma, coercive control, and addiction with a deeply atmospheric, cosmic-gothic supernatural horror. The result is an unforgettable exploration of how we survive catastrophic wreckage, and whether a broken soul can heal without becoming the very monster it fears most.

From Broken Armor to Divine Integration

The series follows Jimmy Davidson, an extraordinarily beautiful eighteen-year-old growing up in Detroit who uses his physical perfection as armor against a childhood of brutal household violence and trauma. When Jimmy falls into a devastatingly toxic relationship with the deeply narcissistic Joey Reeves, his life is systematically dismantled through gaslighting, isolation, and forced addiction. Left at absolute rock bottom, Jimmy is offered a black card that leads him to The Gym—an ancient, reality-defying industrial forge run by seven fallen angels, designed to dismantle human "softness" and remake broken victims into untouchable predators.

What could have easily been a standard, tragic "deal with the devil" tale instead becomes a brilliant, nuanced interrogation of human identity. When Jimmy is strapped into the forge’s chambers of steam, brass, and hooks, the machine demands complete erasure. Yet, Jimmy makes a conscious, stubborn choice: he surrenders his pain, but refuses to surrender his capacity to love. The resulting entity—James Drake—is not a replacement of the victim, but a magnificent integration of both. As Buss beautifully writes, "Jimmy Davidson and James Drake breathe together"—showing us that James’s terrifying, godlike power is merely the shield Jimmy built so his soft, loving core could survive a predatory world.

Love as the Ultimate Maintenance

Throughout his supernatural campaign of retribution against the abusers of his past, James's ultimate anchor is Christopher Flynn, a former dancer with a damaged knee. While the ancient cosmic entities built The Gym to run on absolute, mechanical laws of suffering and balance, Christopher’s quiet, unconditional love rewrites the rules of the universe. Through what becomes known as The Christopher Flynn Clause, the series asserts that "love itself serves as maintenance"—proving that a single human connection is a far more stabilizing, enduring force than all the brass and steam of cosmic machinery.

The Triumph of Radical Mercy

Where typical dark fantasy settles for blood-drenched tragedy, the final volume, Book IV: Full Circle, achieves something truly transcendent. When Joey Reeves—the primary architect of Jimmy’s ruin—finally steps into the forge, the reader expects total, cosmic annihilation. Instead, the Seven Eldritch Entities strip away Joey’s adult cruelty, defenses, and narcissism, remaking him not into ash, but into an innocent child named Joseph, who is granted a second chance at life under the care of a loving adoptive father.

This bold choice does not sanitize the immense harm Joey caused. Rather, it delivers one of the most profound meditations on forgiveness in modern fiction: “I refuse to believe that hurting me was the only thing you were capable of becoming.” It is a stunning thematic victory, proving that true strength lies in choosing mercy over endless, cyclical retribution.

Detroit: Survival Without Erasure

Grounding this epic, mythic drama is the city of Detroit. Using real-world queer set pieces like Menjo's, Backstreet, and The Gold Coast, Buss treats the city not just as a setting, but as a living character. Detroit represents the emotional heart of the novel: "survival without erasure." It is a city and a landscape that carries both its heavy scars and its vibrant, neon-lit beauty simultaneously, mirroring the very survival of Jimmy Davidson himself.

A Devastatingly Personal Crucible

What gives The Gym its breathtaking, almost holy weight is the raw, autobiographical truth beating at its core. Jason M. Buss bravely channeled his own thirteen-year survival of a toxic, codependent relationship, his harrowing descent into addiction, his time in jail, and the sudden, devastating loss of his mother into the forge of this literature. Where reality left unresolved grief, Buss utilized speculative fiction as a profound act of personal catharsis and healing.

The Verdict

The Gym tetralogy is a masterpiece. It is a visceral, bone-crunching, yet ultimately tender monument to queer endurance. It reminds us that though the fires of trauma can melt us down, we have the agency to choose what we hold onto when everything else burns away.

* * * * *

Five stars. A brilliant, beautifully dark, and deeply healing epic that will live in your bones long after the steam clears.

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Exclusive 1st Look at Curveballs & Curtain Calls!

Jason M Buss — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Three years of silence.
One empty parking lot.
And a cassette tape titled "Perfect Game."

Dear Readers,

We’ve all been there—standing in the path of the one person who knows exactly how to break our defenses.

In this exclusive new excerpt from Curveballs & Curtain Calls, the polished masks of the theater department and the varsity baseball team completely slip away. Under the fading lights of the Rosenberry High parking lot, Elliot Maypedal and Jared King finally break three years of calculated, painful silence.

For Elliot, it’s a chance to confront the boy who once kept their love hidden away in dark utility closets. For Jared, it’s the agonizing reality of watching Elliot move on to Perry—holding hands openly in the hallways in a way Jared was always too terrified to do.

There are no rehearsed lines here. Just raw, bruising truths, the heavy shadow of West Side Story auditions, and a secret, fifteen-year-old cassette tape that changes everything.

