Pierced (Tall, Dark, and Handsome Book 2)

by JA Huss

  “Pierce?” Myrtle says.

  “Mmm?” I say, absently.

  “You. Do not. Have to do this.”

  I take her hand, smile at her, struck by just how much I feel for this woman. For how important she has been in my life. For how important she will be. For how much she has taught me. For how much she has forgiven me. For how much she trusts me. And I say…

  “No. But I want to.” I add, “Besides, my father is moving me more and more in the direction of taking over everything.”

  “Yeah?”

  “So… I really will be king someday. I’ll need a prince.”

  She chuckles. “There are other ways of making a prince,” she says. “Super fun ones.” She strokes my cock through my trousers.

  “Stop, stop,” I whisper earnestly. “Jean-Luc’s gonna have it in his hands in a few seconds and I don’t want him to get the wrong idea.”

  I wink. She smiles again. And then she says, “OK. But just know that one day, when we do have our little prince, I’m not naming him Albert.”

  “Oh, God, of course not. That’d be weird.” She nods. “We’re already gonna have a Prince Albert.”

  Jean-Luc returns, sits next to me, puts on a pair of surprisingly nerdy reading glasses, looks to me for permission, I nod, and then he unzips my pants and pulls out my cock. There’s a moment where he regards me with a very French pressing of his lips and nod of his head as if to say, “Très bon.” I nod back with a, “Merci.”

  He lifts up the piercing gun and adjusts the light. I look over at Myrtle one last time and she mouths, Are you sure?

  I just smirk—in a way that I, throughout my life, have been told is, “so Pierce”—and say…

  “Definitely. Let’s crown this prince.”

  And off everyone’s joyous laughter…

  THE MOST INTENSE FUCKING PAIN I HAVE EVER FELT COURSES THROUGH ME.

  And it feels amazing.

  Welcome to the End of Book Shit where we get to say anything we want about the book. These are always done last minute and never edited so excuse our typos. :)

  Was this your favorite BDSM rom-com set in a fictional suburb of Denver and subsequently Paris that you read this year?

  We hope so.

  When we set out to craft this story and realized that this was the direction we wanted to take it, one of the conversations we had to have was how do we utilize an underlying subject matter that has plenty of opportunity for being funny without making fun of it? How do we honor the fact that the dom/sub relationship is a real one that matters to people while simultaneously being jokey about it? Is this the direction we should go? How do we direct the story? How do we control the events?

  And, as with everything we now do together, we decided there was only one answer. Stop controlling the story and just submit to what the story wanted us to tell about it. Because these two people, Pierce and Myrtle, have strong, defiant personalities, and there’s no way we could have forced them into anything without their explicit permission. They were in control. Not us.

  Julie once said to me, “The reason Fifty Shades was a success wasn’t because of a goddamn red room or some “kinky” sex. It was because of the contract.” (And let’s go ahead and abandon the notion that such a thing as “kink” exists, shall we? That’s a judgement. And it’s relative. One person’s kink is another’s Sunday brunch.) She noted that the real appeal of those books, conceptually, was that Anastasia Steele was agreeing to her dynamic with Christian Grey.

  And look, there have been myriad articles written about the success of the series and the whys and wherefores and what it says about the male/female relationship and female empowerment... And even though I’m a man writing romance with a woman and I do have things to say on the matter, I doubt I have anything new or particularly bright to add to the subject today. We can have that conversation another time. Suffice to say, given Julie Huss’s achievements in the world of erotic/romantic fiction, her thoughts about what makes a book like Fifty Shades work can be considered just about as close to expert as anyone’s.

  Here’s why I bring it up ...

  Let’s assume for the purposes of this essay that hers is an accurate assessing. That at least part of the reason that so much attention has been given to the world of Fifty Shades and the sexual culture contained therein owes to the front facing way those books examine the nature of the relationship between Ana and Chrissy (as I have just decided to start calling him). And not just because it’s hot, or sexy, or taboo, or whatever else it might be. Although, if that’s the thing about it that draws you in, more power to you. Hell, maybe you just like the suits. I know I do. Custom suits and shoes are my metaphorical red room of pain. It hurts my wallet so badly, but it’s worth the agony. (As I say, we all have our fetishes. #NoJudgements)

  Since being invited into the romance writing universe just about eighteen months ago, I have learned a lot. A lot about what romance writing is, what it isn’t; about what romance readers respond to, what they don’t; about the kind of people who read romance (spoiler: there is no one kind of person who reads romance – you are a wide, wonderful, diverse group of humans); and about myself and how I view erotic fiction and its place in the zeitgeist. In other words, I’ve learned a lot about my own relationship to the world writ large.

  And one of the many things I’ve discovered is that as much as I know about control being an illusion and that giving over to the power of the cosmos is always liberating, it can still be a hard action to practice.

