One more race, one more adrenaline-soaked night was all they asked, because even Colt and Caine realized that one more was all we could risk before someone we loved more than each other got hurt.

One more night of racing and revelry, then we’d do the right thing—or at least stop doing the wrong thing.

But fate had other ideas.

When life shoved me into the wall, I realized that everything I believed in, I’d learned from a racin’ man. If he could talk to me, I know he’d tell me it was by God time to put the pedal to the metal and go hammer down and hell bent, for love.

If what did next bothers anyone, then those folks can kiss my red-headed, NASCAR-man lovin’, college-educated, country girl ass.

Author’s Notes

A
h, trigger warnings. This is the new ‘author drama’ in my feed. To warn or not to warn? Which warnings are needed, versus which give too much of the plot away?

My writer’s soul howls at the need to tip my hand about the dark parts within. Life, after all, doesn’t come with warning labels.

“But,” some readers say, “I don’t pick up a fluffy romance to get jerked into something I wasn’t prepared to read.”

Fair enough.

This story ain’t fluffy. It’s an erotic romance of the twisted variety. The sex within butts right up to the-line-that-shall-never-be-crossed, and I still ain’t gonna apologize.

It’s fiction, yo.

Except where it’s not.

This tale has been described as a redneck soap opera in a couple of reviews and I endorse that idea.

See, I wasn’t smart enough to know in advance how much comedy this tale would need to balance out the darkness, but my muse is one cunning little bitch, when she deigns to show up for work. Literal as hell, but she can weave some fine threads in the mix. Some I never see even until she shows me how all those invisible threads connect at the eleventh hour, when my fingers hovering over the delete key and I think the story’s a bust.

Thus, in the first paragraphs of
Gas or Ass
, we see that Dale Hannah works in NASCAR—something I didn’t know until it hit the page.

Okay, I could roll with that, I figured, since I did serve out the sentence that was my life from eleven to eighteen, in the epicenter of NASCAR.

The years I spent in Concord, North Carolina, from 1972 to 1978, were also the glory days of the feminist movement. To this day, I can sing every word of Helen Reddy’s anthem,
I Am Woman,
and I learned them while ripping down a few Carolina back roads at a hundred miles an hour, in my 1969 Mustang convertible. The car was tricked out with racing slicks, a Holley four-barrel, and a Hurst shifter, retrofitted by a guy I shouldn’t have been going to see. An older man—four years is a big damn deal at sixteen—with a blue collar job and grease under his nails. A Hell’s Angel prospect, to boot.

You’ve met him. He offered Shelby a ride out of town at the end of
Gas or Ass
. Because, you see, he’s the man who made Eden pack her shit and go with a tear in his eye. He knew better than to believe her vows to come back as soon as she was done with college.

I can’t help but wish that song would hit the charts again. Remix by Adele, anyone?

Another Helen, Helen Gurley Brown, showed me right there on the glossy pages of
Cosmopolitan
, that it was okay to be the bad girl I was with that big, burly biker.

But a pair of Glorias formed the real bookends of my life.

My mother’s name was Gloria. You met her already, camouflaged as Macy Hannah, the woman who would hear a hard truth about a man she’d forced her daughter to share a home with—and who denied that hard truth in favor of soft material comforts, whatever her reasoning.

My mother told me, by the simple act of closing her eyes and lifting her tea glass of bourbon, that what other people think trumps all the rest of the bullshit she ever spouted, and then spent the rest of her life trying to make feel guilty for heeding the message.

I had the hot rod, but not the strong arms of a Dale or a Caine Hannah to hold her back, so I never returned, as Shelby does, to that small town, nor to my mother, in any real sense. She died leaving the apology I craved unspoken, and I reckon I already explained, I used this story to try and slay the dragon of my discontent with how we left things.

But the other Gloria, Gloria Steinem, painted a different future for the girl who saw herself as not worth saving—a sense that was irretrievably tied to my sexuality after a bruising round of blame-the-victim for being molested by my stepfather. This, on top of a childhood spent wondering which part of me was the bad part, thanks to the way she ran my biological father down every chance she got.

There are many kinds of therapy, but few are as cheap or as effective as cranking up the volume on a song that speaks to your heart and dropping the pedal to the metal while you try to outrun the devil that you have little choice but to return home to at night.

