Follow You Down (Farfalla Book 1)

  Follow You Down

  Book I of Farfalla

  Copyright © 2014 Ted Persinger

  All Rights Reserved.

  Published by Ted Persinger

  2014 Edition

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9862521-0-5

  ISBN 10: 0986252107

  Editing: Lisa Aurello

  Formatting: Mayhem Cover Creations

  Cover Design: Melissa Ringuette

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Disclaimer :

  This is a dark, erotic romance, and is intended for mature audiences. This novel is a work of fiction, and contains strong sexual situations, explored in graphic detail. Read at your own risk.

  DEDICATION

  I dedicate this novel to two amazing women to whom I owe so much:

  Aleatha Romig, whose kindness, caring, and mentoring show that she is much more than just an amazing writer, but she is definitely that, and

  Cassandra Dixon-Houston, who set me on the path of writing, cares about what I have to say, and inspires me every day.

  Ladies, thanks are not enough, but they are all I have.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  PART I : ABSTRACTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  PART II : LEPIDOPTERA

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  PART III : TRANSFIGURATION

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  PART IV : CRYSALIS

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  PART V : IMAGO

  32

  33

  34

  35

  FOREWORD

  So why an erotic romance? A dark one at that? From a bi-racial female’s point of view? How did I get here?

  Well, two things came together for me to write this, my second novel. First, I was talking to a friend about my first novel, The One Way. She asked me if Danny Shields, the protagonist, was auto-biographical. I hadn’t thought of it directly, though I knew as I had written that I had inserted a lot of things that were unique to my life, even though Danny was actually inspired by a couple of people I knew in Bangkok. Still, it had me thinking about whether I would always be doomed to write as myself, and all my characters would end up looking like me.

  I’d heard that painters and sculptors always put a bit of themselves in each person they paint. Some have pointed out similar features of the Mona Lisa’s demure smiling face and Leonardo’s own countenance. The noses are the same. The mouths are the same. She is Leonardo in a dress, some would argue. He therefore painted his own image, and simply feminized himself. In that sense, would I always be looking at my own mug as I stared into the faces of my characters? Would all my characters just be me in other clothes? Am I Rockwell looking into a mirror and painting the mirror?

  My second inspiration was a waiting room, where I sat for an appointment. On the table next to me was a cheesy, worn romance novel, complete with a bodice-ripping cover. You know the type: tanned Fabio in pirate costume with rippling abs, and the delicate flower looking constipated as she runs her delicate hands across his manly muscles. I was bored, so I flipped through a few pages. It was horrible. Simply horrible. I had one of those, I should write one of these! moments, even though I don’t remember ever really reading a single romance novel. Arrogant? Perhaps. Okay…definitely!

  So I set about to do two things: write in a genre in which I had no knowledge or experience, and write a character who was as far from me as I could make. It was a writing assignment I never thought I would do anything with. I would just write as exercise to develop my chops. I’d write about fifty pages, toss it, and be done with it.

  The romance part took me thinking a bit, though. The point of romance novels, after all, is the struggle for the relationship. The lovers have to be ripped apart by some insurmountable obstacle or immovable force. They have to fight to be together. So, then, how to make a man and a woman struggle? Well, being me, I had to take an unconventional approach. In the classic romance, it’s life circumstances that often force the two lovers apart. Wars. Evil-doers. Family ties. Consider Romeo and Juliet being torn apart by rival families; Two households, both alike in dignity…it had all been done before. I didn’t want to write just another Fabio-covered romance. I wanted something different. But how?

  Well, what about the characters themselves? What if it was their own flaws that put the obstacles in their way? What if it was they themselves creating the struggle? What if these were character traits they could not change? It started with creating my protagonist and her lover.

  For the lead character, I decided to make this person the opposite of me. I’m a male, so I wrote as a female. I’m a single-race, so I made her bi-racial. I’m from California, so I made her from New York. I waited until later in life to write, but young Rachel gets to it rather quickly. Everything about her had to be somehow different or opposite from me. Yet, I found myself writing with some commonalities, some that I just didn’t notice at the time. For example, I made her a teacher, which is a profession I have held. I put her in the 1970s, which is the era I grew up in (though I put her a few years earlier, as I wanted to explore that decade more). I made her a writer, and, well…working on that.

  But what started as a simple writing exercise has changed into something unique, I think. My plan to stop about fifty pages in went away. I couldn’t wait to find out what my characters did next. The more I wrote about Rachel and her friends, the more I wanted to know and understand.

  And now I do love Miss Rachel. She’s my new favorite character. She is so many things I am not, yet I identify with her struggle. As much as I tried to make her the Opposite Ted, she very much reflects me. She struggles with her identity. She is torn between a need for normalcy and a desire to explore. She wants the house with the white picket fence, but finds herself roaming the darker side of life. Yet, she’s also immensely different. I guess it’s similar to seeing a photo negative of yourself. You see the familiar outline, but all the shades are different.

