Fearless Read-Along: Chapter Thirteen

Whoo, boy. This spring is a bit of a struggle session in so many ways. Last weekend, the Internet went out, so I haven't been able to post anything anywhere. The main cable up at the street fell, likely frayed in one of our many gnarly storms this month, and it took AT&T seven days to get to it. Everything moves at a glacial pace in the boonies. But it's finally back up and running as of last night, so I have lots to get caught up on. 

Which brings us to this week's very belated Fearless read-along post. Let's get to it. 

Chapter Thirteen is on the longer side, and it offers a seizure, a cheerleader with a busted nose, an accusation, a threat, and a moment of heartbreak for Ava. 

After the party at Hamilton House breaks up in Chapter Twelve, Ava - in a moment of heartsick defiance - agrees to leave and continue the evening with Carter...and his regrettable clique of friends. They wind up on the football field at the high school, passing around a joint and a bottle, and then Mason takes two unidentified designer tablets, and promptly seizes - but not before claiming he bought the drugs from Ava's dad. When he starts convulsing, his girlfriend, Ainsley, blames Ava, attacks her, and Ava clocks her in the nose. Because Ava emerges unscathed, and Ainsley's sporting two black eyes, Ava's labeled the aggressor by the school and she's the one who gets suspended. 

This whole half of the chapter is very much focused on the trials and tribulations of youth, of high school; of navigating those particular sorts of conflicts that far too often paint the wrong kid the victim. 

Later, we see the adult side of this conflict: Mason's father comes by the clubhouse to swear vengeance upon the Dogs. I enjoy playing the Stephens vs. the Teagues through two generations. Two families, both of which hold significant power in Knoxville, both of which go about things in an underhanded way, but I like to think I paint the Stephens as the villains in this battle. That's the intent, anyway. And at the end of the day, is there any real difference (besides the wardrobe) between outlaws and politicians? 

The clubhouse confrontation sets up the conflict to come down the road, once Stephens becomes mayor and is truly able to go after the Dogs. It also showcases the very real phenomenon that is one-percenter MCs' ability to launder their money with a deft hand and evade total takedown. 

The emotional meat and potatoes of the chapter is, of course, Mercy and Ava's conversation on the precinct steps. Neither of them say anything explicit, but it's very clear in this moment that Ava's feelings for Mercy are no longer platonic, and that Mercy is going to reject them, albeit gently. 

She was tucked against him and his body shielded her from view, from the light, from anything that would interfere. His large thumb brushed over the inside of her wrist, over her pounding pulse. Staring at their hands, he said in the softest, gentlest voice, “No, chéri. No, no, no. You’re just a little thing.”

               Her eyes were full of tears before she could find any meaning in his words. “Why is that a bad thing?” she whispered.

               “It isn’t.” He lifted her hand, placed it back in her own lap, and released her. “It’s a very bad thing.”

               She wanted to stand, to walk away, put her back to him, but instead she sat, her head bowed against his arm, as the awful evening crashed over her and she mourned the loss of him as the man in her life. Things couldn’t continue. He could never again be “her Mercy,” because her feelings for him could never go back to the innocent adoration of childhood. 

Mercy is so warm and open in later books, it's wild to see how guarded he is here. 

At this point, Ava has no idea how Mercy's struggling internally with his own feelings, and her inner monologue on the matter is devastated and bitter. 

#TeaserTuesday: Let's Get Started

“You ever dug a hole before?” she asked Gray as she tied her hair back and secured it with the elastic off her wrist.

“Yes.” He paused. “Have you?”

“Not this kind of hole, but I think all holes are pretty much standard.”

“This one needs to be deep. At least six feet.”

She popped her door. “Let’s get started, then.”

I'm very pleased to say that I managed to cut my way through the worst of the tangles in that difficult Beware of Dog scene earlier today, and the ball is rolling once more. But I'm not sharing a BoD teaser this Tuesday. Instead, I'm going back to a previous book.

All this read-along discussion of Ava's beginnings has me thinking more and more about the final-form adult Ava we see in Lord Have Mercy. In the decade that I've written her, the transformation has been a slow, organic process, but looking at book one alongside book ten makes it look stark. 

There's so many scenes I loved in LHM; scenes that felt necessary, well-earned, and a long time coming. This was one of them. I'll add most of it under a cut so it doesn't clog up the main page, and to hide major spoilers. 

