Quicklinks:
|
Great Writing - Home > Short S. > Settling for Second
| READING ROOM | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| COMMUNITY | |||
|---|---|---|---|
|
| ABOUT GREAT WRITING | ||
|---|---|---|
|
| WORK AWAITING REVIEW |
|---|
|
| GW IS... |
|---|
|
Great Writing creative writing community is designed to prompt ideas
and provide inspiration and motivation within aspiring and amateur
authors. Whatever your topic; from love poetry to Doctor Who or Harry
Potter fan fiction, Great Writing's online writing group is where you
can make new friends and improve your creative writing. |
| WHO'S ONLINE |
|---|
| We have 1337 guests online and 7 members online |
Shorts
| print friendly version | |
| Settling for Second | |
| By stellafly | ||||
| 03 April 2008 | ||||
|
Hi... the first thing I've posted! It's basically the start to what would be your average chick-lit novel (only a rubbish version!) Any comments would be really appreciated. Arianne “It’s hard to explain how I feel,” Faye sighed down the phone. “The best way I can describe it is… shit as fuck.” “Eloquently put,” I laughed, then immediately racked my brains for something half consoling to say. “Faye, you do realise you’re better off without him?” The old cliché – highly unoriginal, but so accurate it had to be used. She made a sort of disbelieving ‘humph’ sound, as I’d known she would. Ten years of life in the dating game has taught me the stages of a break-up too well to expect any other response at this point. Depending on how long the relationship lasted – or perhaps just its intensity – there will be a period of a few weeks, or even months, when insulting the current bastard in question will be like talking to a brick wall. This is the worst stage – I much prefer the bitching phase, when you are free to criticize every aspect of your friend’s ex-boyfriend that you had to previously keep schtum about, and they had to pretend not to have noticed. Previous experience had taught me that now was not the time to point out the irritating way Karl’s jeans always got stuck up his crack when he’d been sitting down for too long. “Faye? Are you listening to me? You don’t need him.” “Right. Of course I don’t.” I prayed this wasn’t some classic Faye sarcasm. “Forget those dull, pointless nights of exhilaratingly passionate sex – ,” (my praying had clearly gone unnoticed) “ – Never mind them, I’ll just recreate them at home alone with my cat or a pot plant, because I don’t need Karl. How ludicrous of me to ever think I did.” When Faye goes off on one of these Basil Fawlty style rants, (which are often highly imaginative and entertaining, if I can keep myself from switching off the second she puts on that high-pitched squawk of a voice) it’s best just to let her keep talking at break neck speed until she’s physically too tired to say anything else. Then, you jump in with a morsel of advice that usually falls into the ‘completely useless in every way, but it’s my duty as a best friend to say it’ category. So I waited while she babbled on, amusing myself by circling the programmes in the Radio Times I wanted to watch over the coming week. I might sound callous and uncaring for not giving her my undivided attention, but I was more than aware that Karl was only ever a casual fuck buddy. She wasn’t genuinely upset like she’d been about some of the others – Faye falls in love quickly and wholeheartedly – she was just disappointed that she’d now fall into the same sad category of singledom I was in, i.e. boyfriend-less and shag-less. Finally, she paused for breath, and I grabbed the chance to leap in with – “It’ll be alright. Get some wine down you and watch…” I flicked back to Saturday’s page in the TV guide, “A bit of American Idol. ITV 2.” “Are you kidding? It’s even worse than the British one. The only people that watch it are middle aged women who want to fawn over Simon Cowell. Can’t we all meet up instead? I’m sick of Saturday nights alone.”I didn’t like to point out that I’d had months of these sad evenings spent alone in front of crap TV, whereas Faye hadn’t yet endured half an hour of one. But there was no way I was going to argue with the prospect of a good catch-up, not when my plans otherwise were to watch Friends re-runs with a Family Bucket from KFC. Catching sight of myself in the mirror hanging by the kitchen door, I grimaced. We may have been best friends for over a decade, but I still didn’t want the whole group turning up with me looking like I’d been sleeping rough for a good few weeks. “OK. You can all come round to mine. But leave it an hour or so, yeah?”