Weekly Update

My Headphones revision didn't get very far this week because I decided to concentrate on editing. I kind of worked on three manuscripts, but gave most of my attention to Like Cracks In The Sidewalk. It's the darkest thing I've written, considering most of my stories are lighter, slightly angsty, feel-good reads. I'm going to give it one more read-through and then start submitting it around.

Here's one of the darker passages--if not the darkest. Warning: violence and NSFW

I was shouting and couldn’t stop myself. “I’m not the one out all night, coming in at dawn! Where do you go after your gigs, if you aren’t pulling? Am I supposed to just wait around, be your fuckboy? That’s what Susan called me, that first day I met her!”

Val didn’t reply with words; instead, he punched me in the ribs. The blow wasn’t hard. We were standing too close for him to get any power behind the punch. He wheeled back against the wall when I slapped him across the face. Val took a deep breath in his shock and roared as he gathered himself and ran at me. But he was smaller and quite simply clumsy with the drugs, and I shoved him back against the wall with one hand around his throat, the other in the center of his chest. His head hit the solid plaster and Val stood stunned for a moment, long enough for me to notice the bulge straining against his jeans and I swung him around, one arm wound around his chest to hold him while the other traveled down to cup him, pressing between his legs. Val jumped as I tightened my hand and he squirmed, trying to get away when my answering hardness pressed into his back. “Let go of me!”

“No. This’s what you want, isn’t it?” I was still shouting at him as I pushed him towards the bedroom. A part of me was yelling “stop!” but I was beyond reason, the anger and the worry and the bitterness finally all coalescing into one smoldering hot lump of coal burning in my brain, turning my vision red until the world had tunneled down to that moment. The only thing I was aware of was the writhing body in front of me. The only thing I could hear was our combined raspy breaths and Val’s mumbled curses as he fought against my restraining hands.

I fumbled with Val’s button and zipper and pulled his pants off as I shoved him onto his knees with his ass in the air, somehow opening my own pants and freeing my own erection even as I wrestled to hold him down. I shouldn’t have been able to, not in the state I was in, but he wasn’t really fighting me. I think to him, it was a game. I want to believe I’m the kind of man who would’ve stopped if he’d said no. But he didn’t. He never said the word.