Rage, Sex, and Teddy Bears: Excerpt/Bonus Scene–The Flowering Series tour by Sarah Daltry

This is a coming of age story, but it isn’t always sweet and innocent. If dirty talk, bedroom toys, and threesomes offend you… this is not your book.

“No one tells you when you start school just how homesick you will be, or how hard it will be to start life over with no direction and no friends or family. No one says that becoming your own person is terrifying.”

I never wanted anything but Derek, my brother’s best friend. When I chose a college, it didn’t seem to matter that he would be an hour away. We could survive it. After all, we were in love. But almost immediately, things change between us. I blame myself. Maybe I’m just not sure how to be a girlfriend and independent.

Life seems to be getting away from me – and then there’s Jack, the guy down the hall. He’s rude and vulgar and my parents would be shocked by him, yet every single time I see him, I feel like I’m being pulled toward him. It’s physical, sure, but there’s something in Jack’s eyes – and I want to know him.

I know I don’t always make the right choices, and I’m the only person at fault when everything falls apart. How do I tell Derek, the guy who was supposed to be everything, that I don’t feel like fighting for him anymore? And do I run to Jack, when I know his past is way too much for me to handle when I’ve just turned 19? Finally, where do I end up in all of this? Can I be more than just someone else’s idea of what I should be?

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Jack’s story isn’t pretty. He’s suicidal, depressed, and he uses meaningless sex and alcohol to survive. However, the story is about finding light in the darkness, but sometimes the road there isn’t always easy to walk.

“No one tells you about pain. They tell you that it hurts, that sometimes it’s consuming. What they don’t tell you is that it’s not the pain that can kill you. It’s the uncomfortable numbness that follows, the weakness in your body when you realize your lungs may stop taking in air and you just can’t exert enough energy to care. It’s the way taste and color and smell fade from the world and all you’re left with is a sepia print of misery. That’s when the shift starts – the movement from passive to active. I fall asleep, hoping that the morning will bring back the pain. At least the pain is a thing.”

I’m a plague, a cancer. My mom is dead – and my father is in prison for it. I survived high school because college was my way out. I needed to escape, to get away from my family and the people who tortured me, but it hasn’t grown any easier.

I don’t pretend that I’m a good person. I drink far more than I should, and I use my best friend, Alana, because together, we thrive on destroying each other – as well as the parts of us we hate. I don’t believe in love, but sex is fun and it also makes me feel something.

The morning I see Lily, the beautiful princess who smells inexplicably like strawberries every time I see her, I realize I’m in trouble. I should hate her. I want to hate her, because the alternative terrifies me. However, as she continues to crash into my life (often literally), I can’t avoid feeling something that is the one thing I swore I would never feel. I can’t fall in love, because people like me don’t live in a world where love saves anyone.

She just won’t go away, though, and I don’t know if I can keep running. The voices and the darkness hover over me and they threaten to bring me back to the safety of my hate, but the stupid scent of strawberries lingers on the horizon, as something like hope.

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Warning: This book deals with topics experienced those things in their an easy journey.

“Four. My life has been shaped by four people. Four men, to be more specific. My father, my stepfather, my best friend, and my boyfriend. The first two shaped it in horrible ways, but what I am, who I am, is all because of four men.”

Over the last twenty years, I’ve learned how to keep secrets. It doesn’t really matter, since everyone already seems to think they know everything about me. So I hide. I avoid confrontation, I treat Xanax like a magic pill that will make it all go away, and I become everything they think I am. A slut. A whore. Nothing but trash.

I can only name two guys who have ever made me feel like I was more than that. Jack is my best friend and I’ve loved him since I met him. Now, though, he’s in love… with someone else, and I guess I need to get over him. Somehow.

And then there’s Dave. The guy I never gave a chance. The guy I used almost as much as people used me, because I wanted to pretend I was someone worth loving. Two years have passed since we last spoke, but I don’t know how to stop thinking about him.

My new therapist is making me face my past, and she tells me that life inevitably changes without our permission. I believe it, but I know what I am. I hear what she’s saying to me, and I want to try again with Dave, to help Jack find joy, to love myself, and to move on. I just wonder if anyone can do that, really.

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This is a holiday novella-length story that follows Forget Me Not and Lily of the Valley.

“With you, Jack, it was the first time I ever felt real. It was the first time anyone looked at me and saw substance. It was the first time I wanted to make someone see me.”

Jack: New Year’s Eve. I’ve somehow managed to get here, and now I’m wearing a hideous and
unreasonably itchy sweater, because I want to impress Lily’s family. I want to do anything for this girl who has made me believe in second chances.

Lily: The house is beautiful and shining with light, but it feels empty. At least until Jack gets here. I know how desperately he wants this - a family, love, a home. If I can be the person who can give it to him, it’s all I need, but I hope I can keep him from seeing how hollow it all really is.

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“I’ve never understood a year. A year was always a measurement of something bad for me. A year in my father’s prison sentence, a year since my mom’s death, a year left of school before I could get far, far away from here. Now, as I look down the end of my college career, with only a little more than a
semester to go, a year seems like something magical. It has been a year since Lily chose me, since she sat with me on the old swing set and made a decision that I was worthy of her. And every minute of the entire year has been better than the last.”

