This is closer to the way I originally wrote it, as one giant novel - I broke it into a trilogy to, y'know, make it publishable! But now we're doing it as one big story! This volume includes the short stories that came with each book of the trilogy - the short stories that were published separately will get collected into a second volume, coming soon! (And there might be a new one in there...I've been wanting to do the Leather & Tea crossover story, purely for fun, just because I want to. This is a good excuse. And it's possible that Colby and Ben, of all people, have met before...)
I love these characters and this world so much - it's the most words (and ideas!) I've ever written, and I'm so grateful and so lucky to have you all sharing this journey - tall ships, bread puns, and tender falling in love - with me. I loaf you. (Couldn't resist.)
This box set is on sale over at JMS for only $10.39 during release week - after that it'll go up to $12.99! (This is the ebook - paperback coming soon.) Come order yours at JMS now! And here's the cover! (I believe there's not a separate Amazon link - or if there is I can't find it - because Amazon already lets you buy all three books as a bundle over here. That doesn't get you the new cover or Author's Note though!)
In celebration of today’s box set release of my Character Bleed Trilogy (out now from JMS Books! on sale! 332,890 collected words, all three books, plus new cover art & new Author’s Note, all for around $10!) we’ll make today’s Rainbow Snippet a little teaser from the work-in-progress spin-off book!
(In case you’re not familiar with #RainbowSnippets, check out their Facebook Group – new posts every Saturday (depending on time zones). The weekly pinned post will collect comments from authors linking to their six-line Rainbow Snippet post for the week.)
New Snippet below, after the cover image (so you can scroll down if you want), but I’ll just do the little release-day shameless plug first: the Character Bleed Trilogy is basically…oh, gosh, how to summarize…m/m romance, actors filming a gay Napoleonic Wars drama and falling in love on and off screen…bread-related puns…nerd jokes about reading epic fantasy…that time I dropped a character off a cliff…and happy endings all round! You can buy the individual books (Seaworthy, Stalwart, Steadfast) or grab the whole big box set over at JMS for only $10.39 during the new release sale – after that it’ll go up to $12.99! (This is the ebook – paperback coming soon.) Come order yours at JMS now! (I believe there’s not a separate Amazon link – or if there is I can’t find it – because Amazon already lets you buy all three books as a bundle over here. That doesn’t get you the new cover or Author’s Note though!)
This week’s Rainbow Snippet is from what’s going to be a spin-off duology, with Jason and Colby’s friend Leo getting his own happy ending (and having a bit of a bisexuality discovery!). And possibly also getting a fish. Which is not in this excerpt, just a fun fact. But here’s Leo requesting advice from friends….
~
Leo had just lifted a hand to knock when the door flew wide; Jason, occupying most of the world simply by existing, invited, “Hey, Leo, come on in.” His voice dusted antique English neighborhoods with laid-back California sun, and his shoulders filled up every available inch, as usual. “Colby’s getting dressed.”
“I’m dressed!” Colby flew down the last few stairs and landed in the embrace of one of Jason’s arms. He was indeed dressed, in neat grey trousers and a pale pink shirt under a too-large rainbow-patterned knit cardigan, and managed to transform this collection of color into the next fashion trend just by glowing at the world. His hair fluffed up in defiance of the hand attempting to smooth it. “Leo, you said you needed help, we’re here, what can we do?”
“You said you were decent,” Leo pointed out, kicking shoes off in the entryway. “Not naked. Was naked happening? Because I can come back later.” He would. Colby and Jason had had a hard enough time falling into each other’s orbit; Colby even now did not always have good days, and they’d have the clamor of the press round later too. “Unless there’s collective mutual naked, in which case I’m comfortable if you are. Though that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Colby and Jason looked at each other, then at him, and trailed him out to the living room, which folded tall built-in bookshelves and sweeping windows and long blue curtains around them. Colby and Jason decorated like interior designers with a joint unconcealed love of fantasy maps and steampunk lamps and literature about elves and airships; the flat mingled classic elegance and whimsical accents and Colby’s rather apologetic upper-class knowledge of wine into Jason’s Wizards & Wyverns game manuals and general tidiness, along with some take-out menus for really good Italian places stuck to a pin-board, and a second refrigerator just for holding unusual craft beer and home-brewed mead.
Leo flopped down on their sofa, which embraced its purpose enthusiastically, and announced, “I’m having a moment of distress. Support me.”
“Oh dear.” Colby perched on a sofa-arm, over decorative brass studs and navy-blue curves. Jason took the chair next to him. “Distress about what? I know you’re marvelous with press, so it can’t be this afternoon’s obligations, unless it is, if there’s something you don’t want to have to talk about. And I know it can’t be our movie; you’re splendid in it, which you know, and the premiere went excellently. Except—did it, for you? You left so promptly. And you weren’t at any of the afterparties. Not that we made more than a brief appearance either, but I did talk to Jill this morning. Were you feeling all right?”
Colby Kent, Leo considered with affection, would never use one word when twenty would do. “I don’t know. Yes. No. Absolutely yes. Orgasmically all right. But then that’s the problem. Maybe I’m not.”