  So, then, I guess I am staring at another semi-autobiographical character. Maybe, after all, we’re all doomed to model our creative works after ourselves, or at least some aspect of our lives. I guess I will always write where I live, as the old axiom says. While my novel is definitely not a da Vinci, it’s the best art I can create, and it comes from the heart.

  And I feel that I am getting better as a writer. I’m working on a follow up to The One Way, and I feel so much better equipped to take on the challenges of writing. That is, I’m a better writer than I was just a year ago. I hope you’ll agree.

  Thank you for taking this journey with me, and I do hope you enjoy it. Find me online and tell me what you think!

  Ted Persinger

  December 20, 2014

  PART I : ABSTRACTI
ON

  1

  “We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing

  our wings on the way down.”

  ~Kurt Vonnegut

  I’m old now, but I was young once.

  To this very day, I remember the first time I saw him. It sounds corny, of course, to say my heart skipped a beat. But it did. Several. I do believe in love at first sight…it has happened to me a few times in my life. But this was the first, and the first is always special. He set my soul on fire instantly. I would’ve done anything he wanted…and I guess I did.

  Rachel Walker, I’d like you to meet David Wright. I still tremble when I remember those words. That day changed me forever.

  I was in my third year teaching sweet little fifth graders at IS10, now Horace Greeley Intermediate. I was living in Queens with my father, still not making enough to live on my own in New York. It was 1979. Jimmy Carter was president. The economy was struggling and the future looked bleak. They called it stagflation. Having a job was an accomplishment that year, and I tried to keep that in mind. I had seen President Nixon resign while I was in college. Now, a recent graduate of Columbia, I was teaching in an economy that made many of us think the US was soon to fail.

  There weren’t many options for young women in those days. Teachers, nurses, secretaries, and mothers…that’s what most of us did. There weren’t many role models in those days. My mother had only been a wife and mother, and little girls played with dolls, practicing to be mothers. But I knew I wasn’t living up to my potential. My best friend at Columbia, Clarice, told me she was only in school working on her “MRS Degree.” It worked: she met her husband, Mike, in our final year, and they already had a child and a mortgage together.

  I had not met a husband. I felt that life held more for me, but I was also not as popular as Clarice. She was a pretty white girl from Albany. Even in New York, I was an oddity at this time. I am biracial: my black father met my white English mother at the end of World War II, while he was serving as a quartermaster in the Army in the Midlands of England. They moved to Queens in the early 50s, where my family was rejected.

  Whites completely avoided us, and white men viewed my father with anger. He had, after all, stolen a poor white flower and tainted her with black seed. She was not only white, but also properly British. He was the worst of them—he didn’t know his place and didn’t stick to his kind.

  But it was no better in the black community. My father was viewed as a traitor for not being with a black woman…like he wasn’t black at all. Black women were angry that he had passed them by. Black men viewed him as not fully black, though many were curious about tasting the forbidden fruit. How could you trust a brother who didn’t want a black woman? He wasn’t one of them. He wouldn’t back the black community in a pinch, they felt. At this time, many still spoke of revolution.

  Can one person really change you forever? Or does that one person simply unlock what was inside you all along?

  I was neither white nor black. My features belonged to neither side. How sad that there were sides that I didn’t belong to. My skin was light, more Hispanic-looking than black. My nose was higher, and much closer to my mother’s. My hair was thick, curly, and grew long down my back. I was painfully skinny growing up, not developing curves until I was nearly out of high school. I felt tall and gangly and awkward, and I was invisible to boys for most of secondary school.

  Our section of Queens was mostly black, and black girls wanted nothing to do with me. The teasing was incessant. The comments were continuous. The cold shoulders were everywhere. I was called yellah and lightey. Girls can be very cruel to each other, and I felt lost. Despite being from two worlds I was accepted in neither. Adding to my alienation, I had lost my mother early; I had no role model to teach me things a woman needs to know. My father loved me and tried his best to help me grow, but he never knew the tears I shed. It took me years to learn many of the things young girls learn from their mothers.

  Culturally, though, I had no choice in far too many ways. There was the “single drop of blood” rule: though I was half-white, I was black. Besides, my mother would’ve been my bridge into the white citizenry, and she left me before I could connect. Consequently, I was forced into the black community, though they didn’t make me welcome.

  We weren’t African-Americans then. We were fighting to be called black, and still kindly asking people to stop calling us Negroes. Once when I was walking to school, a cute little boy called me a coon. I didn’t even know what that meant, and had to ask my father. As much as he could, he had tried to shelter me from the ugliness of the world. I felt disconnected from the Black Power Movement. I didn’t listen to Marvin Gaye or James Brown. I didn’t pick my hair into an Afro, and anyway it wouldn’t have stood up no matter how short. I was living in Queens, not in Selma, so I was definitely removed from the struggle and didn’t feel it impacted my life. Yet when I looked at positions of power around the country, from CEOs to senators to book publishers, I saw only white faces. Did the world have a place for someone like me? I wasn’t sure.