  I have long had a complicated relationship with the ideas of power and control. I have always believed that no one can take power from you. That power is not about dominion over someone else (or someone else’s dominion over you) but about your own engine; how you fuel it and where it takes you. But that notion has frequently butted against certain realities. As an actor, I have spent many years of my life walking into rooms filled with “powerful” people in order to ask them for things. In premise, those “things” have been jobs. (That is the actor’s actual job. To audition for jobs. The “job,” if you book it, is the reward for having done your actual job well.)

  But, in reality, what you are asking for (or what I know I was asking for for a long time), is validation. Am I good enough? Am I deserving? Am I worth something to you? Am I desirable? Y’know... Ego shit.

  It is a curious dynamic. On the one hand, you must be self-possessed, and self-reliant, and confident, and poised, and all the rest of it, while on the other hand you are asking for someone else’s validation and stamp of approval. There is a reason actors go crazy. (Also, the field attracts a lot of people who have a natural craziness about them. Let’s not blame the profession entirely.)

  And then at some point many years ago I came to realize that the only way I could get the things I wanted from other people was to learn to give them to myself first and then not care if anyone else noticed. This is the well-known paradox that seems to be proven true time and again: As soon as you stop wanting the elusive thing, the elusive thing shows up. The trick, of course, is that you have to actually stop wanting it. And then, when you get it, it’s like, “Eh. I didn’t really need it. But thanks.”

  Another way to say all this is: When you let go of your ego and stop trying to control everything, stuff somehow has a way of working out.

  That may mean that it works out exactly like you wanted or it may mean it doesn’t but you don’t care because you’re already fine without it, but either way... You win.

  And your win doesn’t have to come at the expense of anyone else’s loss. You just feel that victory from within. It is frequently unexpected, always unlike what you planned for it to be, and if you’re present and honest, it is welcome.

  Last week, for a few days, I was ranked inside the top 100 authors of romantic suspense on Amazon. Julie told me that this is something that would happen. That people would read the books we write together and would enjoy them and eventually it would result in some kind of validation that wou
ld be measurable.

  I didn’t necessarily believe her. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I think I have an idea now. It was because I wanted to control things that aren’t mine to control.

  At first I was very much like, “No. I want to write such and such kind of thing. I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to be able to control the reader’s experience in x, y, z kind of way.” Julie would say, “Okay, but trust me, this will work. Or that will work. Or just ... trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

  It was tough for me to give up control. It was difficult for me to try not to bend the work to my will. Hard for me to give over to that kind of trust and believe that I would be safe inside this new experience. Because it was uncomfortable. It was intimidating. It was another way in which I was going to be putting myself up for judgement and asking people to like what I was doing.

  But somewhere along the line, I started feeling differently. Not that I didn’t care what people would think, but that by trusting my instincts about what we were doing along with submitting to the proven truths of what works in this type of storytelling, I could feel safe. I could believe that my own, sincere giving over of myself to the work might still be scary, or sometimes painful, or sometimes invigorating, but it would always be honest and that the reward I would gain would be growth. Both as an artist and as a person. I learned to trust my collaborator completely. I learned to trust the reader completely. I learned that by becoming submissive to the process, I could let go of the burden of perfection. Or ... whatever the fuck I was chasing on a given day.

  It’s an odd thing to spend a lifetime in pursuit of personal liberation on a variety of fronts only to discover that when you come face to face with a new experience, you have to learn to liberate your mind all over again. It never ceases to amaze me how much individual power I gain from the act of giving over. I guess it’s as simple as ... you can’t know how good it feels to stand tall until you’ve experienced the pain of growing.

  Any success I’m having in my life right now owes to the relationships I have. The relationships I have with my writing partner. With the readers. With myself. I have made a contract with all of us.

  To Julie, I have made a contract to work as hard as I can, be as invested as I can, and be as honorable as I can to our partnership.

  To you, the reader, I have made a contract to give you something worthy of your time, to tell the truth in the stories I write, and – whether funny, serious, suspenseful, or all of the above – to take you on a journey that comes from a place of wanting to serve the work. And by serving the work, serve you.

  And with myself, I have made a contract to give over to this incredible journey and enjoy the ride.

  It is still challenging sometimes. It is still intimidating sometimes. It is still painful sometimes. But when I get to the end of a new journey (like this one, right now) it always feels so very good.

  My never-ending love and gratitude to Julie Huss, for bringing me into her crazy dungeon, my wife, Laura, for coming along with me and holding my hand in the dark, and to you, as ever and always, for being curious enough to peek behind the curtain.

  Until next time...

  Submissively,

  -JM

  24 October 2018

  As usual I am fashionably late with this EOBS. I am literally down to the wire in must-get-this-thing-written and what-the-hell-do-I-talk-about mode.

  Well, I don’t think I can top Johnathan’s eloquent essay so I’m not even gonna try.

  So I’m gonna talk about our 2018. Both the one I shared with you, the reader, and the one I shared with Johnathan, the partner. It’s been a helluva year. We began 2018 with a pretty crazy writing schedule (and reading schedule for you guys, right!). Sin With Me was done by the time January 2018 rolled around but that was only book one. We still had three more books to write and not very much time to do it. And in between all that I was writing and releasing the Jordan’s Game series.

