Tom Hihnler is Glen Court High's legendary jock champ. He's a glib bully and a juvenile delinquent. He's a cruel heartbreaker who thinks life is a joke. He deals daily with the reality that his rampaging alcoholic father physically abused him as a child and later disappeared from his life altogether. Now, at seventeen, Tom's denial-ridden, egotistical world falls apart when his neurotic pill-popping mother completely disowns him. The odds that somebody as heartless and hostile as Tom will ever find his soul mate in an unforgiving, big-city world are slim to none.
Joe Todd is a God-fearing ex-Marine raised in rural South Carolina. He's a young man living with a grim sexual identity crisis at twenty-two. He relocates to Chicago in hopes of coping with the lingering pain of an unrequited love for another man. Not even the grueling paces of life in the Corps could have prepared Joe for the ordeal that awaits him. The fragile glass cocoon of his naïve, aloof world is forever blown to bits the day he meets Tom and decides to pursue a forbidden and impossible love.
