Title: Bleed Like Me
Author: Christa Desir
Date of Publication: October 7th 2014
About Bleed Like Me:
From the author of Fault Line comes an edgy and heartbreaking novel about two self-destructive teens in a Sid and Nancy–like romance full of passion, chaos, and dyed hair.
Seventeen-year-old Amelia Gannon (just “Gannon” to her friends) is invisible to almost everyone in her life. To her parents, to her teachers—even her best friend, who is more interested in bumming cigarettes than bonding. Some days the only way Gannon knows she is real is by carving bloody lines into the flesh of her stomach.
Then she meets Michael Brooks, and for the first time, she feels like she is being seen to the core of her being. Obnoxious, controlling, damaged, and addictive, he inserts himself into her life until all her scars are exposed. Each moment together is a passionate, painful relief.
But as the relationship deepens, Gannon starts to feel as if she’s standing at the foot of a dam about to burst. She’s given up everything and everyone in her life for him, but somehow nothing is enough for Brooks—until he poses the ultimate test.
Bleed Like Me is a piercing, intimate portrayal of the danger of a love so obsessive it becomes its own biggest threat.
Excerpt
“You sure you’re okay?” I asked
again as Brooks navigated the streets to my house. His lips looked
bluish-purple and he gripped the steering wheel to keep his hands from shaking.
“Yep.” His teeth chattered and I bit
my lip.
“Not to be a bitch, but I did warn
you the water would be freezing.”
He pulled the car to the side of the
road. “Gannon. You’re gonna need to stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Acting like you give a shit.”
I opened and closed my mouth. “I—“
He faced forward and gripped the
steering wheel again. “Don’t bother lying. It’s true. You don’t really care. You
don’t really know me. You’re just intrigued.”
I shrugged. We sat in silence for
too long. “Do you want to tell me about your back?” I’d been thinking about his
scars ever since I’d seen him at the river.
“Not really. Do you want to tell me
about the cutting?”
“Nope.”
He released a breath. “Okay then.”
I tapped his shoulder and pointed to
the end of the street. “I can get out there.” I moved my hand to the door
handle, but he batted it away.
“I can drive you to your house,” he
said.
I dropped my hands to my lap and
eyed the clock. My parents should be asleep, but after the argument from the
other night, I couldn’t be sure. What would they think of Brooks?
He stopped two houses away from mine
and faced me. “We’re gonna be a thing, you and me.”
“I don’t even know you,” I repeated
back to him. The thing was, I wanted
to know him. I was intrigued. But it
was more than that. Something I didn’t even want to think about.
His fingers traced a line down my
cheek. “You will, though. And I’ll know you. We’re gonna be good together.”
“I’m a mess,” I blurted out. Stupid.
Too many emotions skated along my skin when I was with him. It was like my
shields didn’t work around his Brooks-ness.
His laughter echoed through the car
and I blinked back tears. “Oh Gannon.” His rough fingers traced my eyelids,
finding unshed tears. “Don’t cry. I like the mess. It makes me look better.”
He leaned forward then and took my
cheeks in his hands. His mouth dropped to mine and then he really kissed me.
Not a little peck or a rushed kiss like the one in the woods. A real kiss. Lips
and teeth and tongue and it was so overwhelming, I almost couldn’t breathe. My
hands tugged at his blue hair and I inched toward him, holding myself back from
hopping into his lap. He laughed into my mouth and I let go.
He rubbed his thumb over my bottom
lip and looked at me hard. “Yeah. We’ll work.”
He sat back into his seat. I moved
on autopilot, grabbing my messenger bag and opening the door. The cool night
air rushed over me, but I didn’t feel it. Didn’t notice my feet stumbling as I
walked toward my house, knowing his eyes were on me without even turning to
check. My fingers brushed over my mouth again and again. I slipped the key into
the lock of the front door and finally turned back to see he was still parked
in the same spot. He lifted his hand and waved at me. I waved back and then
slipped into our dark front hall. My legs buckled beneath me.
I wanted to tell someone. Call
Ricardo. Text Ali. Wake my mom. But sharing wasn’t my style. So I snuck up to
my room and lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. My hands slid beneath the
edge of my shirt and I traced the lines carved into my stomach. And even though
I knew better than to believe it, I couldn’t stop the echoing of Brooks’s words
in my head: We’re gonna be good together.
