Books/ The Line We Cross
A Standalone Novel
The Line We Cross
He has spent four years being watched by forty thousand people and seen by none of them. Then a transfer running back and a fearless kicker stop letting him get away with it.
Asher Redmon has spent four years at the center of a Southeastern Conference football field, perfecting the art of being watched by thousands and truly seen by no one. Across two seasons, a transfer running back and a fearless kicker close that distance whether he lets them or not, and Asher has to decide what he is willing to risk to be known. A tender, explicit novel about the cost of visibility, and the line a man finally lets himself cross.
A Southern literary novel of SEC football in Nashville, by Cade Morrow.
Available now on Kindle. Paperback coming soon.
About the book
Asher Redmon has four years of practice at being good at being looked at and impossible to actually see. Starting quarterback for a Southeastern Conference program, he runs on a system: look at a face for two seconds, never four. It has cost him more than anyone around him knows, and it has worked, until the season a transfer running back named Jude arrives with nothing left to hide and nowhere left to hide it, and a kicker named Ari, who has never once lowered his voice for anyone, starts treating Asher's stillness like a question worth asking out loud.
Across two seasons of locker rooms, open dates, and a program that has started winning in a way that makes everyone look closer, Asher's careful system starts failing him in ways he didn't plan for and doesn't know how to stop. What grows between the three of them is not something any of them scheduled, and it asks all of them to risk the one thing a closeted quarterback cannot afford: being seen.
The Line We Cross is an adult, explicit, deeply felt novel about the particular danger of being known on a field built for forty thousand strangers to watch you, and about what three men discover the moment they decide that danger was never the one worth running from.
Read the opening
Chapter 1: The Hum of August Heat
There were rules and Asher had written none of them down.
Look at faces. Faces were free. A man could look at another man’s face for two full seconds in this room and it meant he was listening, and three seconds meant he was waiting his turn to talk, and four meant something else, and Asher had never gone to four.
Look at equipment. Cleats, shoulder pads, the mesh bag somebody left in the aisle. Equipment was free all day.
What the book is about
…that the line he had spent two years afraid of crossing had never been the one the world kept warning him about.
The Line We Cross is set on the one surface that gives the book both its pressure and its privacy: a football field, one of the only places in American life where men are allowed to hold each other, to collide, to lift each other off the ground, to weep without apology, to say the truest things in a huddle and mean them exactly that much. Its real subject is the gap between being watched and being seen, and the particular cost a man pays to keep those two things from ever touching. It trades the rest of the catalog's tidal hush for a stadium's constant noise, but asks the same question every Cade Morrow novel asks: what does it cost to be known, and what is a man willing to risk to let it happen anyway.
Book details
- Author Cade Morrow
- Format Standalone novel, Kindle edition (paperback coming soon)
- Genre Southern literary fiction, LGBTQ+ fiction, sports fiction
- Setting A Southeastern Conference football program in Nashville, across two seasons
- Length About 88,100 words, 14 chapters, 276 pages in print
- Audience Adult. Explicit.
If you like
For readers who love the quiet locker-room intimacy of college-sports fiction and want it played in the literary register of the rest of the Cade Morrow catalog: stories where the body tells the truth before anyone says a word out loud. Literary first, not genre romance.
More from Cade Morrow
The Line We Cross stands on its own. If you want more of the South, try Someday, a south Mississippi love story, Common Ground, a love story set in rural Alabama, or Sourwood, a novel of inheritance on the Georgia coast, or start the Ebb Tide series on the Gulf Coast with Still Waters. Browse all of Cade's novels.
About the author
Cade Morrow writes quiet, deeply felt literary fiction set in the small towns and back roads of the American South, in a plainspoken voice concerned with memory, place, and the private weather of ordinary lives. A son of the Deep South, he writes from the heart, telling stories of life in the LGBTQ+ community, some drawn from his own experience, others from the compassionate observation of the people around him. Read more about Cade.
There were rules and Asher had written none of them down.
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