Hello, Snippetteers! — sorry to be so late this weekend, but I was off at the Renaissance Festival yesterday, and came home too tired to do anything but make the better acquaintance of my pillow!
I’m afraid I’ve gone to seven sentences again — but once again, I think you’ll understand why when you read the snippet. This scene involves Lasair Faol and Bryce Newhouse, the SoulShares introduced in BLOWING SMOKE; they normally live in Greenwich Village, but they’re currently in Washington, D.C. with the other Fae and humans of Purgatory to help out with a growing problem with the way the Fae Realm and the human world interact. Which is what they’ve been discussing just before this excerpt; the first speaker is Lasair.
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“You fret too much, sumiúl, over things you cannot help.”
“Only because you gave me the soul that makes me give a damn.” Bryce’s eyes watered, stung.
“Would you give it back, if you could?”
The question was like cold water flung over him; Bryce couldn’t breathe with the shock of it. He’d been stupid enough to try to reject Lasair’s gift, over and over again; he still wanted to curl up and die with the shame of it, when he remembered how one of his rejections had driven his Fae lover to try to flee back to the Realm. There was nothing inevitable about a SoulShare joining, and he’d damn near thrown the other half of his soul away.
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For any of you who are going to be at Gaylaxicon this coming weekend (October 7-9), please stop by the Queer Sci Fi table in the vendor room and say hello!
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And a few links, for your continued reading pleasure:
Rainbow Snippets on Facebook, for more LGBTQIA+ goodies — https://www.facebook.com/groups/RainbowSnippets/
BLOWING SMOKE (SoulShares #5), Lasair and Bryce’s whole story — http://ow.ly/Xava304M0tD
A SUMMER’S DAY — Shakespearean m/m romance anthology, and a benefit for the It Gets Better Project (my short story, “Deeper Than Did Ever Plummet Sound,” kicks it off) — http://ow.ly/M9Kp304M0jw
FLIGHT — Queer Sci Fi’s third annual flash fiction contest, a fundraiser for the Queer Sci Fi blog (my “Life/Flight” leads it off) — http://ow.ly/PDyp304M0mY
Rory Ni Coileain 
Ouch. We always hurt the one we love…
Great snippet!
Intriguing character and world development mingling together in this snippet.
Ouch! Lasair certainly knows how to hit below the belt, doesn’t he? Or is he just trying to make him see how that makes him whole?
Fae sometimes have a hard time figuring out human emotions — they’re just enough like humans that even the humans who love them sometimes forget there are differences…
Oh, ouch. Great snippet.