A warm welcome to author J.A Rock visiting Love Bytes today

she shares an excerpt of her new release and she brought with her a great giveaway for our readers !

Welcome J.A 🙂

Hi! I’m J.A. Rock, and I’m so excited to be on tour this week promoting my new release, THE GRAND BALLAST, a queer speculative novel about a future where the population is so bored with everything from emotions to technology to art that few people create things or fall in love anymore. The only works of “art” that have relevance are the X-shows—live pornographic performances that often incorporate creative violence. Bode, the main character, is a dancer who still believes in love and falls for the brilliant but highly unstable Kilroy Ballast. Kilroy, in turn, manipulates Bode into joining his famously brutal circus-themed X-show, the Grand Ballast.

In this excerpt, Bode and another X-show performer, Valen, have fled the circus and are on the run. Each feels an attraction to the other, but both are so psychologically scarred by their time under Kilroy’s control that they have trouble acting on it.

THE PARADE OF GOOD THINGS

The next day, something broke with the end of the heat. The clouds pulled apart and the rain tumbled out, and Bode woke to water creeping across the sandy ground where he slept, pelting him through the raincoat. He looked up and saw Valen under a single, gawky tree, looking out for danger the way he did, even when he was supposed to be sleeping. Even when Bode was the one sitting guard.

For someone who had been trained to value nothing, Valen guarded his newfound freedom with an obsessive fervency.

Bode looked out at the wide plains, at the endless gray sky. Even the danger was better than emptiness. His gaze shifted back to Valen. He had no idea what they were to each other. Didn’t know what it was to feel when he looked at him. He touched his lips, which were mostly healed now. His hand bore only a couple of small, bruise-ringed punctures.

They made their way across a long, flat field of tall grass. They’d only gone a short ways when they saw figures coming across the plain. A long line of them—spots of color against the gray sky. Valen froze. “Hide,” he said tersely.

Bode heard the dull bang of drums and a weak horn, almost drowned out by thunder.

A unison cry. “It’s the parade,” Bode said.

“What?”

Bode turned to Valen. “The Parade of Good Things. Do you know it? It’s an X-show. But you can’t buy tickets to it or anything. It just travels all across the country on foot. And if you’re lucky, you see it.”

“An X-show? Then we need to get the fuck out of here.”

No, Bode almost said. It had been so long since he’d seen the Parade. He and the other members of the Grand Ballast had stopped to watch it once, years ago. It had seemed wonderful, in a way. An X-show where no one got hurt, where everyone was joyful.

He followed Valen through the tall grass to a cluster of rocks—their only hope for cover. He didn’t really think the parade posed danger. It went on in all weathers, regardless of the presence an audience, and regardless of whether that audience jeered or screeched or threw things or jerked off. Its performers were hardly going to stop to determine the identities of two lone travelers.

The parade drew closer. Bode saw naked breasts and flapping cocks. Silver sequins and red scarves. The men and women danced. Hooted and threw their arms up. Their bodies were all different shapes, jiggling and arching, their wet costumes clinging. The parade wasn’t spectacular; it looked lewd and sad. But it was company, at least for a moment.

“Get down,” Valen whispered, tugging at his sleeve.

But Bode refused to let the parade completely out of sight. The drums echoed inside of him. The horn wheezed.

When the performers were gone, when he could only see their backs, Bode felt emptier than ever. “They go all across the country,” he told Valen. “And they don’t ask for anything.”

“It’s not really a parade of good things.” There was a note of genuine disappointment in Valen’s voice.

“What do you mean?” Bode asked.

“What’s good about it? A bunch of naked people and drums.”

Bode tilted his head. “What would a parade of good things be for you?”

Valen splayed his hand on the grass as a hush of wind swept the field and went on toward the stormy horizon. “A group of people…going somewhere.”

Bode half smiled. “Well, yes. That’s a parade through and through, right?”

“But I mean, they’d have a goal. They’d be marching somewhere to do something that matters.”

Bode studied him quietly. “You want to do something that matters?”

Valen stared at the slope in the land where the parade had vanished. “I think that’s what I wanted once.” He seemed to be pleading, but maybe not with Bode. Maybe with old ghosts. “You think she’s ashamed of me? My mother? I didn’t fight. I went to the No Returns when she died. I was such a coward.”

Bode’s chest contracted in sympathy. “Nah.” He snapped a twig. “If she had any sense at all, then you were her parade.”

Valen said, tiredly, “I don’t have a fucking clue who I am.”

“I think you do.”

“You’re kind. And I’m nothing like that.”

“I’m not kind. I told you, I killed someone.”

“I don’t believe that.” Valen hesitated, then reached forward. Bode tensed. Valen withdrew his hand.

“You can touch me,” Bode said shakily. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

Valen looked unsure. “How?”

Around them, the rain fell slowly, almost swaying side to side, like leaves. The grass was slick beneath his shoes. “Touch me however you want.”

The most tentative brush of skin on skin. They both had violence beneath the surface, and it was all the more terrifying for its hiddenness.

Bode tried to keep himself steady as Valen’s fingers trailed down his shoulder, but then he leaned sideways involuntarily. Valen paused, studying him. Bode’s breath came fast and shallow.