  I think as we were finishing up Passion Rising, which is the last book in the Original Sin Series, Johnathan and I were looking forward to the break. We’d worked hard and now it was time to take it down a notch.

  And that lasted… oh, maybe two weeks. Because we were going to be signing at Book Bonanza in July and we really (like REALLY) wanted The Sexpert to be available for it. So we doubled down. And during this time Johnathan was super busy recording audiobooks and acting, but writing a book is a lot like giving birth. It sucks a whole bunch while you’re in the whole gestation part and becomes almost unbearable in the week leading up to release, but when it’s all said an done and release day is over and you’re holding that pretty paperback in your hand you kinda forget that you hated everything and everyone around you just a few weeks ago.

  So even though we REALLY thought (for sure this time) that we’re gonna take a break after Sexpert was born, along came The Triangle. And hell, let’s just stop pretending, OK? Let’s just knock this second TDH book out because Myrtle and Pierce are super cool and funny and bigger than life in every way imaginable.

  So let’s just face the facts.

  Johnathan and I just aren’t “down-time” people.

  :)

  I think that part of the reason we work well together.

  We love to work.

  When we finish a book and there’s no words owed to each other the next day it feels weird. I wake up and think—“What is this day that has no deadline attached to it? I must start a book!”

  And maybe some of my workaholic nature rubbed off on Johnathan, but I don’t think so. I think this is just who we are.

  So good news for you! More books coming! Because we can’t stop writing! lol

  As far as this books goes—hell, Myrtle was one fun character to be for seventy-five thousand words. I respect the hell out of her. When I decided to make her come from “circus people” it was a little bit because I sorta come from circus people too. (If you knew that already, you get a cookie for being one of my superfans.)

  I wanted to make her outrageous, but believable. And I wanted people to relate to her. Maybe your father isn’t a lion tamer and maybe your mother isn’t a librarian, but most people can relate to the idea that you don’t want to end up like your parents.

  If you did want to end up like your parents, well you’re a very lucky person. That’s all I can say. Because my father was a professional golfer and I hated golf. To this day I can’t stand the idea of golf. And my mother was always pretty satisfied with her lot in life, pretty content to just do her job and let things happen as they will, and I’m just one of those people who likes to create my own future. I am always on the lookout for another opportunity to change.

  So I relate to Myrtle a lot. She is a woman who has remade herself several times. She started out in the shadow of her mother, the simple librarian, and her father, who courted danger every hour of his working life. And when it came time to step out of those shadows she didn’t know who the hell she was.

  But my favorite thing about Myrtle is that she wasn’t looking for anything. She was very happy, very content, and she probably wasn’t even thinking about her future. She was just… comfortable.

  And comfortable is a dangerous thing to be when you’re a person who craves change. So most of her conflict in this book mirrors my 2018 conflict in real life. Because I decided to reroute my career and become part of a writing TEAM, it felt a lot like starting over. And even though starting over was something I’ve done many, many times and been very successful, if I do say so myself, it was pretty scary. But you know what they say—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

  I think that’s Myrtle’s take home from this experience.

  The other cool thing I loved about this story is that Myrtle’s perception of herself isn’t the same as how other people saw her. Which is probably true for almost everyone. But the way they saw her, though horrifying to Myrtle, was really kinda validating. Because whether she knew it or not, she was projecting that image. N
o doubt about it, no one was missing the fact that Myrtle was one wild woman. No lions or tigers necessary. If Myrtle is in the room, she is at the top of the food chain.

  Some people are just like that.

  And I am in love with this crazy guy called Pierce. He stole the show in The Sexpert and I think we knew, almost from day one, that Myrtle and Pierce were destined to be together.

  I hope you enjoyed the second book in the Tall, Dark, and Handsome series. I hope the TDH is starting to feel like your neighborhood. I hope you enjoyed meeting some characters in this story—Pearl will be back at some point. And I’m pretty sure, by the time Johnathan and I are done with this neighborhood, you’ll be BFF’s with just about everyone we’d mentioned so far.

  Well, maybe not that weird artsy chick from the gallery because she kinda scares me.

  (But there’s one thing I’ve learned about this business is, “Never say never!”)

  I *think* the next time we revisit the TDH we’ll be going back to see what Zoey and Baby Stevie are up to. So stay tuned for that.

  Until then you can check out our other romantic suspense series The Shape of Love Book One, The Triangle. Or get my next solo book The Dirty Ones, which releases December 4, 2018 and is up for preorder now.

  Until then, Unicorn Bitches.

  Thanks for reading. Thanks for reviewing. And see you in the next book.

  Julie

  October 25, 2018

  P.S.

  If you enjoyed Pierced and haven’t checked out THE SEXPERT it’s now in Kindle Unlimited! Have a read to see where it all started…