Julia McBryant has a new MM contemporary romance out: Neon Saturday Night. And there’s a giveaway!
Audie and Calhoun continue their long-distance relationship through college. They sneak off to Myrtle Beach. Audie drives to Charleston when Calhoun gets the flu.
They meet for a fake fishing trip on the Outer Banks. But Audie needs to belong, and because of his traumatic past, he feels like he has little to offer in a committed relationship. While he and Calhoun have fun together, they also have a difficult time negotiating Audie’s need to give as much as he takes and build an authentic relationship together.
Calhoun says his job is to learn to be loved. But Audie wants to be more than a fun top and a tragic boyfriend.
Series Blurb:
The Southern Seduction series chronicles the interconnected lives of a group of well-off, high society young adults in Savannah, Georgia, most of whom have known each other since kindergarten. Their complicated relationships (and unconventional sexcapades) form the meat of the series, along with a careful attention to chronology, character, and prose. More than romantic erotica, the Southern Seduction series details a fully realized world of drama, theme, and most of all, memorable characters.
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I have Calhoun Chatterton’s tattoo, and I’m going to get Audie’s. My Calhoun tattoo happened after I wrote Neon Saturday Night.
This isn’t because out of all my characters, I love Calhoun and Audie best (okay, I’ll cop to loving Audie best). This isn’t because Neon Saturday Night is my fifth published book, a fairly awesome milestone for someone who published her first in May and started writing fiction again after a decade-long break in January. It’s not even because Neon Saturday Night is, hands-down, my favorite title and The Sharks Create the Ocean probably my favorite short story.
Nope. Those tattoos have as much meaning for me as they do for Calhoun and Audie.
Irish writer John Connolly says, “Writers are magpies by nature, always collecting shiny things, storing them away and looking for connections of things.” I steal from everywhere; nothing’s safe, including my own life.
Start with Calhoun. His tattoo’s a quote from Pat Conroy’s Beach Music: “No story is a straight line.” His pec, my left wrist. All my characters have favorite books; I feel they need books that suit their personalities, and so I’m left with books I know well. Calhoun, who’s both a lover of fantasy (he also adores Lord of the Rings and the Fillory and Further books) and a hopeless romantic, gets Pat Conroy. When I was eleven, I found a battered copy of The Prince of Tides in the back of my mother’s GMC Jimmy. The poetic language blew my tiny mind. If he could write like that, I could learn to write like that. She eventually took the book from me, but I never forgot it. I rediscovered Conroy in high school, and when I was applying to college and reading Beach Music, I thought, “Well hell, if the University of South Carolina’s good enough for Conroy, it’s good enough for me.” I applied; they threw money at me; I attended. I actually met Conroy there several times, once when we crashed a big-money donor party. He was thrilled to talk to the gate-crashing college students, and we got some serious shade thrown our way from the old ladies who’d shelled out mega money for facetime with the famous Southern writer. I cried like a baby when he died, and only missed his funeral in Beaufort because I couldn’t find a babysitter. “No story is a straight line” sums up so much of my own life and my own philosophy, so I gave it to my other Conroy-lover. It suits his philosophy too, and I think that comes out a lot in the novel that follows Neon Saturday Night, All The Little Lights: Audie and Calhoun 3.
Audie also gets my heart. He gets James Dickey.
At USC, I was lucky enough to be taught by not one, not two, but all three of James Dickey’s best friends. They told me story after story of the contradictory man, whom I grew to love along with them. Dickey wasn’t perfect, and when I discovered those imperfections I felt, as I told my friend, “as if I learned that Santa Claus wasn’t real,” and I actually cried. At USC, Audie would have had those same professors. Regardless, he’s my favorite poet — and Audie’s — and Falling is widely regarded as his best work. It’s a reminder to live, and live fully, in the time we have left, in the full knowledge that we all plummet to our own deaths as surely as a stewardess falling from an airplane. Much of Dickey’s poetry laughs in the face of death that way, at least the best of it does. And Audie gets my favorite line, which is going on the very bottom of the inside of my left calf: “There is still time to live on a breath made of nothing but the whole night.” It’ll remind me of all those lovely old men telling me stories, of Dickey, of being young and in love with poetry. And it’ll always remind me now of Audie.
So I stole from myself, and I think I stole well. Audie’s always loved Dickey, and Calhoun Conroy, but the ideas for them getting tats didn’t come until I actually sat down to send them to Myrtle Beach. Even then, I didn’t know they would do it until Audie sneered, “Calhoun, do you know what kind of people get tattoos?”
You do, bitch. You get tattoos. Because you aren’t your mama or your daddy, Audie. You just need to nut up and realize it, honey child. But you’ve got a whole novel coming up to work on that.
“You know what it means to be hurt,” Jax says finally. “I don’t know what hurt you, not really. Same’s I talked around it and didn’t tell you all of it, not the whole truth or the real part of it. But you know. You saw it right away and so did I. Henry and Calhoun don’t know what that means. That’s why they can try to put us back together and maybe it’ll work and maybe it won’t.”
“I’m afraid of sharks,” Audie says suddenly. He can’t hold it suddenly, can’t stop it. “But I’m really just afraid of the ocean and I swore I’d never get in it again.”
