Is there any scream more piercing than that of the soul which suffers in silence? – Author Unknown
Cole Grayson had thought his best friend and lover, Jake Walker, was dead, until he walked into a bar one night and the bouncer turned out to be the man—the only man—who, even from the grave, had influenced every single event in the man’s life up to that point: his dreams, his music career, his sham of a marriage…
Finding Jake again and rescuing him from the life he’d been living was supposed to be the realization of everything perfect and whole, and should have completed the picture of the future the two men were destined to have together. But for Jake, the past has left too many scars to ignore, has left too much pain in its wake to leave him in peace and to allow him to believe that who he is and what he’s suffered and what he’s been forced to do to survive are the things that make him anywhere near deserving enough of Cole.
Singing Alone introduced these two men, telling the story from Cole’s point-of-view. In No More Lonely Lullabies, Jennifer Cierra tells Jake’s story, the agonizing truth of the events that shaped who Jake has become, the man who goes through the motions of living but who did, in a figurative way, die all those years before. He is the man who can’t outrun his past in spite of how hard he tries, unless he can allow himself to accept that he has someone to run to and deserves everything that someone is willing to give. Jake is the man who must learn to trust that his silence will keep him bound to the past and only the truth will set him free.
This was an emotional cap on Cole and Jake’s story, filled with the sadness of a boy who was cheated out of the life he deserved and robbed him of the happiness that should have been his to share with the man he loved, and of the purging of the secrets that had become the poison in Jake’s mind so that he could finally forgive himself and look to the future.
This is a lovely completion to Cole and Jake’s story, and I loved the short little commingling at the end of these characters with Paul Ashton from the author’s Melting Wax and Burning Feathers.
You can buy No More Lonely Lullabies here: