999 and Counting: A Love Story
The summer before college, Jake discovers Black’s Beach: San Diego’s unofficial nude beach, tucked beneath towering cliffs, accessible only to those willing to make the climb down. He goes for the sun. He stays for the fun.
What begins as an afternoon among friends — two cars, a cooler of Miller, the comfortable ease of people who have known each other since high school — becomes something Jake didn’t expect. But seen differently, in different light, everything changes.
Over twelve sun-drenched months, Jake moves through a series of worlds, each one teaching him something the last one couldn’t. Black’s Beach, where the rules of ordinary life are suspended by mutual agreement. The gay end of the beach, past the rocks, where Jake crosses a line he can’t uncross. The anonymous dark of glory holes and the strange institutional intimacy of the bathhouse. Each encounter accumulates. Jake keeps count.
But running underneath all of it — underneath the experimentation, the education, the slow confident expansion of a life being figured out — is a question Jake keeps not quite asking. About his friend Kyle. About what it means that Kyle’s absence hurts in a way that no one else’s does. About what he’s actually counting toward.
999 and Counting is a coming-of-age story told from the inside of a body learning what it wants, and a love story about what survives the wanting. Funny, frank, and genuinely felt, it follows one young man from innocence through friendship, desire, and the particular freedom of a city where summer never quite ends.
Contains explicit sexual content intended for adult readers.
