First True Love Affair

Karl James Lucci built an iconic coffee empire on patience and precision until a heart attack shatters his reality. Between ICU beeps and Pacific surf, he wakes in the 1980s. He is sixteen again, back in a summer he thought he had left behind.

His mother is singing in the kitchen. Jimmy Ridge Holloway is waiting at the end of Bacon Street, ready to go surfing, salt water on his skin, sunshine in his hair.

As Karl relives his friendship with Jimmy, he confronts the first love he buried, the quiet ache of loving another boy in a time that gave him no language for it, and the silence that cost them both. His grandfather Nonno, gone before Karl was born and caught between what was lost and what remains, becomes an unlikely guide, reminding him that when the hands align on his watch, the choice will matter.

In this borrowed summer of surf and memory, Karl learns three rules.

Listen.
Tell the truth.
Leave things better.

What he dares to change, and what it may cost, will determine whether a love once hidden can survive a second chance.

Set against the sunlit coast of Southern California, First True Love Affair is a time-bending LGBTQ+ story about memory, first love, and what grows when we finally learn to tend the past.