Jax cocks his head at him. “Someone did something to you.”
Audie tells him about his father and the pontoon boat in the Charleston harbor, about being eleven years and told to swim, just swim to his daddy and they could go home, about the four hours of sheer terror, the thirst and his father’s laughter. ‘
“You’d get in, if you made that go away,” Jax says.
“I can’t.”
“You can. And you need to tell Calhoun this story.”
“I’m not telling Calhoun this. I never should have told you.” Audie casts again. He tosses an empty back up above the high tide line.
“Henry taught me I owe him the truth.”
“I told him the truth. I have a shark phobia.”
“You didn’t tell him shit and we both know it, Currell. Same’s I told Henry I slept around. I told him something. I never told him why. Never told anyone why.”
“Why’d you do it?”
Jax looks over the horizon and squints into the sun. “I was fucking lonely, Audie, the hell do you think?” He straightens up. “How deep will you go?”
“My knees.”
“Go out to your thighs. I’ll go with you.”
“No.”
“I’m not your father and you’re not eleven. Do you trust me enough to tell me that fucking story?”
Audie hesitates. “Yes.”
“Did I trust you enough to tell you why I slept around?”
Audie stares at the vast expanse of water and wonders at its secrets. “Yes.”
“Then trust me enough not to get your ass eaten. I’ll go ahead of you so you know there’s nothing there.”
Audie begins shaking. But he looks at Jax and realizes that he’s right, for some goddamn reason he does trust him. Jax takes his hand. It’s not sexual; it’s not the way you hold the hand of a lover. More the way you’d lead a blind man, or the way Audie imagines a preacher leading someone down into a river. But Jax holds Audie’s hard firmly and takes him into the water, one step at a time. Audie looks down anxiously, watches his feet. Jax suddenly laughs and points. “See the teensy ray?” he asks, the water at their knees. “Like a little pancake.” And it is, small and gray. They keep going until they stand up to their waists when the waves come in. “You’re safe,” Jax says. “Look how clear the water is.”
Audie stops. Turns. He can see in every direction. He looks. There are no sharks. None that he can see. He knows there are sharks, knows it in his bones: this is Nag’s Head, the Carolina coast, sharks up and down it, black-tips and makos, duskies and sand tigers. But the sharks are far away, and the chances of them hurting him so small. He stands and dives. Stands. Dives again. Suddenly he’s swimming, swimming strong, the way he learned as a boy in the Low Country, in the creeks and estuaries of the Cooper River. Jax swims next to him. Audie flips, backflips. He rides the waves and swims under them, a part of this vast, mysterious thing, just one more creature in this strange universe governed by the pull of the moon. A world of undrinkable water, of whalesong, of menace and beauty, crashing whitecaps and glass-calm. Jax doesn’t leave him alone. They finally swim back to shore.
“You aren’t eleven anymore,” he says quietly.
“I’m not,” Audie says.
“And you never have to be again.”
They share a towel.
“Your trunks are wet,” Calhoun says, when Audie comes into the living room.
“Do you want to go swimming?” Audie asks.
“But —”
“I’ll be fine, if you go with me.”
Calhoun scrambles to his feet. “I’ll put my suit on.”
They hold hands as they walk into the waves. When the waves roll at their chests, when the water is clear, after Audie looks around them, he wraps around Calhoun, tips his chin to the side, and kisses him hard. They hold each other as the saltwater crashes in front of them, as they bob in the waves. Audie feels Calhoun harden in his suit, tent it out. “That was the best kiss ever,” Calhoun says, when Audie sucks his lower lip and pulls back.
Audie does a backflip. “Why?” he asks, when he comes up.
“Because you weren’t afraid anymore.”
Calhoun touches the bottom and leads him out of the water. They walk right to the bedroom and take off their suits. Audie sheds his rashguard.
“Now we can,” Calhoun breathes.
“Yeah,” Audie says.
“You’ll taste like saltwater.”
“So will you.”
They fall into the bed, side by side, hair still soaked. Audie wraps around Calhoun and kisses him. And he tastes like seawater, oh god he does, like the ocean, like all the secrets of undiscovered whales and unknowable depths, of dolphin names and even the distance tang of shark menace. But Audie knows now you can’t have one without the other: the fear makes the beauty bloom, magnifies it from the everyday to something wild and perfect. He sucks Calhoun’s lower lip the way he likes. Audie doesn’t close his eyes to Calhoun’s beautiful sun-browned skin, blond beginning to streak his wet mermaid tangles.They press against one another, both hard, Audie almost overcome by the sudden depth of his need.
Julia McBryant is, as the saying goes, Southern born, Southern bred, and when she dies, she’ll be Southern dead. When she’s not riding her horse or writing, Julia likes to play with her German Shepherds and rescued greyhounds, make all the crafts (especially those involving glitter), and hike, especially in the North Carolina mountains. She is grateful her husband tolerates both the dogs and the glitter.
However, for the most part, when she isn’t writing, she’s writing. Her favorite authors include William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pat Conroy, and Flannery O’Connor. She knows next to nothing about pop culture, and always loses at Trivial Pursuit but can kick your ass at Scrabble.
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