Creeping Beautiful

by JA Huss

  I ache for that girl.

  No, that woman. Because that’s what she is now.

  But I ache for McKay too. And Donovan… whatever. I don’t mind him being around. It’s all pretty exciting. Things are about to get interesting.

  Indie seems… fine. And while fine isn’t wonderful, or amazing, or hell, even half as good as great. Fine is not bad all things considering. She and Maggie have been inseparable. I wish I could give back the years she missed but I can’t. And I’m not sorry about that. If I had not kept my secret then we might all be dead.

  Maggie—like me, like Indie—won’t be going to regular school. I tutored her for the last three years, but it’s summer now, so we can just think about tutors again in the fall.

  Maybe Donovan will be her tutor? That asshole has more education than any one person should. But we’ll see. Because Donovan still hasn’t come clean about Carter. I need him to come clean with me about all that shit if he wants to stick around.

  But the Indie problem—AKA the Carter problem—hasn’t gone away. It’s just on hold for now. Indie goes nowhere by herself. She doesn’t even sleep by herself. We gave Maggie Indie’s old room and now Indie sleeps with one of us. And we always have someone on watch.

  If Carter ever shows up here, he’s in for a surprise.

  It took me a long fucking time to get to this place.

  To get McKay thinking about what comes next between us. To get Indie calm enough to trust her. To get Donovan to think about switching his loyalties.

  It was a twisted road of fucked up shit.

  But you know what?

  I’d do it all again.

  We’re in the pavilion right now getting ready to start Maggie’s sixth birthday celebration. We have the lanterns and candle boats all ready for when the sun finally goes down. But we’re gonna do cake and presents first.

  She has a pretty new dress, just like her mama.

  And McKay, Donovan, and I are all dressed up in summer suits.

  Maggie is sitting on Indie’s swing surrounded by presents and birthday cards. Donovan is pushing it, making her giggle and smile as he jokes around.

  McKay is drinking a bottle of beer, sitting on his swing across from Maggie. Indie is sitting next to him, her head on his shoulder.

  I’m in charge of taking pictures.

  Yeah. It’s pretty nice.

  Maggie is impatient for the presents to start. “Can I open them now, Daddy?”

  Yeah. She calls me Daddy. She always has and I’m not gonna tell her she can’t.

  As far as I’m concerned, I am her daddy.

  “Go ahead, baby. But open the cards first.”

  “OK!” She picks up a big pink envelope and starts tearing it open. It takes her a minute to get the card out, and then she holds it up so she can read it.

  It’s a cute card with a snake wearing a ballerina tutu on the front. I look over at McKay. “That your card?”

  “Nah, not mine.”

  “It’s not mine, either.” My head swivels to find Donovan’s face when he says this.

  I know Indie didn’t get her that card. We shopped for cards together.

  That feeling I get in my stomach when a job goes wrong is back.

  And you know what?

  I fuckin’ love it.

  But I can’t be sure. So I say, “Hold up, baby—”

  “Who is Nathan St. James?” Maggie’s face is twisted up in confusion. She probably doesn’t even remember Nathan.

  But we do.

  McKay is on his feet. But Donovan is closest. “Gimme that, Mags. Right now.” He snatches the card and reads it, then passes it to me.

  “Who’s Nathan, Daddy? What does that mean?”

  But I don’t answer her. I don’t say anything. I just pass the card to McKay.

  Because that card says…

  Nathan St. James is not your father.

  I am.

  Love,

  Carter

  I’d like to say I was surprised, but it would be a lie. So I just concentrate on hiding my smile and enjoying that feeling in my gut.

  The one that says…

  We’re back, motherfuckers.

  We’re back.

  Carter needed to learn that I could take from him just as easily as he could take from me.

  And now he knows.

  FREE BONUS SCENE

  READ NICK TATE’S POINT OF VIEW

  (For the very first time ever)

  CLICK HERE

  WANT TO CHAT SPOILERS WITH OTHER READERS?

  JOIN the Creeping Beautiful Discussion Group HERE

  Are you ready for book two?

  Read the description below and then pre-order it HERE.

  PRETTY NIGHTMARE

  INDIE

  I have them all now. Just the way I want them.

  McKay, the one who loves me deepest.

  Adam, the one who protects me fiercely.

  Donovan, the one who tells the truth.

  They are my friends, they are my lovers, they are my world.

  And Maggie belongs to all of us—no matter who her father is.

  This is the family I’ve always wanted.

  This is the family I deserve.

  And I will do whatever it takes to keep them.

  McKAY

  I have a secret that could ruin everything.

  But I’m not keeping that secret to hurt her.

  Nathan St. James needed to go.

  ADAM

  I made plan that could ruin everything.

  But I did it to save us in the end.

  The Company needed to come back.

  DONOVAN

  I told a lie that could ruin everything.

  But I didn’t tell the lie to them—I told it to myself.

  Carter is closer than we think.

  There is something truly wrong at Boucher House on the Old Pearl River.