I pause to quote Ms. Steinem here and beg you not to skip these wise words, because they pin the disparate parts of this message together:

“Tell the truth about what has happened to you that you think is unique. Tell the truth about what has happened to you even to small groups of people and chances are that you will discover that a version of that has happened to other people, too. Since we are each of us unique, that means that the shared experience, the pattern of shared experience,
is political.
(
emphasis mine
) If we get together, we can change it for each other. I think that is the root, the real durable revelatory root of change that must come from the bottom up in order to be true to our lives.”

~Gloria Steinem, in an interview with Lauren Schiller for Fortune Magazine, Dec. 22, 2015

See the date? By the time the article fell into my hands after Christmas, I had finished PTTM. Again. I wasn’t happy with what I call PTTM_V4.0, but I was bowing to the pressure to release the story, and had turned my attention to fighting the ghost in my machine that was wreaking havoc on my formatting.

Which might not have been a ghost, but a little thing called serendipity.

After I read the paragraph I quoted above, I knew what my issue was with the finale of Shelby’s tale. Not enough truth had hit the page, because the story had already eaten up pages the way a muscle car sucks gasoline.

And so what? If you have something better to do, put the story down. This tale isn’t a drag race. I knew that, but I tried to make it a four-hundred lap race, out of convention.

Ah, but the setting should’ve been my clue all along. See, the longest race NASCAR holds is the Charlotte 600, held every Memorial Day weekend. The ‘600’ stands for six hundred laps. A night race, which also seems apropos of the tale you’re about to read.

Like that race, the finale of Shelby’s story is a six-hundred lap grind to the checkered flag of self-acceptance. No woman wins that race so much as we endure it.

So, I knew, I had to go back. I had to bleed. Not half-assed bleed, like I’d done to that point. A pure bloodletting was the thing I’d avoided and the thing that kept me from feeling satisfied that the story was done.

Why had I pulled back?

All the writing advice you’ll ever see say to not let politics stray onto the pages of fiction—unless you’re a political writer. At the same time, whenever I’d close the PTTM file in frustration and don my webmaster hat to work on my new site,
www.edenconnor.com
I was confronted by the need to write a new author bio, so potential readers can get a sense of who I am as a writer of adult romantic fiction.

Because you just can’t get all that shit said in a tag line, right?

Ms. Steinem’s words echoed inside my head, just like so many of her words have done through the years. I realized what she advocated was what I’d set out to do with this tale. Hell, hadn’t I even labeled these books a confession?

Like Dale Hannah, I saw a way I could kill two birds with one stone.

So, to hell with what other writers do. This is what I do. Only Eudora Welty and O. Henry come to my mind as southern writers renowned for short fiction, although I admit, I might be overlooking some in the drive to make a point. Heck, every story I write starts out as a short story. But, I have to accept that I tend to spin a slow tale, laced with the bitter and the sweet, a la Pat Conroy and Ernest Hemingway.

I ain’t gonna apologize for that, either.

And you don’t need me to write a trigger warning for each story. All you need is one warning about who I am as a writer and a woman. First, a feminist. Second, a liberal, and third, a G.R.I.T—girl raised in the south.

The thing that burns in my gut whenever one of my well-meaning relatives tells me I’m wasting my talent writing romances is this:

If I want to speak to women—and I do—where in the world can I find more women than are clustered around the virtual shelves of the romance section at Amazon? Some yank up their hoodies and tiptoe past, stuffing their electronic selections inside e-readers they’d never show anyone. Others stuff their iPhones and cannot wait to share their latest book boyfriends with their like-minded sisters.

Even the women like my adult daughter, who aren’t scanning those shelves yet, just haven’t had that life trigger that sends them hurtling head-first into the pages of a romance, as happened to me after the death of my mother. A process that led us all to write our first romance, erotic or otherwise.

How can writing fiction for women mean anything at all, if it means we have to hide our personal truths about being woman? Makes no damn sense.

I don’t often write about suit-jacketed CEOs who take one glance at a self-assured woman, and know with the total conviction that I reckon only a man can experience, the missing ingredient in her life is the time she will spend on her knees at his feet.

I ain’t knocking those stories and don’t you dare think I am. I defend to the death any writer who wants to explore submission, same as I’ll die in defense of the right of women to explore the power exchange—and healing—involved in rape fiction, and to sample all flavors of fantasy in between.

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Temple of the Dragonslayer by Waggoner, Tim

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