Feedback Needed
I’m new to writing in the dark MM / erotic thriller space, but not new to writing in general. I’ve been writing professionally for a little over a year now, and before that I was a pretty voracious reader with a very active imagination. I love atmosphere heavy stories, psychological tension, flawed characters, and relationships that blur the line between dangerous and intimate, so I decided to finally try writing something in this genre myself.
I’m still figuring out the balance between noir style prose, horror elements, romance, and pacing though, so I would genuinely love some honest feedback from people who actually read this kind of fiction regularly.
My biggest concern is whether the writing feels immersive or if I’m slowing things down too much and risking boring readers before the tension fully escalates.
I’d really appreciate thoughts on:
• pacing
• chemistry between the characters
• tension / atmosphere
• whether the prose feels too heavy for the genre
• and whether you’d keep reading after the opening chapters
Thanks in advance to anyone willing to take a look. I genuinely appreciate the feedback.
Worthy Terror - Ch 1.
The bar had no good reason to still be open. Half the bulbs in the sign outside had burned out years ago and nobody replaced them, so from the street it just read THE LA T DR P, which felt about right. Inside smelled like cigarettes that had soaked into the wood so long they were part of the building now, and the bourbon was cheap enough that Alex had stopped tasting it two glasses ago.
He was fine with that. Tasting things required being present, and he had spent the last six months trying to be as absent as possible.
The stool beside him scraped back. A man sat down.
Alex did not look up right away. He had been in enough bars to know that people who wanted company announced it, and people who did not stared at their drinks. He was staring at his drink.
The man settled in anyway, unhurried, like he had already decided something.
“The bartender hates you,” the man said.
Alex looked up then. “What?”
“He keeps checking on everyone else. Not you.” The stranger nodded toward the bar. “Means you tip badly or you come here too often. Either way, he has given up on you.”
He was tall even sitting down, with a leather jacket that had seen actual use and dark eyes that caught the dim light in a way that made Alex think of deep water. Not handsome in any soft sense. More like a face arranged specifically to be difficult to look away from.
“I come here too often,” Alex said.
“That explains it.”
The man raised two fingers at the bartender, who came immediately. He ordered the same whiskey Alex was drinking without looking at the menu.
“Damien.”
“Alex.”
Damien turned the glass in his hand once before drinking. He wasted very little movement. Nothing about him fidgeted. Even his stillness felt intentional, the way certain people carried themselves when they were used to being watched and knew exactly what to do with it.
The jukebox was playing something with too much saxophone. Damien looked at it the way you look at a car accident.
“Nobody put that on,” Alex said. “It just does that.”
“The bar has opinions.”
“The bar has been through a lot.”
Damien glanced around the room with slow deliberateness, taking inventory. “Used to be a hardware store. You can still see where they bolted the shelving into the floor.”
Alex looked down. The screw holes were there, running in a line toward the back wall. He had been coming here for two years and had never noticed.
“How do you know that?”
“I looked it up before I came in.” Damien said it without embarrassment, like it was the obvious thing to do. “I like to know what a place used to be.”
“Why?”
He considered this. “Because what something was explains what it became.”
Alex turned that over. It should have sounded pretentious. It did not.
“That is either very insightful or the opening line of a terrible podcast.”
Damien smiled at that. Not the polite kind. The kind that meant he had been waiting to see if Alex would push back.
An hour went somewhere.
Alex could not have said exactly how. The rain outside. The bad music. The worse whiskey. A conversation that moved from old buildings to failed careers to the kind of restaurants only people who hated themselves ate at after midnight. Damien did not talk too much. That was part of the problem. He left spaces open, and Alex kept stepping into them.
Damien’s knee was against his under the bar.
It had been there for a while.
Alex had noticed and done nothing, and Damien had noticed him noticing and done nothing either.
“You are bored,” Damien said.
“I am drinking.”
“Same thing, the way you are doing it.”
Alex looked at him. “That is a lot to read off a stranger at a bad bar.”
“It is a very legible situation.” Damien finished his drink and set the glass down level and exact. “You have checked your phone twice, but you did not answer either message. You keep turning your glass when you do not know what to do with your hands. You watched the door every time someone came in, but never like you were waiting for anyone.”
Alex went still.
Damien looked at him as if the pause confirmed something. “You could go home right now and nothing would feel any different tomorrow.”
The thing was, he was right, and they both knew it.
Alex should have hated that. Instead, he felt the first real pulse of interest he had felt all night. Maybe all month.
“So what is the alternative?” Alex asked.
Damien’s gaze dropped to Alex’s mouth, then returned to his eyes.
For the first time that night, the silence between them changed shape.
Damien reached over and brushed his thumb against the rim of Alex’s glass, close enough that his knuckle touched Alex’s fingers. It was barely contact. It still landed low in Alex’s stomach.
“You have to want one,” Damien said.