If you still haven't ventured back to the swamp with the whole gang in Lord Have Mercy, consider this your gentle reminder that there's more than four-hundred-thousand words of craziness out there for your reading pleasure. What are you waiting for? 

She wouldn’t call the digging therapeutic, because nothing could have been that, at the moment, but it was…good. A positive way to burn calories. It felt like doing something, and something far more useful than vacuuming.

Fearless Read-Along: Chapter Twelve

The scene in Beware of Dog I'm currently working on is seriously kicking my butt, and taking a little hiatus didn't really help! Fun! So! Here we go with Chapter Twelve. 

This chapter highlights the fact that, though Ava and Mercy are both a part of the Lean Dog sphere, their daily lives and daily challenges couldn't be more different. We see Ava set off for a party at the local abandoned haunted hangout, Hamilton House. And we see Mercy absolutely lose his cool and threaten Jasmine back at the clubhouse. 

Mercy:

“Understand this, too: I’d be perfectly within my rights to crush your windpipe right now. My boys out there, they’d help me chuck you in the river and not say a damn thing about it. You do not ever, ever, question a member like you just did. You do not ever suggest what you just did about Ava Teague.” He flexed his fingers the tiniest amount. “Got it?”

I wrote this scene knowing full well that it was going to make Mercy look bad. I knew there would likely be readers who had a big problem with what happens, but was willing to take any potential heat for it for two reasons. One: it's one of those reminders that this is an outlaw club. They're not bike enthusiasts looking to make the world a better place (though all of them do develop a slightly more philanthropic side in later books as the Abacus plotline unfolds). They care about their women, but women outside the club do not get the full-scale MC protection and respect treatment, as we see in Price of Angels with Holly. And two: since the beginning I wanted to draw a distinct line between Mercy's intense love of his chosen family, and those he sees as a threat to it. Unfortunately for Jazz, here, she's also serving as a foreshadowing breadcrumb for Mercy's mother, Dee. Mercy has a very complicated relationship with women in general, and you throw in that immaturity/arrested development of his, and things can go sideways. He's a much-loved, and I think truly loveable character...but I never backpedal on his psycho front. 

Ava:

“I heard you,” Ava said as she righted herself, her hands curling into fists. “But I don’t think whatever just fell out of your mouth counts as English.”

Rereading this chapter, I was reminded of a reader email I received years ago. It wasn't disrespectful or rude, but the reader requested that I write older, more mature heroines, because she found she couldn't identify with young women Ava's age. I have two thoughts about this.

1) I can for sure see someone aging and maturing past the point of wanting to read about teen and young adult drama. I certainly have no desire to read a Babysitter's Club book these days. But my perspective is that it's much easier for an older reader to look back on their own younger years and find sympathy and empathy for a younger character - we've all been teenagers with teenage problems - than it is for a younger reader to understand the mindset of an older character. I mean, I've had the personality of a middle-aged man my whole life, but that's not true of most people, I don't think. I also think that, within the context of a novel written for adults, POVs from younger characters can help to create a fully realized world and set up future stories for years to come. Arya Stark is eight at the start of A Game of Thrones, and I don't think anyone could say they didn't understand and empathize with her as a character just because she was a child. I will forever maintain that no mature, together, self-possessed forty-something woman with a career could have EVER had anything like a relationship with Mercy. Meet-cutes, dates, mature conversations...nope. Not for Mercy. Ava had to be young, which means that Ava's having to deal with young people challenges. 

2) I think anyone who attended high school can understand what it's like to not be a part of the "in" crowd. Unless you were in the "in" crowd, in which case you think high school was, like, totally awesome. Ava's rivalry with Mason and co. is obviously exaggerated, and it needs to be given Ava's family and background. The enemy has to feel nasty enough to counterbalance her own nastiness. I never had a target on my back in the way that Ava did, but I wasn't pretty, wasn't cool, and I got picked on. I tried to keep my head down and I had a small, tightknit group of friends who helped make it all bearable, but I feel like Ava's school struggles have a certain universal quality to them. My high school really did have a "best body" senior superlative in the yearbook. Yuck. 

