The Open Door: Building James

Of the three men in this series, James is the one people ask me about the least — and the one I find hardest to talk about honestly. Patrick is my husband, plainly and mostly. James is different. James is built on someone I was, and in some quiet way still am, deeply in love with.

Not Lightning — Something Slower and Just as True

It wasn't love at first sight. Not the way it was with my husband, the kind of immediate, electric recognition that some people are lucky enough to get once in a lifetime. What I had with the real man behind James was slower to arrive — but by the time it did, it was every bit as real. Maybe more disorienting, because I wasn't looking for it.

We met at a strange, specific junction in time — right before DADT ended, but not yet. Still hiding, still calculating, but close enough to the edge of change that you could feel it coming even if you couldn't name it. We shared pieces of a life across three cities — Washington, DC, New York City, NY, and San Diego, CA — never quite in the same place long enough to call it simple, but present for each other in the ways that mattered.

The Ideal Officer

He loved the Navy the way some people love a faith. He loved the Academy, the standard, the discipline of it — not performing duty, but genuinely believing in it. And I loved him for exactly that. There's something magnetic about watching someone be fully, unapologetically themselves inside a structure that demanded so much of them, especially when that same structure told him he had to hide half of who he was to stay in it.

That's the core of James on the page: a man who loves service with his whole chest, and who spent years learning that loving it didn't have to mean disappearing inside it.

What I Watched From a Distance

Here's the part that still catches in my throat a little when I write it. I watched him grow — from a closeted officer into a proud, open partner in a real, loving relationship with another man. I watched it from the outside, from inside my own separate relationship, without either of us ever really naming what we were to each other or what we were watching in one another. We never talked about it directly. But I think we both knew, quietly, that we were helping each other grow into who we were supposed to become.

That distance, that unspoken mutual witnessing — that's not something I could have invented. It's the realest thing in James's entire arc.

The Small, Honest Details

Some of what makes James feel human on the page are the small things, straight from life. The mismatched socks. The carefree clutter that never seemed to bother him because, as he'd say, it wasn't important enough to be noise. And then, in total contrast — when something actually mattered to him, there was no clutter at all. The cups turned to exactly ninety degrees. The near-obsessive precision around cooking, done not as a chore but as something close to devotion. A specific drink, ordered the same way, every time, like a small ritual of control in a life that otherwise didn't offer him much of it.

Carefree where it didn't matter. Exacting where it did. That contradiction is entirely real, and it's one of my favorite things about writing him.

James's Arc

James's arc in the series isn't about becoming a different person — it's about a man who already knew exactly who he was learning, slowly, that he was finally allowed to say it out loud. Watching a character move from hiding in plain sight to standing in the open, hand in hand with someone he loves, without flinching — that's not fiction I had to imagine from nothing. I got to witness the real version of that journey, up close, even if I wasn't the one standing beside him at the end of it.

Why This One Is Harder to Write About

Patrick is easy to talk about because he's still here, still mine, still the anchor at the center of my actual life. James is different. He's love that mattered, growth I got to witness, a connection that shaped who I am, even though our story didn't end the way Alex and James's does on the page. Writing him has been its own kind of gift — a way of honoring something real without needing it to have turned out any particular way.

That's the truth behind James: beautifully, imperfectly real, exactly like the man he's based on.