Harley & Shae began as a kinky couple in five erotic short stories that I wrote called Ink & Kink For The Win. The stories are about a young woman, Shae, who survives breast cancer. To celebrate her victory, she gets a tattoo to cover her mastectomy scar. The experience reveals that Shae is a masochist, and in the hands of Harley, her tattoo artist and a dominant, she has her first kinky experiences. Harley’s intensity and unusual perceptiveness drive an on-again, off-again relationship that eventually tethers their hearts on a paranormal wavelength.
 

I donated their introductory story, “New Flame,” to my publisher’s charitable anthologies for Save The Ta-tas. When I first wrote the couple, I didn’t know that they would end up helping a breast cancer foundation. I gave Shae a cancer victory because I wanted to write about what it’s like to have your life split into a before and an after. Not everyone experiences such great change. Some are blessed with even-keeled lives. Others, like my aunt, great aunt, and cousin who fought cancer, don’t survive to live in the after.
 

Because I was suicidal, I know that there’s a difference between being a survivor and being a victor. Survival is the physical part. Victory comes from reinventing, and rising up to live in, your essential self once more. After her mastectomy, Shae struggles to live in her deep beauty, because there’s no going back to mere pretty for her. Her family thinks that reconstructing her breast could take her back to before, but she doesn’t want to go back. Fighting cancer unleashed her inner champion, and she tries to stay on that path by turning her mastectomy scar in a tattoo of Nike, the goddess of victory. She doesn’t want to identify as sick anymore, but she does want to identify with the story of her pain because it’s also the story of her triumph.
 

In Harley, Shae finds someone who understands that pain has a much bigger story than hurting, just as beauty is much bigger than being pretty.
 

When writing begins, you can receive updates on this project through my Facebook page.