Stories We Ruined Together Pt. 02

"This is it," I said, unnecessarily, as I opened the door to my flat.

"Very nice."

I had a quick glance because I often suspect people of being insincere with casual compliments. He seemed to genuinely like it. There was no reason not to -- it was a cool place, with the big windows and high ceilings, and the pretty (although defunct) fireplace. My sofa was covered by a thick red throw, a deep red, and it was luxurious in colour and in texture. I invited him to sit down on it, and he did, and I went round the corner to the semi-open plan kitchen, and raised my voice to ask him what he wanted to drink.

"What are my options?"

"Chilean red...orange juice... or water. That's it, sorry."

"It's more than I have at my place. Wine please."

I poured for us and took a long moment alone by the sink, to work out what I was thinking and feeling, and what I expected or wanted to happen now. I wanted someone to want me. And not some random creep, someone I actually liked. And that was happening. Great. But what now. Around a year since my last fumbling interaction with a guy, I could hardly remember how it all was supposed to work.

"Here you go. It's on the house."

"Wow, thank you. That's so generous of you."

I winked at him. "I know. You're a lucky boy." Slowly, very slowly, I sat down, on the other end of the sofa. Like some sort of prude. He laughed, probably under the misapprehension that I was messing around. I wished I had thought to put some music on. Something to take the place of the silence. It seemed to soon to stand up again.

"So, tell me some more about your book," Ed said, and that gave me an excuse to hop up, and retrieve my laptop. On the way back I stuck the TV on and opened my music streaming app. On with a playlist of nice relaxing shoe-gaze.

"Here it is. Have a little scan of it, if you want to." I placed the laptop on his lap, and turned away to feign interest in the street outside. I usually don't share any works in progress. To be honest, I don't really share my writing with people who know me. I just don't like to. It's another side of me and I get embarrassed. I feel like I'm showing too much. It would be like a friend seeing me get out of the shower. I don't want that to happen. But this time I just went ahead and did it.

I took a quick glance back and Ed was concentrating firmly, with pursed lips, and his use of the down arrow key assured me that he wasn't reading it in minute detail. That was something, at least. Taking advantage of his focus, I tried to figure out what of his face appealed to me so much. I couldn't quite identify it.

"I like this. This is good." He kept his eyes on the screen, kept moving through it, and I watched him in silence for a few minutes. "It's better than the title suggests. I think you should change the title. 'Rosie's summer of love?' I don't think that does it justice."

"Okay, well, I'm all ears." Titles never were my strong point. I would have liked to have just called it Romantic book project number sixteen, if that had been a viable option.

"Oh, I don't actually have a suggestion. I just think you might want to change it."

"So helpful." I reached over and gave him a nudge in the shoulder with my knuckles, the most daring contact made so far. "What else?"

"Well, I've only had a few minutes with it, but maybe this classmate of hers -- I guess this is who she has the casual thing with?" I nodded yes, and he continued. "Well, I would want to make him a a bit more sympathetic. Because how you've written him.... he does seem very very annoying. Which might be fine. But you did say that the story is partly about a difficult decision for her -- to carry on with this immature guy of her age, or pursue things with the professor. Yeah?"

"Yeah, basically."

"Well, if you make the student a bit more likeable, then the decision is going to be more difficult, it's going to seem like more of a genuine dilemma. At the moment it doesn't quite come across like that. For me." That made sense. I nodded, and waited for more. He read on for a few more minutes. "I like this a lot. This scene where she's in his office, and he tells her that stuff about his elderly parents, and they get really close. I think that's great. Great feeling."

"Thanks," I said, and I moved just a little bit closer, to read over his shoulder. I understood why he liked it, it was a good scene. I'd felt good writing it. It had worked for me. "Some of the other bits are really bad. I can't seem to make them... I don't know. So much of it falls flat."

"And you don't know why?" Ed asked me.

"No. I've no clue. Maybe I've just lost it. Maybe I should add some werewolves or something. That usually moves things along. I wanted to try something different, something more realistic, but... I don't know."