Read the Exclusive Parking Lot Excerpt Now:

The school parking lot was completely empty.

Except Elliot.

He's leaning against a maple tree, backlit by the setting sun like some deliberate cinematography, and for a heart-stopping moment I'm thrown back to another sunset, another tree, another time when possibility hummed in the air between us like electricity. The last rays of sunlight catch his hair just as they used to in Grandma Helen's music room, transforming ordinary brown into burnished gold. My crutches sink slightly into the rain-softened ground as I approach, making each step feel even more precarious than usual.

"Hey," I manage, the monosyllable feeling woefully inadequate for everything churning inside me.

"Hey." He pushes off the tree, takes a half step toward me, then stops abruptly as if hitting an invisible barrier.

"That was...you were really good up there," I say, words fumbling against each other.

"Thanks." He looks at the middle distance, somewhere past my shoulder. "You were—" He stops. Starts again. "The guitar. You brought the guitar."

"Yeah."

A silence stretches between us, taut and complicated.

I shift my weight, unable to hide the wince as pain shoots up my damaged side. "You were amazing. But then, you always are."

Something flickers across his face—pain? regret? longing?—before he carefully neutralizes his expression.

His gaze drops to the ground, and he runs his fingers through his hair in that achingly familiar gesture that always betrayed his nervousness. "Jared," he begins, "I want you to know that I've moved on. I've released myself from the past. It was a long road to find my true self, but now I am no longer afraid. There were many tears shed along the way, but—"

"I know," I cut him off, unable to bear hearing the rehearsed speech. "You've moved on. You're with Perry. I get it."

"Do you?" His voice sharpens suddenly, the polite veneer cracking. "Because I remember another time you said you 'got it'—right before you told the whole team that rumors about us were just me being a desperate fairy with a crush."

The words hit with physical force, stealing my breath more effectively than any tackle. The memory of that day in the locker room floods back—the panic when I overheard Tommy and Brian discussing rumors about me and "that theater kid," the blind terror that everything I'd worked for was about to collapse, the horrible, unforgivable words I spoke to protect myself at Elliot's expense.

"Elliot, I—"

"Don't." He wraps his arms around himself, a protective gesture so achingly familiar it feels like watching a scene from our past. "Just—don't. We can't change what happened."

"Can't we talk about it? Really talk about it?" I lean heavily on my crutches, forcing myself to maintain eye contact despite the shame threatening to drown me. "Like how it only took you a week to start dating Perry? Seven days after I supposedly broke your heart, you were already holding hands with him in the hallway like what we had meant nothing."

Elliot's head snaps up, his eyes flashing dangerously. "Don't you dare—"

"A week, Elliot. Seven days." My voice trembles with the emotion I've suppressed for three years. "You just gave me this whole speech about needing time to heal, about how damaged you were from hiding. But there you were at the spring musical, kissing him where everyone could see, like our six months together were nothing but practice."

"You don't know anything about it," he spits, taking an aggressive step toward me. "You have no idea what it was like, watching Perry be proud to be seen with me, while you—" He cuts himself off abruptly, running both hands through his hair in frustration that vibrates through his entire body. "You wouldn't even sit with me at lunch. Wouldn't walk down the same hallway if your teammates were around. Made me duck into empty classrooms if you heard the team coming."

"That's not fair—"

"Fair?" His voice rises, edged with three years of accumulated hurt. "You want to talk about fair? How about watching you play the perfect straight guy so convincingly? Pretending I didn't know every expression on your face, every nervous tic before a big pitch? How about watching from the bleachers as you threw no-hitters for scouts while I sat there knowing exactly how your hands felt on my skin the night before? How about watching you date Katie Bell? Seeing her hand in yours where mine used to feel like it belonged?"

Each accusation lands like a physical blow, because beneath the anger is a foundation of undeniable truth. I did all those things. I compartmentalized us into secret moments while living a public lie. But anger rises in me anyway, hot and desperate and self-protective. "At least I was honest about being scared!" The words explode out of me. "I never pretended it was easy, never acted like I had it all figured out. But you? The second Perry showed interest—"

"Don't." His voice cracks, raw emotion bleeding through. "Don't you dare make this about Perry. This is about you. About how you could kiss me in utility closets but couldn't even look at me in public. About how you'd hold me for hours in your grandma's music room but practically run away if I tried to say hi in the cafeteria." He turns as if to walk away but pivots back with such sudden intensity that I almost step backward. "Perry asked me out five times before I said yes," he continues, softer now but somehow more devastating. "He wanted to take me to homecoming. Wanted to study together in the library where people could see us. Wanted to actually build a life together in the daylight, not just stolen moments in dark corners. And you know what? I turned him down. Every time. Because I was still hoping you'd find your courage. Still hoping you'd choose us over your fear."

That pulls me up short, the revelation landing like an unexpected pitch. "What?"

"But you never did, did you?" His voice trembles with suppressed emotion. "You were ashamed of us. Of me. You buried your music with your grandmother, buried your heart with your fear. And then that day in the locker room, when you called me—when you said those things—that's when I realized you were never going to choose the real you. Not your music, not your heart, not me."