“Er…” Colby slid down from the sofa-arm to a cushion, inching closer. Jason watched him with the eyes of a royal bodyguard on the brink of hauling his prince back from peril. “You went home with—with someone, is that it? And now you’re here…oh, Leo. Are you hurt? Do you need us to call someone? Or would you like to talk? You don’t seem terribly upset…”
“I’m not hurt! I’m fine.” Mostly to make Colby feel better, he melodramatically flung the back of a wrist against his forehead, tipped his head back, and intoned, “I’m simply overwrought, darling,” which made Colby laugh and Jason snort. Leo dropped the hand and sat up more and said, “The person I went home with was a Sam. I mean a man. I mean Sam. I mean my Sam.”
“Oh,” Colby said. “Your…your photographer.” That was polite; they all recalled first meeting Sam and Sam’s camera. “He did come to the premiere, then. Did he like Steadfast?”
“Loved it. You, the writing, the setting, the art design…me, obviously…”
“No,” Jason put in, low and firm. “Not obvious. Not that you’re not fantastic, you are, but you say it like you don’t think it matters.”
Leo shrugged at him. “It’s your movie. You and Colby.”
Jason got a small line between dark thick eyebrows. “Leo, you know it wouldn’t be the same without you, right?”
“My point is,” Leo said, “I had all sorts of sex with a very male person, for the first time ever, last night—and also this morning—and I’m suddenly having a lot of emotions, and you two have definitely also had the sex with men, including whatever you were doing that meant Colby needed to get dressed, and you know about this type of thing, and please help.”
“Er,” Colby said again, “what is it, precisely, you’d like our help…with?”
“I don’t know! Me, life, being a celebrity and being gay, apparently. Got any sex tips?”
Jason rumbled, “Yes. Go back to the being gay part.”
“That’s the first time I’ve said that.” Leo stared at their rug. Plush and shaggy and blue with little white flecks, it stared back. He wiggled green-striped sock-toes in it.
Maybe if he kept looking at his toes he wouldn’t have to think. He liked not thinking. “Out loud, I mean. To anyone. I’m not even sure I am. I suppose what I’m asking is…well, you know I’ve dated women, and I enjoyed that…as far as I’m aware they also enjoyed that, I get on with all my exes, we’re on good terms…and now there’s this…am I in fact gay now? Or some sort of…bisexual sort of word?”
Colby and Jason traded glances. Jason raised eyebrows Leo’s direction. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I kinda already thought you were. Bi, I mean. With the flirting, the comments…and I know Jill’s casting preferences for Steadfast were, well…us, for one…and you got all annoyed when I said you weren’t Colby’s type, that time. Unless those were all just you making jokes.”
“I always thought those were just me making jokes! Or…maybe not. I mean, I do like Matt Grant’s mouth, that was true when I said it, it’s a delicious-looking mouth. And Colby’s adorable, so who wouldn’t—”
“Thank you for that.”
“—and then Sam was so—he’s so—he was nothing like I expected, and everything that I wanted to say yes to, and I think I like him, not just the sex, I actually like being with him, but I don’t even know him. I met him for the second time literally a day ago. I’m very confused.”
Colby and Jason did some more silent communing. Jason asked, “You had sex with him, you said?”
“I definitely did that.” Inarguably so. Wonderfully so. Repeatedly so.
“You said you were confused. But you did it because you wanted to, right? He asked whether you wanted to? And it was good?” Jason, Leo noticed, had a hand holding Colby’s.
He knew why Jason would be the one to ask that. Not all the details—Colby never had talked about his ex-boyfriend publicly, nor what’d happened the night that’d all finally come crashing down—but Leo’d seen the difference. The Colby Kent he’d first met, back during the filming of The Far Cry of Guns, had been young and hopeful and eager to please, self-deprecating and anxious about getting everything right but irrepressibly bubbly. The Colby he’d met several years later at the auditions for Steadfast had grown thinner and quieter, and flinched away from even friendly touch.
Leo had never previously wanted to hit anyone in anger, had no clue how he’d even go about it in non-filming life, and nevertheless had imagined putting his fist into the face of the man who’d done that. He would’ve tried, if Colby’d ever indicated any desire for revenge.
Everything had changed again when Jason Mirelli had gently bought cinnamon bagels and asked permission before touching Colby, on set and off, with those large callused action-hero hands.
Colby looked at Jason as if perpetually amazed that such kindness had landed in his life. Jason looked at Colby the exact same way, only maybe with even more sunshiney awe, Leo decided.
He said, “I absolutely wanted to. He did ask. I said yes. And it was spectacular.” It had been. And he wanted to reassure Colby, and by extension Jason’s muscles. “I would like to do it more. But I do still quite like women. Or I think I still do. Should I find a friend who’d be willing to test the hypothesis? We didn’t say anything about being exclusive. Except I don’t want to have sex with anyone else at the moment, even if she is a friend. I do want to have more spectacular sex with Sam. And only Sam. Am I properly gay, then? Or is this some sort of thirty-three-year-old bisexuality crisis? Should I feel awakened or enlightened?”
“Do you?” Colby inquired.
“I don’t know. Should I have slept with you, ages ago, to help figure it all out? Except your type is human Mount Everests and I wouldn’t’ve known what I was doing, so it likely wouldn’t’ve worked at all and I’d’ve ended up thinking I was in fact straight.”
Colby was outright laughing now.
Jason, with a hint of protectiveness but also pleasure because Colby was laughing, rumbled, “You’re still not his type. And being bisexual doesn’t have to be a crisis. I should know.”
“It feels as if I’m having one,” Leo pointed out dolefully. “Shouldn’t I at least be allowed one graceful swoon onto a fainting couch? Colby, do you own a fainting couch? If not, can I buy you one so that I can bisexually swoon onto it?”