Ed gave me a gentle smile that made me feel all seen and safe. "Why do you think the office scene was easy for you to write? What was it about that?"

"I don't know. It just... I don't know. I suppose I've been in that situation myself --someone older than me told me all about their problems, some really personal stuff... and that's one of the times I've felt closest to someone. Actually I can't remember ever feeling closer to someone than at that moment."

I thought that might sound weird, but Ed nodded thoughtfully. "That makes sense. You've got a connection to that experience, you know what it's like. The characters and the setting are different, but the emotions are the same."

"I've never had this problem before though. Although, thinking it through, all my other books used a few repeated themes that... that were probably drawn directly from experiences in my life. Yeah. I think this is the first time I've tried to write about something I haven't experienced myself. Fuck. So basically I just have no imagination at all."

"Well I wouldn't say that. Maybe you just need a kick start with some of it. Something to stimulate your creativity."

"How does it work for you? You haven't told me what you write."

He shook his head and brushed the question off smoothly. "I don't ever show anyone what I write, I don't write to share. Nothing important, nothing interesting. I just like reading and writing." He returned his gaze to the laptop screen, and scrolled some more.

The flat was cold, I realised suddenly. I was used to huddling up with blankets and hot water bottles, because of the near-useless central heating system, and I often forgot that for a guest it might not be a pleasant environment. I asked him if he would like me to put the heating on. "No, that's alright. I like being cold." Was that a joke? I wasn't sure. "What I think you should do, if you ask me... is identify all the things in this book that you haven't experienced yourself, and get out and do them, just do those things."

I tried to get my head around that. "I don't think I actually necessarily need to do everything that I want to write about. I don't think that's like, necessary."

"Not to do them exactly the same, but something similar - to experience some of the feelings, some of the emotions. So that you can use that when you write the scene -- just like you said you did with the office part. Because that bit is fantastic."

I said I didn't know, and we went back and forth on the logic of his suggestion for a bit, and all the while I was thinking that this was very unlike me, to talk about what I was writing, to actually want the opinion of someone else, to open up. And just to have a man here in my flat was a novelty really. Being sat right next to him, with the dark evening slowly dying, and the wine half gone, brought intermittent pulses of desire. Soft waves that rose and subsided, as I listened to him talk. I watched his lips move. They were nice lips. At one side he had a mark, or a scar maybe, faint but I saw it because I looked closely. Then without any warning to him or to myself, I leaned over the small gap between us and put my hand to his cheek and kissed him softly, deeply.

It took me a long second to realise what I was doing, and when I did he had already begun to respond, and his hand found my thigh, right where dress met skin, and I suddenly felt very very alive. The cold of the room and my vulnerabilities flew off and left us there, and his other hand was in my hair, and mine in his, and we kissed with more force, like we were desperate to get through to something.

And then the laptop fell off him and onto the floor, loudly, and we both jumped. He apologised and picked it up, and we laughed, awkwardly. I didn't know what to do, I felt a bit overwhelmed, but Ed reclined back on the sofa and guided me gently back with him, and I lay my head against his chest, and for a while we did nothing more than lie there, listening to the soft music. It was as though he knew I needed things to slow down just then. Maybe he did too.

Eventually, he said "So, shall we try to make that list? What do you think?"

I nodded assent and we got we got to it. It took a while, even reading through quickly, and I had to change the playlist. More shoe-gaze, almost nothing else suited me in those days. We sipped the final dregs of the wine like we were arctic explorers rationing at the last. By eleven pm we had a list, and it went like this:

Scene in which Rosie gets drunk and makes out with a stranger in a bar

Scene in which Rosie explains to the immature boy her biggest insecurities

Scene in which Rosie uses a toy while the professor watches

Scene in which Rosie and the immature boy jump into a river on a cold night

Scene in which Rosie asks the professor to tie her hands and blindfold her

"I think that's it. Everything else in the book I can sort of relate to, in one way or another. But these... yeah. I've never made out with someone I didn't know, and I can't even imagine doing that. I've never told anyone about my biggest insecurities, I like to keep all that hidden. Jumping into a river at night is just stupid, no one should do that. So I might actually take that out completely. And the bondage scene... yeah, I don't have any experience with that. I get the general idea of it, but I wouldn't know what the hell to say for how it feels."