  Some hidden evil lurking deep inside the woods.

  Nothing about their blissful life is what it seems.

  Because just when they think they have it all—he shows up to take it back.

  PRE-ORDER HERE

  END OF BOOK SHIT

  FREE BONUS SCENE

  READ NICK TATE’S POINT OF VIEW

  (For the very first time ever)

  CLICK HERE

  WANT TO CHAT SPOILERS WITH OTHER READERS?

  JOIN the Creeping Beautiful Discussion Group HERE

  Welcome to the End of Book Shit where JA Huss gets to tell you all her rambling thoughts on the book you just read.

  This is the EOBS. And if you’ve never read one of my books and just stumbled into Creeping Beautiful out of nowhere, I’ll have some tips for you at the end on how this new series ties in with most of my other books.

  But for now… let’s get to it.

  I have written a LOT of End of Book Shits by this time. Eight years. January 2020 marks the eight-year point in this fiction writing career and I’ve been writing the EOBS for seven of those years. So… lot of EOBS’s.

  Here’s what I want to talk about this in this one:

  First of all, there are fourteen years of memories in this book and all of them are “relived” over the course of ONE DAY through different points of view. It’s a complicated story. I’m not gonna deny it. But if you keep that one thing in mind it should all make sense. This story is ONE DAY in the life of Adam, McKay, Donovan, Adam, and Indie. The timelines jumps all over (though it IS linear, for the most part) because I needed a way to tell you ALL THE THINGS in one book before we move forward. This story has barely started. That’s the most important thing to take away from this EOBS. If you think of a superhero story arc, then this would be called “the origin story”. How they all came to be in this one place, at this particular point in time, and THEN—THAT is when the story really starts.

  Also, even though a lot happens in this book, not much really happens. Indie shows up on McKay’s doorstep, Donovan joins them, they go home, Adam joins them, Adam leaves,
Adam comes back. End of story.

  Obviously there’s more to it than that. This book is 110,000 words long (and that’s before the EOBS which adds another 3700 words to the book). But that’s the basic plot outline.

  The theme of Creeping Beautiful is called “Coming Clean”. Not making up for past mistakes, just OWNING them. And I think this is important in the context of the real world we live in. Because listen to me. This is important.

  THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PERFECT PERSON.

  I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. No one is perfect. Everyone fucks up. And once you realize this it’s a lot easier to cut people currently in the middle of fucking up, some slack. (And, conversely, maybe they think you’re the one currently in the middle of fucking up and they cut you some slack, right?)

  Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has regrets. Even if they eventually learn to accept those regrets and no longer regret them because mistakes are how you learn and become a better person, they have to accept them.

  I have no problem with changing my worldview about things. This goes for everything. Every controversial issue you can think of, I’ve been on one side, then another, then another over the course of my life. Abortion is bad, abortion is good, abortion is sad. I think the death penalty rocks, I’m not sure it works, prison suck, we need prisons. I love zoos! I think zoos are cruel. I’m a democrat, I’m a republican, I’m an anarchist, I’m a libertarian, I’m a nothing. I like being informed, I like being ignorant. I want to be a scientist, I hate being a scientist. I want to write non-fiction, no fiction, no TV scripts, no really, fiction. I have no idea what I want to be. There is definitely a God. There is maybe a God. There is probably no God. Hell, there has to be something, let’s just call it God. I want kids, I don’t want kids. I want to get married, fuck marriage. I love this man, no this one, no, really, this one—you know what? I don’t need a man. I believe in the happily ever after… but really you make your own future, and then no again, you really just need a team. It’s all luck, it’s all fake, it’s all real, it’s all lies.

  At some point in my life I’ve had all these thoughts. And in the moment when I had these thoughts I was convinced.

  And then I wasn’t. Something happened, or I read something, or heard something, or fucked something up and I changed my mind.

  It’s as simple as that.

  So the truth is--It’s all just… learning.

  You start out with nothing. Your brain is just neurons firing billions of time over the course of a day. And each time they fire, you make a connection. You learn to recognize things, you learn to feel things, you learn what you like and what you hate, who you trust and who you fear.

  And as your brain takes in new experiences and new ideas, it makes a whole other set of connections and your opinions waver, or they don’t. And your life becomes better or worse, because of it.

  Seeing things in a new way and then changing your mind isn’t weakness.

  It’s LEARNING.

  That’s the take-home message of my life.

  It’s all just learning.

  I had a friend criticize me once. She said, “You change your mind a lot. I don’t understand you. One day you say this, another day you say something completely different, and then you change your mind again.”

  I was like… “What’s your point?

  And I didn’t say it to be a bitch, either. I just truly didn’t understand what she was saying. Until that moment it had never even occurred to be that some people do not reevaluate their worldview on a regular basis.

