A Thtucked Foose

One of the things that I always forget about when working on a new book is that sometimes, the revision process can delight the crap out of you. Seriously-- I was totally giggling over a new phrase I'd spat out in a fit of irritation (I do that, you know...) and when I ran it by Mate, he giggled too. This is big for him--he's not really a giggler. It's hard to charm Mate, or even to impress him with my rapier wit... of course, after eighteen years of cohabitation, it could be that even the sweetest dragon grows wit-proofed scales to fend off unwanted incursions of jagged intelligence, but we'll just leave it at the thought that he's hard to impress. And he liked it. He liked it so much, I thought I would share, but how to share? It would work good on the blog, but then, it was a small bit--sort of a one-trick pony bit...so, how to share? how to share how to share how to...oh, wait.

It sounded like something Cory would say.

Now Cory is the main character of my books--she's painfully young, terribly honest, and, at times, excruciatingly profane (as are even the best young people, at times--the awful weight of the spoken profanity has not yet descended upon their backs. Sort of like me.) Cory would spit this out in a second...but, where in the book would it fit? It dealt with blood, and she gets beat up a lot so...so...

And what followed was magic. I've put the bit here to work as a teaser--for those of you who follow the books, it has no spoilers and no plot points--you all know Cory gets the crap beat out of her, but that she always bounces back. For those of you who don't follow the books, remember that this totally (to you) pointless conversation was brought to you by the first day of my period, when I got tired of telling my husband that I was bleeding like a stuck pig, and decided, instead, to bleed like a moose:


From BOUND,
by Amy Lane

“Oh gees…” I swore, feeling my nose starting to swell enough to bother my speech. “Is dere anyding we can do to top this goddabbed bweeding?”

Between Bracken’s red-capped proximity and my broken nose (it must have been broken—with the hurt and the breathing and the goddamned blood there wasn’t another option) it turned out that there really wasn’t anything we could do about the bleeding. By the time we pulled up to Green’s hill, I had soaked through what was left of Bracken’s T-shirt as well as one of the sweatshirts Nicky had left in the SUV, and since those were the only extra clothes in the car, I was freezing my ass off as well. Somewhere between where we’d met by the stadium and the parking lot, my shoulder had good and well frozen up with agony, and the entire trip up the hill was one long misery of pain, blood, and cold.

Green was waiting for us as we pulled up, his yellow hair dark with rain and his lovely face clouded with worry. I had a sudden, horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach—I had done this to him, I thought miserably. I was the reason he was standing in the rain, pacing and afraid. Wonderful.

He greeted me with grim, flashing eyes, and a general pat down to check
my injuries. I yelped as he touched my arm and he practically had to fight my hand away from my nose, soaked through T-shirt and all.

"I'm thorry." I garbled, trying not to cringe away from his touch in guilt and shoving that pathetic wad of bandage back up against my face. "I'm bweeding like a thucking thtuck boose."

Mario sputtered as he got out of the car. "Are you sure that's not a stucking mucked foose?" He asked, putting a gentle hand on my shoulder and shooting Green a wary look.

"With Cory's mouth I think she meant a mucking fucked stoose." La Mark
shot back, aligning himself next to me and giving my 'gentle' beloved one of those super bright smiles that usually melts knees.

"I think," Green said deliberately, "That she is bleeding like a fucking stuck moose. And I also think that you two need to get out of the rain."

"We tried." Mario murmured, and then they deserted me like cucking fowards, leaving me face to face with one very unhappy beloved, while the other one parked the car.

It's hard to look sheepish when you can’t wrinkle your nose or show your mouth, and after a minute I found I was squinting uncomfortably against the rain as it fell. "Uhb...bewoved..." I said hesitantly, and he swore savagely and hauled me against him, mindful of the shoulder, but with the suppressed violence of a pulled bow-string.

"It would serve you right if I let you bleed." He said, and his voice was as close to sounding petulant as a two-millennium old being possibly could.

"I'b thorry." I said again, and all of my misery must have oozed through the rag in front of my face, because he heaved a giant sigh, and kissed my temple reluctantly, but the sweet weirdness that was his healing felt just as wonderful when the tingle of knit tissues and re-aligned bones had faded. Then he ushered me to the shower, and a half an hour later I was no longer bleeding, my nose and shoulder no longer hurt, and I was warm and dry on his couch. But that awful feeling in my stomach was still there. It wasn't helped by the fact that both he and Bracken insisted I eat as soon as I got out of the shower, and the stew that Grace left simmering on the stove sat like a rock.