Ed stood and stretched and yawned. He was only a little bit taller than me, I realised. And I wasn't a tall lady.

"Okay then. When shall we start?"

I laughed, and then yawned myself. "Are you sure you want to help me with this? I mean, I agree with you, I think it's a good idea, and I'm going to give it a go. Because I really, really want to do a decent job with this book. But I don't know how much fun it'll be for you."

"Are you joking? It'll be hilarious for me. I'll help with the logistics of it all, and I'll make notes of whatever you say right after each... thing. I'll have a great time."

"You're weird. You're a weird guy."

"You're weird." He smiled a very nice smile. I liked it a lot. I liked him a lot. He was so comfortable in his own skin, I'd rarely seen that before, and never in someone with whom I had any kind of intimacy. I felt inspired by it. Maybe I could be like that, maybe I could be happy in myself, in the person I was. Spending time with him could reveal something, some secrets... and I wanted more, I wanted more of his lips and more of everything else too. I wanted this to be the beginning of a long story, the beginning of the rest of my life. Of course, I didn't say any of this to him. That would have been too much, far, far too much. So I just smiled back at him, and patted the sofa next to me.

"Come here."

"For what?" He poked his tongue out at me, and feigned suspicion.

"Just come here."

He sat down slowly, and pretended to be very interested in the ceiling. So I moved over to him, and put my arm around him. He kept up the act of ignoring me, so I brought my mouth to his neck and kissed, very gently, and my lips found his collar bone, then up to his ear, then to the neck again, and I felt braver from the wine, and from the strange plan we had made together. Ed turned to me, and we kissed with the intensity we had before, and his hand was back on my thigh, and making its way slowly, slowly up, and just to have that touch made me tingle, and my body was ready for anything. I put my hand in his hair again because I loved its thick wavy craziness, and then his arm was around me and he was pulling me closer, pressing me to him, and my instincts screamed at me to get him inside of me, to go all the way right now, right now. But I didn't. I broke the kiss and tilted my head away, to breathe deeply. His hand halted its travel towards my warmest part and he waited for a cue.

"I think we should stop there." Where did that come from, why did I say that? It sounded so lame, it sounded ridiculous. Not the idea of stopping, and waiting, but the way I said it. I embarrassed myself with the phrasing and delivery.

"Okay, yeah. Sorry if I-"

"-No, no, there's nothing wrong." I stroked his cheek with affection hardly appropriate for the length of our acquaintance, but it felt right. "I want to do more. Just... another day."

"That's fine. I should get home, get to bed." We disentangled ourselves from each other, and he yawned again. "When can we see each other again?"

"How about tomorrow night?"

"Ah, I've got to work until closing, I won't be back until midnight. Friday night? We can start on the list."

I looked at the piece of paper we'd used to note it all down. "Which one?"

Ed took it from me, and scratched his chin. "We could do it in the order on here? Unless you've got a preference? It doesn't really matter, as far as I can tell, if we're doing all of them anyway."

I said I agreed, that we would do them in that order, so it was decided. On Friday night we would go to a bar and I would drink enough to empower me to kiss a stranger, at length like Rosie did in my book, and Ed would keep an eye on things, and interview me afterwards. And that would be my basis for re-writing the scene, so that it actually felt like something worth reading. This bizarre idea made sense at that moment, on that exciting first evening with Ed, it seemed logical. Somehow. I thought it would work. And it did, in some ways. But it brought so many strange and painful consequences. Which I'm about to explain to you in full, so just be patient please. If you're already bored then I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do about that now.

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