Q&A with Christa Desir:
When you start a book, do you already have the whole story in your head or is it built progressively?
I usually start with characters and a very vague idea of what their problem is. For example, in my alcoholic girl boxer book, I had a voice in my head of a girl who was really angry and had just gotten out of rehab. The rest of it came out (including her being a boxer) as I started writing.
Tell us about your first book. What would readers find different about the first one and your most recent published work?
My first book FAULT LINE is a book about a girl who is gang-raped at a party and is told from the POV of her boyfriend who did not attend the party. BLEED LIKE ME is told from a girl’s POV who is in a very co-dependent and unhealthy relationship. BLM is not exactly an “issue” book in the same way that FAULT LIINE is and even the things that come up in BLM aren’t as polarizing as FL. Books about rape can be very tricky, particularly if people are sexual violence survivors. BLEED is a different sort of book because it leaves the reader with questions about what we’re willing to sacrifice in order for someone to love us.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
I find the business of publishing to be very challenging and when all that noise gets in my head, I think it is hard to write. I miss writing in a vacuum of pure writing and nothing else. Every morning I try to recreate that vacuum by writing for a few hours with no noise or internet or anything else, but I still can’t stop thinking about the business side of things. (For example: will this book be too controversial? Will schools not want to shelve it? Will people hate it because it’s not a happy ending and therefore sales will suffer?
What are your current projects?
I have a book about an alcoholic girl boxer that is coming out in January 2016. And I have a collaboration with author Jolene Perry that comes out in May 2016. I’m also working on a long-term pet project that is just for fun and just for me. Which makes me very happy. :-)
How did you come up with the idea for this story?
Well, first, my agent at the time asked Twitter if someone would write a YA Sid & Nancy and I thought I was probably the right person for that. J And second, I happened to be reading a lot of romance novels when I first conceived of the idea (hazard of the day job) and kept seeing all these stories where messed-up guys and messed-up girls got together and their love made them so much better. And I thought, “Gosh, that never worked that way for me.” So I wanted to tell a more honesty story about how we sometimes need to figure out how to love ourselves and be worthy of that before we can start messing with loving other people.
Where do you find your inspiration?
Mostly I meet people in the world and find them interesting and wonder what they were like as teenagers or what would happen if they were in particular scenarios and that’s sort of my jumping off place. I usually start with characters and build from there.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
I find the business of publishing to be very challenging and when all that noise gets in my head, I think it is hard to write. I miss writing in a vacuum of pure writing and nothing else. Every morning I try to recreate that vacuum by writing for a few hours with no noise or internet or anything else, but I still can’t stop thinking about the business side of things. (For example: will this book be too controversial? Will schools not want to shelve it? Will people hate it because it’s not a happy ending and therefore sales will suffer?)
What are your current projects?
I have a book about an alcoholic girl boxer that is coming out in January 2016. And I have a collaboration with author Jolene Perry that comes out in May 2016. I’m also working on a long-term pet project that is just for fun and just for me. Which makes me very happy. J
Tell us about your first book. What would readers find different about the first one and your most recent published work?
My first book FAULT LINE is a book about a girl who is gang-raped at a party and is told from the POV of her boyfriend who did not attend the party. BLEED LIKE ME is told from a girl’s POV who is in a very co-dependent and unhealthy relationship. BLM is not exactly an “issue” book in the same way that FAULT LIINE is and even the things that come up in BLM aren’t as polarizing as FL. Books about rape can be very tricky, particularly if people are sexual violence survivors. BLEED is a different sort of book because it leaves the reader with questions about what we’re willing to sacrifice in order for someone to love us.
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
This is a tricky area, because I don’t really write “message” books and if a reader is going in looking for one, they’ll end up disappointed. But, I do like to leave readers with questions about the story I’ve told and in the case of BLEED, I hope that they think about what it means to love and what we do to fill the holes inside of us.
Does music play any type of role in your writing?
When I’m walking my dog and trying to figure out something in my plot, I often listen to music and it ends up being really important because I think music can capture really raw emotions in a way that almost no other medium can. With BLEED, I listened to Sia’s “Breathe Me” and Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie” a lot.
Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your life?
Everything I write comes from something inside of me, but not in the way that it happened exactly like how I wrote. More the truth is in the emotions experienced, the rawness of loving someone so much you lose yourself, the devastation of losing your first love. That’s sort of universal to a lot of people, I guess.
What books have influenced your life most?
Sylvia Plath’s THE BELL JAR, Joan Didion’s PLAY IT AS IT LAYS, Margaret Atwood’s THE BLIND ASSASSIN, Camus’s THE STRANGER, the complete works of Shakespeare, and there are too many YA titles to list. J
Are there any new authors that have grasp your interest?
Yes, I love Carrie Mesrobian’s writing (SEX & VIOLENCE, PERFECTLY GOOD WHITE BOY). It is fierce and fearless. I also adore Sarah McCarry and think everyone should read her books, they are lyrical and super smart and dig deep (ALL OUR PRETTY SONGS, DIRTY WINGS). Both Steph Kuehn and Brandy Colbert wrote astounding debut novels (CHARM & STRANGE, POINTE). And Stephanie Oakes’ forthcoming THE SACRED LIES OF MINNOW BLY is unforgettable.
Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers?
Thanks for reading. It means so much to me that you take time out for authors and their books. Keep reading. So much great dialogue starts from the questions asked by books.
How can readers discover more about you and your work?
Website: www.christadesir.com
Do you have a special time to write? How is your day structured writing-wise?
I usually write in the mornings from 5-7am. It’s early but my house is always quiet and I get my best thinking done then and I don’t feel guilty about ignoring my day job.
Why did you choose to write [genre] stories?
I love YA. I think it’s such a special time of a person’s life and there’s so much growing that happens then, so much discovery. It’s so interesting to be able to work through all that over and over again. To think about how I was then and how I am now and how I figured out things.
What is for you the perfect book hero?
The romance editor side of me always falls hard for deeply damaged and broken heroes who have to find their way back from a lot of difficult things. That is my favorite kind of hero’s journey, not necessarily big quests, but big emotional journeys.
When you start a book, do you already have the whole story in your head or is it built progressively?
I usually start with characters and a very vague idea of what their problem is. For example, in my alcoholic girl boxer book, I had a voice in my head of a girl who was really angry and had just gotten out of rehab. The rest of it came out (including her being a boxer) as I started writing.
When and why did you begin writing?
Well, the long answer to this is: when I was five years old and saw my sister kissing Andy McKee in the bushes and wrote a story about it that my parents later framed. The simpler answer is that I started with an idea that I wanted to write as a screenplay almost 15 years ago now, then about five years ago, I decided to write it as a YA book instead.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
When I started to do it every day, when I couldn’t stop, when I ignored my friends and family because I had to get something down, then I felt like a real writer. So basically, when I became sort of sub-human. LOL.
List three books you have recently read and would recommend.
Carrie Mesrobian’s PERFECTLY GOOD WHITE BOY
Andrew Smiths’ 100 SIDEWAYS MILES
Benjamin Alire Saenz’s ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE
Tell us something that people would be surprised you know how to do.
I skate roller derby. I love it, even though I end up really bruised quite often.
Will you write more about these characters?
Do you mean a sequel? LOL. No. I couldn’t, for REASONS.
BONUS Excerpt:
Thirty-five days. Thirty-five fucking days. No Brooks. Be back in a month was a cruel joke. I deleted his text and stopped feeling anything at all.
Dennis had concocted a huge sale to get rid of the summer inventory. He wanted me to build wooden birdhouses to mark the sale aisles. It was the stupidest idea I’d ever heard, but he threatened to fire me if I didn’t do it and I thought he might be serious.
“Why don’t you just put sale signs over these aisles?”
“Shut it,” Dennis barked at me.
“I’m just saying, a bunch of birdhouses aren’t gonna let people know they can take fifty percent off of all the merchandise.”
“Quit your bitching. You’ve been in a surly mood this past month and you need to snap out of it.”
I gaped at him. Was I that obvious? “No, I haven’t.”
Dennis shook his head and exchanged a look with Ricardo. “Yes, you have. Now just finish putting your tools away and get your head in the game or I’m dropping you.”
