Last week’s WIPpet snippet was short. Of COURSE I’m going to give you something massive this week. I won’t be offended if you skip it. 🙂

This is from chapter… probably three. I’m not too clear on chapter divisions yet. This is extremely rough, please excuse the everything. Set up: things haven’t been going well since the end of Bound (so much for happily ever after, right?). So SPOILER ALERT I guess, if you don’t want to know whether people survive that one.

Still with me? Good. Rowan has convinced Aren to take a walk with her on the beach, saying she wanted to search for treasure. He doubted they’d find any, but went along anyway. He doesn’t get to spend much time alone with her these days.

12 + 6 paragraphs for 12/6  (plus one line so it makes sense)

—

Rowan seemed to be trying to get her bearings on the beach, running back and forth, looking down, when she suddenly dropped to her knees to rake her fingers through the pebbles. I jogged toward her, holding tightly to the cloth-wrapped item in my pocket. She stood and held her hand out to me. “Told you there was treasure.”

Glass. Two pieces, one green and one brown, the edges smoothed and the surface dulled by the rocks and water. “That’s it? This is what you were looking for?”

“Mm-hmm. I didn’t think you’d come with me if I told you.”

“What, that we were looking for old garbage?” She looked at me expectantly, and I sighed. “No, I still would have come along.” I fell in beside her as she walked closer to the water.

“It’s not old garbage.”

“It’s broken glass that somebody threw away, or that floated off of a shipwreck. It is the very definition of garbage.”

She stopped to pick up a few more pieces, and motioned for me to hold out my hand. “No,” she said. “This is garbage.” Clear glass this time, and new, probably tossed over the cliff recently. I closed my fingers around it, and the point of the triangle bit into my skin. When I opened my hand, blood welled up from a tiny puncture. Rowan frowned. “I wish you wouldn’t do that. I can’t heal it, you know.”

“It’ll go away on its own soon enough.”

She shook her head, and a sudden breeze off of the ocean blew her hair around her head until she caught it and tied it back with the ribbon she kept in her coat. “This, however,” she continued, “is treasure.” Clear glass again, but turned white by its pitted surface. It was perfectly smooth, and aside from its colour was indistinguishable from the round pebbles that littered the shore. “I suppose it was garbage once, but after a while it becomes beautiful. Don’t you see it?”

As she added to her collection, I started to see. No one would ever mistake the glass for gemstones, but they were beautiful in the same way that someone like Rowan thought beach rocks were beautiful, or a mossy forest, or the swirling patterns in driftwood. I didn’t notice those things the way she did, but I was learning. It reminded me of her; if the women I’d known in Luid were diamonds and sapphires, she was the amethyst-coloured glass she handed to me, which seemed to glow in the fading sunlight and became more interesting the longer I looked at it. She was a strange person, but in ways that I liked very much. I thought again of leaving, and felt ill. I didn’t know how to bring it up.

A dull flash of green caught my eye. “What about this one?” I asked.

She turned the glass over in her hands. “Almost there. See how this edge is clear? It probably broke off of something not too long ago, and the ocean has to work on it a bit more. It’s a shame; the colour’s good.”

I sat on a weathered log that had landed above the tide line, and Rowan followed. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?” she asked.

“It’s time,” I said. She was silent for a few moments, then smiled, sadly.

“What, just when things are going so well here?”

I took her hand. It was so small in mine. “I would stay if I thought it would help you, but I think I’m just in the way right now. I’m not doing any good here. I’m tired of being unwanted and useless. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing now, but it’s not this.”

Rowan squeezed my fingers. “It’s not getting any better, is it?”

“Did I ever tell you what Mariana and Arnav said to me at the Grotto?” She shook her head and sat beside me. “They said that it was admirable that I wanted to renounce my past, but that I needed to learn what I was living for. Right now I have nothing but you. I think I could spend the rest of my life living for you, but-”

“…but that’s not fair to either of us. I know.”

—

Life is hard, kids, stay in school and don’t fall in love too quickly. Quality advice from Auntie Kate, right there. I have a big problem with stories where people fall in love too quickly and then that’s it.  I will NOT have codependent characters. *end rant*

And yeah, I know, it’s wordy and needs editing. I’ll get back to it. 😉

Want to join in the WIPpet Wedesday fun? Head on over to our host’s blog (KL Schwengel at My Random Muse), click on the linkie and share the love with the other WIPpeteers, and add your own link to a bit of your work in progress that relates to today’s date in some way (12 lines, 12 words… 12+6 letters, something from chapter or page 12… whatever).

Treasure ahoy!

I guess I owe a #ROW80 update, too, especially since I missed Sunday’s check-in. JuNoWriMo is putting the pressure on, but I’m behind. I need a few good days with no distractions to get caught up. 2,000 words a day is just not happening right now. I’ve given up on reading Fallen (see here if you really want to know why) and have started Matched, which I thought sounded very not me, but I’ve enjoyed the first few chapters. Housework is going well, too, even if I refuse to acknowledge that as an official goal.