  I don’t know what to think about that. But my answer to her, after she told me her point (which was that I was confusing her) was, “I’m allowed to change my mind. I’m allowed to form new opinions about things and throw away the bullshit I no longer need, and start over. I don’t need anyone’s permission to do that. There doesn’t need to be some public coming-to-Jesus-moment where I fess up about my mistakes. I just get to do it and no one gets to tell me I can’t.”

  She didn’t get it. And, no surprise here, we’re no longer friends.

  But I learned something from that encounter. I learned that not everyone sees things MY WAY.

  It’s not that I expected people to see things my way. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is this—and this had been scientifically PROVEN, OK? Are you ready? Here it is:

  People see things differently.

  FULL STOP.

  It has been scientifically PROVEN that we all interpret the world in different ways. And this can be something as simple as what the color RED looks like, to something very complicated like “When does life begin.”

  This happens because we are all different. You’ve heard that before. As a trained scientist I heard it a lot in college and grad school. If you’re in medicine they drill this fact home to you hard.

  Every patient responds differently to drugs. Why? Because, while we are all the same species, we are not all the same. We are all different. Our genetic code, our brains, the neurons in those brains and how they make new connections—they all come with their own strengths and weaknesses. They are all unique.

  WE are all unique.

  And here’s the other very important thing to realize—we can only ever know what WE FEEL, and WHAT WE SEE, and what WE EXPERIENCE.

  We cannot EVER know what others feel, or see, or experience. Because we have not perfected the “mind meld” yet. You can’t see inside someone’s brain. You cannot BE them. Thus, you cannot ever understand how they see the world and how it might be the same, or different, as the way you see the world.

  This is the mystery called CONSCIOUSNESS.

  When I wrote Ford Aston it was kind of a joke. He was so “unfeeling” so “logical” so “distant”. He gave no fucks. And I say it was a joke because I’m a lot like Ford and I was just kinda writing a person like myself.

  Someone once asked me if I has Asperger’s. I kid you not. I laughed at them. I was like “What the fuck? Why would you even think that? I have like a genius IQ, I live a pretty normal life, I’m… normal.”

  But… what is normal? I had always thought I was normal. But, there is no real “normal”. So, hell, maybe I was some kind of high-functioning Asperger’s person?

  How would I ever know?

  This is my point. I don’t know. I’m not interested in knowing, BTW. I’m not gonna go get tested. If I do have some kind of Spectrum issue, I’ve learned how to deal with it so who cares?

  I don’t know. I can’t know. Because “normal” to me is just that. Me.

  This is why I love storytelling in the first person.

  Because when I write a story in the first person I get to BE someone else.

  For real.

  This is like… a fucking miracle, ya know?

  Think about it – writing a story is like being God. You get full control over everything that happens. So when I write first person I not only get to be someone else, I get to plan every action, every moment, every word, and every experience. All of it is under my control.

  And I get to be them.

  I get to see the world the way they see it. I get to feel emotions the way they feel them. I get to experience conflict, and problems, and make mistakes, and learn new things, and reevaluate my life, and try again, and make more mistakes, and learn from that too. When I write stories in first person I get to live OTHER LIVES.

  And you—when you read stories in the first person you get to do that WITH ME.

  This is the miracle of storytelling.

  So when this person told me that I confused her because I change my mind about things all the time, I learned something.

  I learned that her experience of confusion with me was just as valid as my experience of confusion with her.

  All points of view are valid in the context of the person experiencing them.

  I really do have a point that connects this to Creeping Beautiful and here it is:

  Indie Anna Accorsi is the most unreliable narrator since Ju
nco. I have written lots of other fairly unreliable narrators before. James Fenici is unreliable, Sydney Channing is unreliable, even Sasha Cherlin has her own unreliable moments. In fact, when you think about it, we’ll all unreliable narrators in the context of the “bigger world”. Because we have blinders on called “SELF”.

  But Indie is an unreliable narrator in the very strict, literal sense of the word. She has memory lapses. So what she thinks happened, and what other people perceive as reality, are disconnected. I say this because going forward this will be important. Her relationship with Nathan wasn’t the way she wrote it in this book.

  It’s a valid interpretation of her point of view of that relationship, but it’s not the ONLY valid point of view.

  McKay, Adam, and Donovan each have a point of view about Nathan too. And their views are just as valid as Indie’s.

  And like me, when asked if I had Asperger’s and why I change my mind about things so much—there is always a moment when you realize—Hmm. Maybe I should take another look at how I perceive this particular thing? Maybe I am wearing blinders? Maybe there’s another interpretation of this person, or event, or problem that can help me see it more clearly?

  Keep that in mind as you read the other books in this series.

  So back to Creeping Beautiful and coming clean. We have a quartet of impossibly imperfect people in this book. And… just a word of advice here—don’t trust anything Indie said in her chapters. I’m sure she THINKS it’s all real and true… but the take-home message about Indie Anna Accorsi is that she’s fucking damaged.

  McKay is filled with shame and guilt. And let’s just get this out of the way right now. There is no life, there is no instance of reality where buying a ten-year-old girl at a slave auction is a good thing. Ever.