  His eyes…his charcoal-black eyes…the eyes of a predator…

  Feminism was also going through many changes at this time. We heard “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” We were claiming the right to our own anatomy, which seems odd now but was critical then. Women had shrugged off the free love of the sixties…what would a woman gain from giving away her assets to any man who wanted them? We wanted choice over our reproduction, but we also craved traditional families. We wanted to be our unique selves, but were still tied to worrisome concepts of our gender. Could a woman lead a unique life and still be a mother and wife? Our feminine culture was evolving, but without my mother to help guide me, I often felt like a member of the audience instead of a participant.

  With all the confusion and fighting in our country, I had retreated into books. When my mother died, they gave me solace, and became my truest and most reliable friends. I read everything. I lived in books! But I didn’t just take in: I also wrote stories and poems, both informed by my distance and longing, my inclusion and exclusion from all that went on in the country. I colored my world with imagination…

  …and fueled it with a drive to succeed. I worked hard in high school, harder than anybody I knew. Some girls viewed me with even more suspicion as a result. I was a sellout. “She’s trying to be a white girl!” “She’s an Aunt Tom!” I would hear them hiss as I walked by. If a black young man were interested in me, I would suffer the wrath of every black girl in the school. Even speaking to an interesting young man brought sharp glares and sneers from the girls in my class. I avoided that pain as much as I could, though not completely.

  What is change, after all? We’re not caterpillars metamorphosing into butterflies, are we? Our changes are less than that…small course corrections, right?

  Those of us who were good in school banded together, and we rode out the storm of anger, spite, and distance as best we could. These few awkward, geeky girls gave me my only sense of belonging…my only circle of friends…my only feelings of self. We didn’t play sports. We didn’t go to parties. We didn’t date the hot guys. We studied. Only other unloved, awkward girls were my friends, and we all shared the same solitude and exclusion together. We didn’t go to proms (or even get asked). We didn’t go to homecoming games. While others spent weekends at parties, we spent the weekends writing poetry, or studying together, and sometimes crying together. We lost our virginities unromantically, more to just get it out of the way. High school for us was Dickens’ “worst of times.”

  And while we all worked hard, I worked harder…and excelled. I was the top student in my high school, and earned a full scholarship to Columbia. My father cried when I received my acceptance letter. I had never seen him show much emotion at all. He hardly ever laughed—maybe a smile if he was in a good mood. He was a serious man from a serious generation. He had seen things that had made him as hard as iron. When I saw those tears, I finally realized how much my
education meant to him. As their only child, I was the focus of all my parents’ energy. When my mother died, I was all my father had in the world. I guess that’s something I didn’t realize until later.

  My father had survived the Great Depression. Fought the Nazis. Battled prejudice at home and abroad. Built a small distribution business when nobody wanted to do business with a black man. When his wife died, he raised his only child and gave me everything he had, even if he didn’t understand the things a young girl experiences growing up. He fought through every challenge in his life. He was my entire world.

  His generation had a strength no generation has had since. He had never had the opportunity to attend college; he had worked since he was twelve, helping support his family. He had enlisted in the Army as soon as the war broke out, fighting for rights he wasn’t allowed to enjoy himself. Nothing ever came easy to him, and he bore the physical and emotional scars to prove it.

  I hadn’t realized college meant that much to him…he had never told me…but his tears told me everything. Seeing my hero, my pillar of strength, break down and cry made me want to put everything into my education.

  I had only memories of my mother. She had left her home country, and had few friends in Queens. She was quiet and kept to herself. Though she rarely spoke of it, I was astute enough to know she suffered rejection in her hometown of Birmingham. She had married, God forbid, a dark-skinned black man, at a time when men who looked like him were janitors and bus drivers. Most of her family back home wanted nothing to do with her, though I didn’t find this out until much later, and it was a painful lesson. My memories of my mother were of a quiet, somewhat dour woman.

  Does the butterfly remember its life as a caterpillar? Does it think, “That was me then, and this is me now”?

  Before my mother died, my parents had shown me how to build a world in which you could live and find satisfaction without the acceptance or approval of your community. All they needed was each other…and me. Every holiday and life event we shared together…within the circle of the three of us. Our photo albums were filled with pictures of just us. We camped, hiked, and went for weekend drives…just the three of us. While I boiled in the hot waters of my problems, my parents modeled a steely resolve and drive to succeed, and an unblinking focus on our family unit. It would serve me well through my life, as rarely have I ever fit in in the traditional sense. Instead, I learned to be an island…and let the waves of judgment wash onto my shores, then wash back out.