Indie Page 99 discussion

The Fractured Hues of White Light
Laura J. W. Ryan
Copyright 2010 Laura J. Wellner, All Rights Reserved.

Brief synopsis:
The Fractured Hues of White Light is an emotional journey that explores who we love and why we love them. Mother, father, daughter, siblings, lovers, spouses, and friends; it’s all love in some form. It is a story about Samantha Ryder, a young autistic woman who is an artist; it is because of her handicap that she often fails to articulate her emotions with an appropriate demonstration. Ironically, the ‘normal people’ who surround her are just as incapable of communicating their feelings, creating a sense of isolation full of things left unsaid.

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http://www.amazon.com/Fractured-Hues-...


From page 99 plus a little bit more so that it will make a little bit more sense...


“Now I can go home.”

“Oh, Samantha—” I sighed, giving in to her logic. Never again. She’s right—this must end here because we’re not in a position to carry it further. Although stolen kisses during furtive meetings in secluded places “to talk” eagerly greeted my imagination—but I feared turning something beautiful into something ugly should our secret be discovered. For now, our feelings have nowhere to go, so, I reluctantly kissed my love goodbye. Never again.

With her robe firmly wrapped around her, she paused in the doorway to look back. Without my glasses on, her expression was softly blurred, but I didn’t need to see clearly to feel the emotional brew afflicting her—never again. Then she was gone. I rose from the bed to watch her from the upstairs window. Her pale shape flitted through the gap in the hedge, and she walked quickly across the green lawn with her arms folded tight in front of her. I knew that it is for the best to let her go home to work out her problems—or not. And I need to do some thinking as well—it is time to put an end to the charade in which I live.

When I turned away from the window, I met the accusing gaze of Daisy; she lay on my pillow, her bushy tail twitching with annoyance like a regal lady with a fan. “Daisy, if you don’t tell, I won’t tell Helena that you peed on her brief case.” The cat only narrowed her yellow eyes as if in contemplation of the deal that I offered; the fluffy rogue routinely pees on Helena’s stuff to pick a catfight, and Helena screams at me because of something my pissy cat did to her stuff. After a while, Daisy looked away and yawned as if she had already forgotten my indiscretion. One thing for sure, my cat always liked Samantha. It’s funny how animals seem to know things in that peculiar awareness they possess; through my cat’s eyes, I’m finally seeing the errors of my ways.

How do I amend what I’ve done? I don’t know.

***
Right up to an hour before Helena’s return home on Wednesday after¬noon, I had refused to change the bed sheets. I spent the last two nights relishing my infidelity through the fading lavender scent of my lover, alter¬nately feeling sated and miserable. A part of me wanted Helena to come to bed tonight and know that I had been with someone else—my sweet revenge—but my guilt forced me to strip the bed to eliminate the stains of lovemaking.
“Why are you doing laundry?” she asked when she caught me carry¬ing the tangle of clean sheets upstairs; my nervous hands were incapable of folding them neatly.

“I umm—I—” I sputtered with guilt, ready to confess what I had done.

“Eww, did you go off in your sleep again?” she asked, wrinkling her lips into a grimace reserved for amused disgust. Her intimate knowledge of my body’s nocturnal habits sometimes makes me too human for her taste. I disgust her most of the time, awake or asleep, it doesn’t matter; she’s always had a hard time with the reality of me once the early novelty wore off.

“Ugh, last night—it woke me up.” I matched her expression by crinkling my nose.

“Jeez, Luiz, you act like you had an affair,” she snorted in an indelicate way that always makes me laugh, but my usual snicker got stuck in my throat because of the confession teetering on the tip of my tongue. Forcing a chuckle into the air, I climbed the stairs with the sheets.

While making the bed, I picked up a pillow from the floor and breathed in the scent of lavender; I had forgotten to wash the pillowcases in my panic to hide the evidence. After embracing what was left of that night, I exchanged the pillow with the one from my side of the bed; this one bit of proof of my infidelity I could not part with just yet, and if Helena smelled it, it would serve her right to have to wonder how the scent of her sister had gotten there. But this evidence was explained away later—“Preston was drunk, he had scared the shit out of Sammy, so she spent the night here.” She bought the story that I had slept on the sofa without batting an eyelash. It’s the furthest thing from her mind that I would have an affair with anyone, and she’d think it especially ludicrous that I would have a fling with her autistic half-sister, Samantha Ryder.

I'm hosting a Q&A here at Goodreads for The Fractured Hues of White Light, please stop by and have a look around, I've posted various musings and excerpts from the book.

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/3...

I posted a new comment at my Q&A with a cross posting on my blog, I've gotten involved in a Literary Blog Hop and the question we're pondering is "What is Literary Fiction?" so I picked up the torch and ran with it for a little bit, and included a reading from chapter 7 from The Fractured Hues of White Light.

Link to my blog:
http://upstategirl-laurajwryan.blogsp...

Link to the Literary Blog Hop just in case you want to join in or take a peak at what others are saying:
http://www.thebluebookcase.blogspot.com/

Thanks for the links. I enjoyed reading your blog.