You already know their stories: Lily, the perfect princess, always living someone else’s life. And Jack, the broken boy, who had stopped believing in hope. Somehow, though, they found each other and what was one night blossomed into a love story.

Now, a year later, Jack and Lily are dreaming of the future. Despite all of his promises to himself that he would never be indebted to anyone, Jack makes a new promise – this time to Lily – that he willbe there for her forever. But when life unravels for them, he starts to pull away, and Lily worries he’s out of reach for good.

When Jack does the unthinkable, Lily is left destroyed. Is it possible to have a happily ever after? Does love ever really save anyone?

“What are you doing?” I ask as she takes off her shirt.

She laughs. “Was I not clear?”

Hell, she is pretty damn clear now as she undresses, reaches around me to turn on the water, and climbs in the shower. God, she is amazing. It’s difficult to be miserable or feel guilty or really think anything at all when she stands under the water, holding the shower curtain open, and watching me. The rivulets spill across her breasts, down her stomach and on, past her legs and over the curves of her hips. I stare at the spot between her legs and I can’t even imagine what I was thinking last night. How could I ever give her up?

“Fuck,” I mutter.

She grabs me and pulls me into the shower with her, nearly bringing me to my knees. I try to wait, to enjoy looking at her, to deny myself, but she gets down and takes me into her mouth. I don’t know how she can breathe but she says nothing and soon, I can’t think about anything else. “Lily,” I groan. She looks up at me and those eyes just kill me. I would give up breathing for those eyes.
I reach down and lift her, bringing her to me, and I enter her under the hot water. The best part is having her so close to me, her eyes locked on mine, her body wet and warm everywhere. She leans back in the most delicious fucking angle. Lately, when we’ve been together, she has been so afraid of being wildbecause of everything happening in the world around us.However, this is what I need and she seems to read it in my eyes. I need her, hard and rough and in all the best ways.

“Hold on,” she says, and she turns the shower off. I don’t want to stop moving inside her, but she makes me wait and brings me back to her bedroom. She doesn’t lead me to her bed, though, instead pushing me down in the hard, wooden desk chair, and then she straddles me, bringing me back into her warmth, and she wraps her legs tight around the back of the chair.

“Fuck me hard, Jack,” she begs, and she digs her nails into my back while I do just that. She holds onto the chair and buries her head against my shoulder. She stays with me as I thrust hard and fast with all of the rage I have let build inside of me. It’s not sweet at all. This is just dirty and raw fucking, but she feels so good and I can’t stop myself. She makes noises that good girls just don’t make.
“Princess…” I can’t speak, because I love filling her like this and I want to go harder, deeper. I want to fucking consume her.

“Say it,” she says. “You never tell me anymore.”

“Tell you what? That I fucking love your pussy? Because fuck, I do. Oh, God, I love having you wrapped around my cock.”

She whispers, close to my ear, her lips brushing against my neck and driving me mad. “Remember my birthday? I wanted to make you come, Jack, but you didn’t wait for me. Let me make you come now.”

She is wrapped so tightly around me that I can barely move out of fear of tearing her apart, but she feels so damn good that I can’t stop. I can’t control it. I just push harder and harder and she meets each thrust with the same force, riding me as if she’s as angry as I am. At her request, I close my eyes, because if I keep looking at her, I’ll want to do this forever, so I think of nothing but the physical sensations of her body and I come just as she asked. It’s more than an orgasm, though, feeling like months of waiting for her, even though it hasn’t been that long at all. When I finish, she doesn’t move, allowing us both to savor the reverberations a little longer.

I reach up and bring her mouth to mine, my hand tangled in her wet hair. It’s so illogical that she still tastes like fucking strawberries, but she does. Sweet and impossible and satisfying and everything that Lily herself is. I breathe her in and hold her tight, trying not to get too excited about the proximity since her parents will be home any minute and I can’t be fucking their daughter like I just did when they get here.

“Tell me you’ll still marry me,” I plead.

“I’d marry you tomorrow if you asked,” she replies. I almost consider asking her to do it, to run away with me before the semester starts, but we hear the garage and she laughs as she fumbles around for our clothes. I wonder how she’ll explain both our wet hair

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Orange Blossom - music playlist

Four years. One night that was supposed to be an escape turned into four years. And now, four years is about to turn into forever.

Lily was never anything special. A perfect girl from a perfect world living an empty life. She was lost, thinking she knew who she was and what she wanted. She thought she knew love, but then there was a boy.

Jack has been through Hell. Watching his mother die - at his father’s hands - will never leave him. He had given up on living a life, figuring he would drink himself to death, if he didn’t give in to all the voices telling him to kill himself first. And then there was a girl who smelled like strawberries.

Two years have passed since Orange Blossom. Jack and Lily are only months away from their wedding and their journey is about to come to an end. Join them in the final title in the Flowering series, a story of growing up, of finding yourself, and of “blooming.”

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Sarah Daltry is a girl who writes books. The books are in all genres, because Sarah’s not so great at committing to things. She’s happily married and she and her husband live with their cats in New England. Sarah is painfully shy and, if you are able to find her, she is probably in a corner, hiding.

She also wrote Bitter Fruits, Backward Compatible: A Geek Love Story, The Love Song of J. AlfredPrufrock: A Modern Reimagining, and The Quiver of a Kiss: The Seduction of Helen of Troy, as well as several short stories and works of erotica.