I wasn’t the only surly one. Dennis had been on his period ever since Brooks had shown up drunk that day.
“You’re not dropping me. No one else can work the circular saw.”
“Ricardo can. And working the circular saw isn’t a requirement of the job.”
“It is if you have to build bullshit birdhouses,” I mumbled.
Dennis’s nostrils flared. “No more discussion. Tools away and you better be back here this weekend to work the sale.”
I opened my mouth to argue more, but Dennis held up his hand. When the hand came up, I knew Dennis was really pissed. I shut my mouth and moved to the storage garage. What did I care anyway? I had nowhere else to be.
The lights flickered as I stood surveying the piles of wood and tools littered along the floor. I sat down and started collecting nails, putting them into the tiny, labeled boxes Dennis housed them in. The door to the storage garage creaked open and my head whipped up.
Brooks. Heat I hadn’t felt in days surged into my body. My hands trembled and I clenched them into fists.
“Where the hell have you been?”
He took a tentative step toward me. “Rehab.”
“Really?” My hands unclenched and my eyes scanned his body as I got to my feet. He’d gotten thinner and something about his face looked not quite right.
“Yeah. Sue found some E in my duffel and sort of overreacted. I think fucking Ray tipped her off about it. She told me I needed to pull my shit together and get clean if I wanted to stay with her.”
He moved closer to me, and his hand reached out to trace the hoops in my ear. I shut my eyes for a second and allowed his long fingers to figure eight around the silver before I shook him off.
“You could’ve called me or returned my texts. It’s been thirty-five days. Longer than a month.” My breath came in short bursts, squeezed from the hole in my throat that had been shrinking since the moment he left.
His fingers moved to the now completely faded hickey on my neck. He circled it, his thumb brushing over the smoothness as he stared at me, took all of me in with his too keen eyes. Butterflies fluttered around my stomach. Then he dropped his mouth to my pale skin and sucked hard. My insides coiled, the butterflies stilled. I released a long shaky breath.
“They took my cell and it wasn’t the kind of rehab where you get to make a bunch of phone calls,” he said, nipping me with his teeth.
“Are you going to apologize?” I grabbed at my last vestiges of logic and pushed him off my neck.
“I don’t do apologies,” he said, and his hands circled my waist before he plunged his mouth onto mine. His tongue traced my bottom lip, pressing me to open.
Part of me wanted to push him away. Drop him before he bailed on me all over again. Make him beg for my forgiveness. But seeing him in front of me practically vibrating with want, everything fell out of my head. It was like an IV of Ecstasy pumped directly into my heart.
I clung to his neck. His hands slid beneath the back of my shirt, moving up and down my spine. I raked my fingers through his hair and opened my mouth wider. My entire body trembled with how much I’d missed him.
He pulled away for a second, dropping kisses along my jaw before whispering, “Does the door lock?”
I nodded, drawing in a quick breath. Dennis had installed a lock on the inside of the door a month after he realized how much time I spent alone working there.
Brooks released me and went to shut and lock the door.
“Let me see you,” he said, stepping toward me and lifting me on to Dennis’s work table. He moved his hands to the bottom of my shirt.
I stilled for a second and then helped him pull my shirt off. His hands shook a little when he lifted off the next layer of my thin tank top.
“You’re shaking.”
He grinned at me. “Anticipation.”
The lump in my throat got bigger. “Really?”
His hands moved over my stomach, sliding over old scars. “Really. It’s been a long thirty-five days.”
About Christa Desir:
I’m Christa Desir and I write young adult novels. I am an avid reader and have been in love with YA books ever since reading Judy Blume’s FOREVER (while hiding between the stacks in the library).
My first success with writing came at the age of five when I wrote a story about my sister and our neighbor Andy “kissing in the dushes.” My parents were so proud of this work, they framed it and showed it to every visitor who came to our house. My sister still has not forgiven me.
I live outside of Chicago with my awesome husband, Julio, and our three children. When I'm not writing, I am an editor of romance novels. I am also a feminist, former rape victim advocate, lover of coffee and chocolate, and head of the PTA. It is a rare day when I don’t humiliate myself somehow, and I frequently blog about my embarrassing life moments.
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