Beneath The Skin(108)
And sometimes, in a rare moment, it’s just this kind of utter silence a musician like me needs to feel any true peace.
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Continue on to find out how it all began between Dessie & Clayton in Read My Lips, which includes a brand new previously unreleased bonus epilogue!
by
Daryl Banner
Read My Lips
A College Obsession Romance
#1
Copyright © 2016 by Daryl Banner
Published by Frozenfyre Publishing
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including but not limited to being stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, groups, businesses, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover Artist : Kari Ayasha at Cover To Cover Designs
Interior Design : Daryl Banner
Read My Lips
(A College Obsession Romance #1)
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
Other Work By Daryl Banner
Bonus Epilogue
First and foremost, thank you, the reader, for picking up this book and giving it a try. I hope you enjoy getting to know Dessie & Clayton.
I’m a proud alumni of the University of Houston with a degree in Theatre and Psychology, and I want to dedicate this book to all the other actors, techies, designers, and dreamers who created art with me and shared in some cool-ass experiences during my time there.
While writing the second half of this novel, I experienced the very sudden loss of a friend who was also a fellow Theatre U of H alumni. His name was Timmy Wood. He was a hilarious and caring comedic actor whom everyone knew and loved—and I do mean everyone. Timmy was involved in freakin’ everything. He was always in a play or working on some new project. Simply put, he was a creative machine who just couldn’t be stopped. Every memory I had with him rushed forth as I finished this book. So I dedicate this to you, Timmy. Tell Doc, Lanford, and Jenny hi for me, and I hope you’re all partying hard up there!
And to my witty, proudly deaf professor with whom I took four eye-opening semesters of American Sign Language, and to the friends—both hearing and not—who I met along the way, this is for you too.
With so much love & Happy Reading,
Daryl
DESSIE
I went to college to find myself. I didn’t expect to find him.
My whole life was a delicate, artful plan set in place by my delicate, artful family. From my mother, the famous actor of stage and film, to my world-renowned lighting designer father and insufferably perfect sister, I was doomed to a life in the Theatre spotlight.
And the Lebeau family name was forever tainted with average, unremarkable, untalented me.
After graduating high school, I enjoyed a few years of disappointing my parents. Thirty-three bad auditions and two private academies later found me begging them for one last favor: a normal college experience.
And it was at that totally normal small-town Texas college that I met him, the muscular, tatted bad-boy who would soon become my obsession.
His eyes smoldered me with just one look. His touch awakened the woman inside me. His breath drew out the inspiration deep in my soul that I did not know was there.
And through his lips, his perfect, plush, kissable lips, I would find my voice at last … the voice that would someday fill a New York City stage, the voice that would set me apart from my tragically perfect family, the voice that would finally break me free …
If only he could hear a word of it.
DESSIE
“I can’t hear you!”
The noise that fills the courtyard of the Quad is deafening. Families bustle about carrying belongings to the dorms. A group of frat boys play Frisbee, their shirtless torsos sweaty and lean. A guy shouts orders from a window up above to his parents below, who can’t make out what he’s saying. A circle of girls chant some sorority thing over and over nearby. Two dudes who look like they haven’t bathed since Daylight Savings began stand on the rim of a fountain with guitars as they serenade the masses, their lyrics lost in the cacophony of shouting and laughter.