He used to love to be touched; used to love his body. If that was a mistake, if that was asking for cruelty, then he would ask again and again. He rested his head on Valen’s shoulder, flinching as Valen brought his hand up and splayed it on his back. Valen stroked up and down between Bode’s shoulders.

Okay. Okay.

Bode swallowed.

Valen pulled him closer. He took Bode’s arms and squeezed until Bode winced, until the pain felt like closing a book—final and spell-breaking. He backed Bode against the rock. The wet stone scraped Bode through his shirt and jacket. He let out a nervous snap of laughter.

A shadow lifted from Valen’s expression. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Raindrops hit them both, burst on their skin. Valen’s short hair was dark with water.

Bode tried to smile. He closed his eyes as Valen leaned forward. Valen’s lips brushed his cheek, then his temple. Somewhere out across the plain, in the air, a crackle like a speaker system, and Kilroy’s voice whispering, Iiiiiiiii knooowww…

Bode felt a tightness in his core. Fear and wonder became two whirling black capes, spinning propeller-like until they blurred and then disappeared with a crack, leaving behind silence and calm.

There was this world, and these creatures that made an absolute pit of everything they were given. They stole from one another, they hurt their children, they mistook anger for courage and wisdom for weakness.

Bode looked at the trees as Valen kissed his neck.

They burned their gifts. Solved the wrong mysteries.

He tried to keep breathing as Valen’s hands moved up his chest. Their lips met, water streaming down their faces, into their mouths. Bode kept kissing, feeling the softness of Valen’s mouth and the hardness of his body—holding him as close as he dared.

But they found moments of goodness. Moments they were worthy of all they’d been offered.

He gasped as Valen turned him around and pressed him closer to the rock. Bode rested his cheek against the stone and tried not to wince as Valen’s hand slid down his leg. For all of Bode’s joy, he wasn’t hard, and he disliked not being able to see Valen’s face.

There’s a price to pay for tenderness, he reminded himself. Be good now.

That tough knot of an idea settled on his brain and pressed. He felt suddenly bleak and unwell, and instead of rain he imagined he was soaked in blood. He expected Valen’s fingers undoing his pants; he expected a sudden tearing pain and fullness and the slide of small rivers down his thighs.

But Valen stopped. A few seconds later, his sodden jacket was draped over Bode’s shoulders. Valen held it there with one hand and braced his other hand against the rock, his arm alongside Bode’s cheek. He leaned forward until Bode couldn’t feel the rain anymore, until Valen’s body sheltered him. Valen hooked his chin over the top of Bode’s head. He smelled like earth and damp fabric, and there was an underlying odor of sweat and blood, of LJ’s sickness.

Bode’s legs vibrated like the taut strings of an instrument. That buzzing spread through him, turned to numbness. His knees sank deeper into the soft wet dirt, and he hunched over. Valen followed him down, still sheltering him. Wrapped one arm around his middle, the other around his shoulders, and held him close.

Valen’s borrowed shirt was too thin. Without the jacket he’d be cold. But Valen didn’t so much as shiver, when Bode tried to give back the jacket, Valen growled in his ear. They stayed like that at the base of the rock until the rain stopped.

Blurb

In a future where live sex shows abound to keep a jaded population entertained, dancer Bode Martin falls for the brilliant and unstable Kilroy Ballast, who molds Bode into the star attraction of his erotic circus, the Grand Ballast. Drugged beyond any real feeling, Bode trades freedom and his once considerable pride for an illusion of tenderness—until he inadvertently rescues a young man from a rival show, and together they flee to an eccentric town in the west where love still means something.  Valen’s not an easy man to know, and Bode shed his romantic notions under Kilroy’s brutal employ. Yet their growing bond becomes a strange and dangerous salvation as they attempt to overthrow the shadows of their pasts and wade together through a world of regret, uncertainty, beauty, and terror.  But Kilroy won’t let Bode go so easily. Long ago, Bode was responsible for the loss of something Kilroy held dear, and he still owes Kilroy a debt. As the three men battle toward a tangled destiny, Bode must decide if his love for Valen is worth fighting for—or if he was and always will be a pawn in the story Kilroy Ballast will never stop telling. 

Buy Links

Amazon

Smashwords

 

THE GRAND BALLAST is out this week, and in the spirit of its nontraditional romancey-ness, I’m giving away an e-copy of any of my backlist titles that exist in that sort of Is-this-a-romance-novel? gray area. Choose from TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME, THE SILVERS, and ANOTHER MAN’S TREASURE (co-written with Lisa Henry). More information about each title is available here. Leave a comment and your contact info for a chance to win! A winner will be drawn at random at 11:59 p.m. on July 5^th.

 

J.A. Rock is the author of queer romance and suspense novels, including BY HIS RULES, TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME, and, with Lisa Henry, THE GOOD BOY and WHEN ALL THE WORLD SLEEPS. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama and a BA in theater from Case Western Reserve University. J.A. also writes queer fiction and essays under the name Jill Smith. Raised in Ohio and West Virginia, she now lives in Chicago with her dog, Professor Anne Studebaker.

Website: www.jarockauthor.com

Blog: http://jarockauthor.blogspot.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jarockauthor

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ja.rock.39