Alex swallowed. “Maybe I do.”
Damien looked at him for a moment. Not like he was deciding. Like he was letting Alex catch up.
“Finish your drink,” he said.
Outside, the rain was coming down cold and steady. Damien walked to a black SUV parked at the curb and unlocked it without checking if Alex was following.
Alex followed.
He knew it was reckless. He was thirty one years old and tired of every night ending the same way, and reckless was the first thing that had interested him in months.
He got in the car.
Ch 2.
The inside of the SUV smelled like wet leather and something sharper underneath it, like rain hitting hot pavement.
Water hammered the roof hard enough that conversation would have been pointless. Damien started the engine but did not pull away from the curb. He sat for a moment watching the blurred neon beyond the windshield, one hand loose on the wheel.
Then he killed the headlights.
"Backseat," he said.
Not a suggestion.
Alex climbed over the console before he could think too hard about the fact that he was doing it.
The leather was cold beneath him. Damien followed a second later, larger somehow in the confined space. One hand pressed flat against Alex’s chest and pushed him down.
Their mouths met hard.
No careful beginning. Just whiskey, heat, and the immediate ugly relief of finally touching someone after too long without it.
Damien kissed like he had already decided exactly how the night was going to go.
Alex felt that low in his stomach.
His shirt disappeared somewhere onto the floorboards. Damien’s mouth moved down his throat, biting once near the collarbone hard enough to sting.
Alex inhaled sharply.
Damien made a quiet sound against his skin that almost resembled approval.
"You have been thinking about this since I sat down," he murmured.
Alex reached for his belt.
Damien caught both wrists easily and pinned them above Alex’s head with one hand.
"Not yet."
The words should have irritated him.
Instead they landed warm.
He opened Alex's jeans and freed his cock. The first touch of Damien's mouth was shockingly hot. He took him deep in one smooth motion, throat working around him without hesitation. Alex groaned and bucked up. Damien's free hand stayed locked around his wrists while the other pressed down on his hip, holding him in place. The contrast between restraint and wet heat made Alex's head spin.
Damien pulled off long enough to spit on his fingers, then pushed two inside him without warning. The stretch burned in the best way. Alex cursed under his breath. Damien added a third finger quickly, scissoring and curling until Alex was panting and trying to fuck himself on them.
"Enough," Damien growled. He freed himself from his own jeans. His cock was thick and already leaking. He slicked it with spit and pushed in with one long, unrelenting thrust.
Alex cried out at the sudden fullness. Damien did not give him time to adjust. He started fucking him in deep, powerful strokes that rocked the entire car. One hand returned to Alex's throat and squeezed. Not choking him out, but applying steady pressure that made every thrust feel sharper, brighter, more dangerous.
Alex's vision blurred at the edges. Pleasure and the faint edge of fear braided together perfectly.
"Look at me," Damien ordered.
Alex forced his eyes open. Damien's face was inches away, dark eyes locked on his while he drove into him again and again. The hand around his throat tightened a fraction more. Alex came suddenly, hard and untouched, spilling between their stomachs with a broken sound.
Damien kept going. His hips snapped faster, more brutal. The car filled with the wet sound of skin on skin and Alex's ragged breathing. Finally Damien buried himself deep and came with a low growl, hips jerking through it.
They sat there for a minute breathing the same damp air.
Then Damien reached into the center console and pulled out a bottle of water.
Condensation beaded along the plastic.
"Drink," he said.
Alex laughed quietly. "Bossy."
"You look dehydrated."
The strange thing was that Damien sounded almost gentle now. The sharp edges in his voice had softened into something calmer. Intimate, even.
Alex took the bottle.
The water was cold enough to hurt his teeth. Clean tasting. Cleaner than anything else about the night.
Damien watched him drink.
Not casually.
Attentively.
The same way he had studied the bar. The same way he had studied Alex.
A slow warmth began spreading through Alex’s legs.
At first he thought it was exhaustion. Adrenaline bleeding off.
Then his fingers stopped feeling entirely connected to him.
He frowned. "What was in…"
The sentence lost shape halfway through.
Damien took the bottle carefully from his hand and set it aside.
"Easy," he said quietly.
Alex tried to sit up too quickly. The movement turned the inside of his skull sideways. His shoulder hit the door harder than he intended.
Panic arrived late.
Muted. Distant.
Like hearing someone shout through several closed rooms.
Damien’s hand moved briefly into his hair, fingers brushing back the damp strands from his forehead with surprising care.
"You are fine," he said.
Alex wanted to disagree with that.
He could not seem to gather the energy.
The rain outside had become enormous somehow. It swallowed everything else.
His limbs felt impossibly heavy.
The last clear thing he saw was Damien watching him with that same unreadable focus, patient and calm, like he was waiting for something inevitable to finish happening.
Then the darkness finally caught up.
Thoughts?