“Brilliant. You better get the Chardonnay out of the fridge. And I’ll stop off at the Co-Op on the way; I know how tight you are with the snacks.”I laughed, marveling at how well Faye knew me – I’d already been plotting to hide my Kettle Chips stash away, and get out the Somerfields Light Tortilla Chips instead – and hung up, with that warm feeling I always get when I’ve been talking to one of my friends. You know you’ve found a friend for life when you can predict their response to almost anything, and yet still enjoy asking them, just because you get pleasure out of spending time with them. That can be applied to everyone in my group – Faye, Thaila and Phoebe – and it really says something that after ten plus years, I still get excited at the thought of the three of them turning up on my doorstep, laden down with junk food and gossip. Clearly the main topic of conversation tonight was going to be Faye, who has a tendency to make mountains out of molehills in every aspect of her life – but then I think that can be attributed to her lust for life rather than any sort of selfishness. She gets as much as she can out of every moment that goes her way, and the fact remains that if one of us was going through a rough time, she’d abandon all her own problems without a backward glance and throw herself completely into trying to sort out our dilemma instead. So, reminded of how much I actually owe her, I reluctantly dug out my Kooks album (more ‘her’ sort of music than mine), took the Kettle Chips out of the cupboard and put a few into a bowl (can’t be expected to go completely overboard…) and tried to summon up some sort of sense of loss for Karl on Faye’s behalf. It was hard, when the only image I was confronted with was one of his arse in those too-tight Levi’s heading out my front door after a lengthy stationary period of time, but I just had to trust Faye’s word that he was good in bed. And very good in bed he’d have to be, too, because there was just no way of forgiving someone who looked like they had a mobile letterbox attached to their trousers otherwise. Faye I know Arianne and the others didn’t think much of Karl. To be honest, I didn’t think much of Karl. He was a bit ratty looking, and his jeans were too short, revealing highly unerotic Next sports socks. But a girl’s allowed to mourn for a bit at least, no matter how pointless the relationship actually was. I took full advantage of this basic female right by playing ‘our song’, Irreplaceable by Beyonce, at full blast seven times. It was only ‘our song’ because it happened to be playing at Adamski once, (and I happened to notice it because it was one of the few times we’d been when I hadn’t been totally off my face,) not because it actually holds any significance to either of us whatsoever. And after the third playing, I realised I actually hated it, but out of principle blithely soldiered through another four repeats. After that, I decided enough was enough and rang Arianne, who, bless her, let me go on for a ludicrous amount of time. If I’d been her, I would’ve been thinking ‘I swear you’ve now been talking for a longer period of time than the relationship actually lasted’, but thankfully she’s nothing like as bitchy as me. Or if she is, she hides it well. To be honest, I’d give anything to be like Arianne. She seems so mature next to the rest of us – I think it’s because she’s been in multiple long-term relationships, whereas the others are more like me and flit from man to man, although this obviously can’t be applied to Thaila anymore. I hate the way I still act like I’m about seventeen. I feel like I should be into Norah Jones or James Blunt, and own a Classical CD that didn’t come free with the Daily Mail (and to be honest, I think I even threw that one away.) I should be capable of holding down a ‘proper’ job – I love my career, if you can call it that, but it’s hardly raking in the millions. The longest relationship I’ve ever had was when I was eighteen, which lasted nearly two years, with Ollie Henderson. It worries me sometimes that I still haven’t found anyone who lives up to that unfeasibly high standard. Since Ollie, I’ve chucked every man I’ve been with the second I’ve discovered that they don’t like, for example, Brass in Pocket, or windy picnics at the beach. You could say I’m living in the past a bit, trying to relive my youth and that carefree pleasure you get from relationships in your teenage years, instead of facing up to the fact that once you hit twenty five it should really be more dinners and tax bills than mix-tapes and skinny dipping. But it’s not like I consider my relationship with Ollie as something frivolous and lighthearted. I’ve never liked anyone as much as I liked him – maybe that says something about my personality, I don’t know. Him making me a CD of all his favourite songs, and them instantly becoming mine as well (except Eye of the Tiger – I’ll never forgive that one)… him listening to me moan for hours about my parents’ latest slanging match instead of going out with his friends… him selling his guitar to take me to Blackpool for the weekend… all of that means more to me than Isaac’s marriage proposal, Hugo buying me the biggest rock available from H.Samuels – and it definitely means more than the meaningless sex I had with Karl. Every time I go to The Wallflower to see a band play, the girls insist it’s because I’m trying to find an Ollie replacement. If a guy I like happens to play guitar, the first thing they’ll ask is ‘Can he play as well as Ollie?’ And god forbid I ever go to the coast with anybody – Phoebe does this amused wink and says suggestively ‘I do hope the weather’s good – but if not I’m sure you’ll find a cave to shelter in somewhere.’ This is a direct reference to one of the most romantic days of my life, and to be fair to them, if they knew how much it had meant to me, they probably wouldn’t joke about it. But they don’t know, and I don’t want them to know that these Ollie jokes still bug me, because then I’ll have to stop denying, even to myself, the fact that I never fell out of love with him.
Only registered users can rate and write comments. Powered by AkoComment 2.0! |
||||
 Previous item
|
Next item
|
|---|