"Elliot—"

"So yeah, maybe I moved on quickly. Maybe I jumped at the chance to be with someone who wasn't ashamed to make music with me. Who didn't make me feel like every song we shared was something dirty that had to be hidden away." He draws a sharp breath, and when he continues his voice has taken on a different edge—something harder, more present-tense. "And now here you are. Senior year, Jared. My senior year. The year I've been working toward for three years, every single production a stepping stone to this one. West Side Story. Tony." He says the name like it belongs to him, because until today it did. "I cannot believe you would walk in here and audition for my part."

The silence between us stretches, not empty but full—packed tight with everything three years of deliberate distance has compressed into this parking lot, this failing light, this moment neither of us planned for.

"And… I wasn't ashamed of you," I finally manage, my voice barely above a whisper. "I wasn't even ashamed of the music. I was ashamed of myself. Of the way my hands would shake when I picked up the guitar, wanting it just as much as baseball. Of how alive I felt singing with you, like I did on the mound. Of being someone my father couldn't understand, someone who needed both the game and the music to feel whole."

Something flickers in his eyes—pain or recognition, I can't tell which. "And now?"

"Now?" I laugh, but it emerges as something closer to a sob. "Now I'm the one watching you sing love songs while I figure out what's left of me. Three years ago, I chose baseball over music, over you. Now I've lost baseball forever, and you're living the life I was too scared to want. Playing music openly, loving openly."

He flinches as if I've physically struck him. "That's not—"

My voice fractures with the weight of a question I've carried for three years. "Tell me the truth," I interrupt, my heart hammering against my ribs like it's trying to escape. "Did you really love me, or was I just an experiment? A mindless jock for your own pleasure, someone to pass the time until someone braver came along who wasn't afraid to hold your hand in public?"

The color drains from his face, leaving him pale and vulnerable in the fading light. His features contract with naked emotion, like watching a heart break in real time. In this moment, he looks exactly like the freshman boy I found crying in the locker room three years ago—lost and desperately alone.

"How can you even ask that?" he whispers, voice rough with hurt. "You were everything to me. Every secret smile across crowded hallways, every note passed in class, every stolen moment we had together—they meant everything. I went to bed every night with my heart in my throat because I knew the next day I would get to hold Jared King, even if only for minutes between classes." His voice fractures on my name. "That's why it hurt so goddamn much when you chose your reputation over us."

"And now look at me," I gesture bitterly to my crutches. "No baseball. No you. No future. Karma really is a perfect coach."

"Jared..." There's something in his voice I can't quite identify. Pity? Regret? Lingering affection? But I can't handle any of those emotions right now, not when I'm barely holding myself together.

"We should go," I say. "It's getting late."

I turn to leave, but his voice stops me, softer now, stripped of defensive anger.

"For what it's worth," he says with quiet intensity, "I did love you. So much, Jer..."

I shift awkwardly, my weight unbalanced on the crutches, and dig into my jacket pocket. The cassette tape feels warm from being carried so close to my heart, its cracked plastic case familiar beneath my fingertips. I've kept it through everything—through championship games and Grandma Helen's funeral, through dating Katie and the accident that redefined my entire existence. This piece of myself I was brave enough to create but not brave enough to share.

"Here," I extend it toward him. The label is faded almost to illegibility, but you can still make out the words: "Perfect Game — JK" in my messy fifteen-year-old handwriting. "I made this. Back then. For you."

His hand trembles visibly as he takes it, our fingers brushing for the first time in almost three years. That fleeting contact sends electricity cascading through my system, a cruel reminder of everything we once were to each other.

"You'll need your mom's old Walkman to play it," I add softly. "It's not exactly digital."

Each step away from him echoes in the empty parking lot, a rhythmic reminder of everything I've lost. Everything I threw away out of fear. The sound reminds me of a metronome, like the one Grandma Helen used to use during our lessons.

Steady. Constant. A beat to keep time by. But maybe, just maybe, also a beat to build something new upon. Because today I played her guitar again after years of silence. I stopped hiding one crucial part of myself. Today I let people see me—really see me—in ways I never allowed before. And even if I've lost Elliot forever, even if that particular symphony will never be completed, maybe I can still find the boy who used to sing without fear in Grandma Helen's music room.

Maybe, in losing everything I thought defined me, I might finally discover who I actually am.

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THE GYM - BOOK ONE: DETROIT'S PRETTIEST LITTLE HEARTBREAKER "Prologue"

Jason M Buss — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

June arrived like a held breath finally released. The air over Detroit shimmered with heat and gasoline and the quiet electricity of endings. Graduation had come and gone, caps tossed skyward like small promises, and the world—vast, glittering, dangerous—had cracked open just enough to let light spill through. Jimmy Davidson stood at the threshold of it all, eighteen and newly unmoored, still learning that freedom often arrived disguised as upheaval.

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.

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