Welcome to Ink & Bone
In the last column, Incognito Windows & Half-Truths, I told you how he arrived, not in a notebook, but in the blue-white light of a CRT monitor. Born of absence. Saved to hidden folders. Written into breath.
This is what Ink & Bone is for. To return to the drafts that held me before I knew how to hold myself. To follow the thread from secrecy to scripture, from the private keystroke to the voice that can say it aloud.
This one is about what happened once Elias existed, when I began to choreograph his every movement, to write the rooms I could not yet enter, and in saving him, began to save myself.
I didn’t control much in those years.
Not my body. Not my hunger. Not the way desire slid sideways through me like a secret I was too afraid to hold with both hands.
But I could control him.
Elias.
My beautiful, trembling, obedient fiction.
He did what I couldn’t.
He said yes.
He knelt.
He let himself want.
Writing him was less like storytelling and more like… choreography.
Each scene was a rehearsal.
A dance I needed to memorise in order to survive.
What would it feel like to be told what to do?
To take my clothes off because someone wanted me bare, not because I wanted to disappear?
To be opened slowly, reverently, and praised for it?
I didn’t know.
But Elias did.
In file after file, draft after draft, I wrote him into rooms I couldn’t enter.
Dim rooms. Rich with tension. With sound. With rules.
I wrote him folded over desks.
Bent over altar rails.
Washing someone else’s feet with his mouth.
I gave him strange tasks.
To speak without using the word I.
To keep still while being touched.
To count strokes.
To come without permission, and then beg forgiveness for it.
These were not things I had ever done.
Not then.
But they fascinated me.
The paradox of being utterly controlled and yet utterly free.
In real life, I was tense.
Tidy.
Too agreeable.
Too good.
But Elias… he was allowed to be ruined.
To cry out.
To want too much.
He was punished and adored.
Exalted and marked.
Fucked and forgiven.
And every time I wrote him, I saved him.
Ctrl+S.
Again.
Again.
I didn’t realise, at the time, that I was saving myself too.
That each keystroke was a kind of resistance.
A refusal to be invisible.
A secret claim to my own desire.
Because even though I was writing from fantasy, what spilled out wasn’t just heat.
It was structure.
Devotion.
Pattern.
I began to understand that I wasn’t just writing sex.
I was writing ritual.
And Elias wasn’t just my fantasy.
He was my first theology.
Of pain. Of praise. Of surrender.
He taught me that writing could be both sacred and filthy,
that power and softness weren’t opposites,
that giving in didn’t mean giving up.
Every saved file became a kind of scripture.
Not for others.
For me.
Ctrl+S.
Ctrl+Me.
I didn’t know it then,
but I was already becoming Rowan Thornwell.
Become Tethered.
His, Theirs, Enough is an unapologetically tender and brutal debut for readers who understand that devotion isn’t always a choice.
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So raw and intense xx