Rain is innocent and free he is the child Oryn never was.Īnd he is COVE: the self who holds all the bad memories, the self who considers himself a flaw, the one who drinks and smokes and harms. He is 5-year-old RAIN, who loves Batman and dinosaurs. Theo is one of Oryn's earliest alters he's the most like Oryn except much more confident.

He is THEO, the caretaker who cleans and cooks and deals with the logistics of daily adult life.

Reed steps in when Oryn gets stressed or scared. He is REED: the protector, the one who's angry, who doesn't trust. Cohen will always be 19 he is Oryn's sexual, social self, the self who likes meeting new people, and longs to be touched and cuddled. He is COHEN: cheerful, flirtatious, outgoing, living in the moment. ORYN is a man broken apart by a horrifying past, a childhood so traumatic the only way to survive was to create another self (or alter) to take the abuse so Oryn could go on. In this life, the life outside the system of his mind, Oryn has one body (the host), but he is not one self. Vaughn doesn't expect to have a war of wills with Reed, stop Cove from self-harming, eat Theo's meticulously prepared meals, or babysit Rain. When Vaughn asks the withdrawn, painfully shy man in his marketing class to be his partner, he has no way of knowing he'll fall in love, not just with Oryn, but with Cohen too. Love Me Whole is a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit and the most selfless, abiding kind of love. This is one of the most moving and extraordinary romance novels I've ever read. But how can you love someone who isn’t always themself? It may not be easy, but Vaughn is determined to try. Vaughn’s heart defies logic, and he finds himself falling in love with this strange new man. Little does he know, the man he meets during an impromptu decision to return to college is anything but ordinary. When his job doesn’t offer the same thrill it once did, he decides it’s time to mix-up his stagnant, boring routine. And Rain, a five-year-old child whose only concern is Batman. Theo, an asexual man of little emotion, whose focus is on maintaining order. Cove, a self-destructive terror, whose past haunts him.

Cohen, a flamboyantly gay nineteen-year-old who is a social butterfly. Oryn shares his life and headspace with five distinctively different alters. He may look like a normal man on the outside, but spend five minutes with him, and his daily struggles begin to show. Being an extremely shy, social introvert is only part of the problem. Twenty-eight-year-old Oryn Patterson isn’t like other people.

Love Me Whole by Nicky James