Welcome to Ink & Bone
In the last column, Becoming the Boy Who Wrote Him, I told you how Christian waited.
Not as a memory, but as a tether. A voice that stayed soft and steady until I was ready to write him home.
This is what Ink & Bone is for.
To return not just to the characters I wrote, but to the versions of myself that needed them. To trace the pulse from paper to screen, from margin to modem.
This one is about Elias. Before he came to the world in His Theirs Enough.
About how he arrived not in notebooks, but in glow.
Typed into breath. Hidden in folders. Lit by want.
A boy born not from plot, but from the ache to be seen.
He didn’t arrive in a notebook.
He arrived in the glow of a CRT monitor.
In the hiss of dial-up and the hush of a house asleep.
Elias was not a boy I invented.
He was conjured.
In the early 2000s, when connection was still a negotiation, and you had to pray the phone line held… I found him.
He came to me through pixels, through usernames, through forums with names like ObeyMeBoy24 or VelvetKink. Places where no one knew your face but everyone knew your want. Where everything was half-true and twice as urgent.
I was barely twenty.
Living in two worlds.
By day: polite, helpful, reliable.
By night: wired, aching, fingers stuttering across a keyboard in the dark.
That’s when I started writing him.
Not as “Elias” he didn’t have a name yet.
But he had presence.
He had breath.
I typed out scenes I couldn’t speak of.
A man kneeling in front of another, trembling with the need to please.
A mouth held open.
A name whispered like a secret.
A screen glowing just bright enough to show the pulse in his throat.
The first Elias was a file named Try1.doc.
Then BoyObeys.doc.
Then AltarBoy.txt.
Each time, he changed.
But not really.
He always waited.
Always watched.
Always gave in.
I remember the fear, how it made my fingers shake even as I wrote.
Not fear of being caught, exactly, but fear of being seen.
Because Elias wasn’t just a fantasy.
He was too familiar.
He wanted the things I wouldn’t let myself want.
He yielded in ways I only dared to in the safest corners of my mind.
He said yes when I would have swallowed the word.
And there was something holy in that.
I didn’t understand it then.
That what I was writing wasn’t porn.
It wasn’t even kink.
It was prayer.
Offered in keystrokes.
Saved to folders no one else would open.
Backed up on discs labelled Uni Essays and Tax Documents.
Hidden, but never forgotten.
When I look back now, I can still feel the heat of that screen.
Still hear the soft plastic click of the keys.
Still taste the breath I held as the scene unfolded, a man lowering himself onto his knees, not with shame… But with devotion.
Elias wasn’t born of confidence.
He was born of absence.
Of yearning.
Of too many nights spent with one hand on the keyboard and the other in my lap,
typing fantasies I needed more than orgasm.
I needed to exist.
Somewhere.
And so, Elias did.
Become Tethered.
His, Theirs, Enough is an unapologetically tender and brutal debut for readers who understand that devotion isn’t always a choice.