To get a little meta about it: Ava's trouble at school in the novel serves as a microcosm of the trouble the MC deals with in the wider world. Like her dad, and Mercy, and even Maggie, Ava eventually decides that since she's never going to be accepted, she's at least going to make sure she's feared. But at seventeen, there's a part of her that still wants to belong - hence going to the party in the first place - because she's not yet certain if she can truly belong in the MC world the way she wants to. 

#TeaserTuesday: Daddy Issues

 

Literally any excuse to make these two bicker, and I'll take it. Despite all the lies he tells himself, Walsh and Fox BOTH love Devin the most, and have been the most hurt by him, they just handle that hurt in different ways. 

 ***

Fox squeezed a lime wedge into his G&T and then dropped the whole thing into the drink with a little splash, so the liquid brimmed right at the edge. He ducked forward to suck the first half-inch off the top, then picked up his glass and eased back on his wicker bench. It irked Walsh to no end that the bastard could make any seat, no matter how sedate, look like the coolest possible place to sit.

“The thing is,” he said, lifting a forefinger off his glass to aim at Walsh, “not a one of us has a leg to stand on when it comes to telling her what to do with her love life.”

Walsh regarded his can of sparkling water with extreme regret. He’d spotted an unopened bottle of Grey Goose in the freezer earlier, and it was taking a not-small amount of willpower not to go and fetch it. He sipped his La Croix, grimaced, and said, “Do you think I don’t know that?” He didn’t want to have this conversation with Fox, but Fox was the only one he could have it with, so, here he sat on the back deck of the Albany house, watching Cass play beer pong with her fiancé.

Christ.

“It makes sense, if you think about it,” Fox continued, unbothered. “All of us have daddy issues—”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Oh no. You hate him worse than anyone. You have the most daddy issues.”

“Shut up. I’m leaving,” Walsh said, but didn’t move.

“Dad and I get along famously.”

“That’s because you have no soul.” And also, Walsh knew, because Fox was the one who actually loved the bastard. Loved him the most, anyway: Tenny was pretty damn attached at this point, and Cass, too, to a lesser extent. But like Raven, Walsh had watched her pull back over the years; had seen her carefully snip through some of those threads. All the little-girl love she’d once felt for Devin had been transformed and was now directed at Shepherd.

Speaking of…the beer pong game came to an end, and Shep reeled Cass in by both hands to kiss her like nobody was watching.

“Ooh,” Fox said, flatly. “We might have to kill him.”

“Yeah,” Walsh agreed.

Fearless Read-Along: Chapter Eleven

 

               Carter Michaels had everything going for him.

               Except he wasn’t Mercy, and Ava didn’t know how else to measure a man

.

Carter! Really, Carter is the very first Lean Dog I ever wrote, because he began as one of four original characters, along with Ava, Mags, and Leah, that I used in my old fanfiction writing days. When I migrated to original fiction, I brought all of them with me. I don't usually have an actor in mind for my characters - they're normally imaginary constructs - but the exceptions are Ghost, Walsh, Fox, and Carter. Since he was "conceived" in 2008, Carter has always looked like a young Paul Walker in my mind, RIP. 

Chapter Eleven is the first time we meet Carter, when he's still just a high school quarterback caught between his craptastic friends and a personal desire to do the right thing. It's also the start of "Part Two" of Fearless in installment form. It begins an entire quarter of the book that's dedicated to what happened five years ago. 

By the time she's a senior in high school, Ava is completely in love with Mercy. She even thinks to herself that it goes far beyond a crush. She's obsessive, she's devoted, and she's heartbroken by the "knowledge" - I put that in quotes because she thinks it's fact, but we'll soon find out that it isn't - that he doesn't return her romantic feelings. 

It's always felt like a very natural progression to me. She already loved him, growing up in the shade of his protective shadow, always able to depend on him. He's a safe place for her, and a true friend in a way that her father and brother weren't. Her relationship with Mercy is the closest relationship she has with any man. And then, after puberty, as she matures, she starts to have romantic feelings, both emotional and physical, for him. We only get her POV in this chapter, and Ava sees Mercy's hasty retreat at the picnic table as a rejection of her innocent flirting.

We know that he's having an internal panic attack and hoping a little distance, and a distraction (Jasmine) will keep him from doing something stupid. 

I of course had to use Wuthering Heights, because Mercy and Ava are modeled on Heathcliff and Catherine. 

“That’s…a lot of drama for one guy.”

               “Heathcliff’s a dramatic dude,” Ava agreed.