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Shorts
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| Captivated by Her | |
| By Snodlander | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 14 June 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Entered for a short competition entitled 'Captivated by sheer romance'. This isn't going to win, I suspect She stopped the car and pulled on the handbrake. I wished she’d use the button when putting it on, and not let the ratchet click, like a kid on speed running a stick over railings. She sat, hands gripping the wheel, knuckle-white, staring through the windscreen at the vista below us. Finally she turned to me. “Do you recognise this place?” I nodded. This was Her Place. We had been dating for a few weeks. I don’t remember how long exactly, but I bet she did, down to the minute. It was her special place. A dirt track that ended on top of a chalk quarry dug into the side of the North Downs. We had sat in her car, looking at the Weald of Kent spread out below us one summer evening. And as the red sun had sunk below us, we had had sex. Although she probably thought of it as ‘consummating our eternal passion’. It was OK, I guess. Car sex always meant compromises with the shape of the seats and the various sticks and levers. But she had cried afterwards, just with the beauty of it all. Her Place. I bet she had mentally re-christened it ‘Our Place’ afterwards. “You know why I brought you up here, that first time?” I stayed silent. It was, I thought, a rhetorical question. “I loved you, James. I mean, I really thought you were The One.” She had a way of capitalizing words when she spoke. ‘The One’. It made me think of that Keanu Reeves character in The Matrix. You are The One. She said she liked my quick wit and funny quips. I sensed that this wasn’t the time to make a joke about what she was saying. “I thought we were going to grow old together, James. You know, like those old couples you see in the supermarket that still walk around hand in hand? I thought that was going to be us. That we would have made each other happy for the rest of our lives. This was my Special Place. I never brought anyone up here before, you know that? You were special. “And you just had to go and spit in my face, didn’t you!” I would just like to make the point that I never once spat in her face. I think she was being metaphorical, though even here I would dispute the spitting metaphor. “Is there another woman, James?” I shook my head. There wasn’t, truly. I wasn’t running into the arms of another woman, I was just running away from hers. It was OK at the start. I fancied her, no doubt. Then it grew into something more. Not love, exactly, but it was comfortable. Like a pair of old shoes, I guess. But shoes wear out after a while. Her cute little foibles somehow turned into irritations. Her refusal to call me ‘Jim’. Her questions bordering on paranoia when I had been out with the lads. The way she would run the ratchet on the handbrake. And she started to cling. Like mud, sticking to me, choking me, dragging me down. “What, then? I love you, James. Completely. I’ve destroyed myself to become what you wanted. What I thought you wanted. I’d have done anything for you. Anything. In the bedroom, too. There have been other men, before you, but not like you, James. You were special. You were The One.” I tried to reassure her, but the words wouldn’t come out No tears. That was a blessing, I suppose. I’ve never been able to cope with a woman crying. It had scared me silly when she had wept, that first time, after we had had sex in the car, here, in Her Place. Our Place. I thought I had screwed up, somehow. Or maybe I had hurt her. But she was crying, just from the beauty of it all, I guess. I was crying, though. Now. With her in the car. She reached out, and I flinched, but it was just to wipe my tears. She was scaring me, but the thought of a runny nose scared me more. I tried to ask her to take the gag off, but all that came out was a mumbling. “Sssshhhh,” she crooned, as though I was a fretful baby. “It’s alright, James. Everything is alright.” Her face became hard, cold. Like ice, super-chilled. So cold that it would take your skin off if you touched it. When I was at school our physics teacher had filled a hollow bolt with water and screwed a nut onto the end, sealing it. Then he had put it in a biscuit tin full of ice and had carried on teaching. Half-way through the lesson there was an explosion from the tin. The ice in the bolt had expanded and broken the nut off, stripping the threads bare. She was like that now. I could see all that warm love turning into ice so cold it would strip my flesh to the bones. I could see her just busting at the rivets with ice-cold fury. I tugged at the handcuffs yet again, my arms cramping from being stretched around the back of my seat, the metal cutting into the wrists. “Except it isn’t alright, is it, James? You spoilt it all. You could have had me for the rest of our lives. Happy ever after. But that’s ruined now. Ruined.” She grabbed my face in both hands and kissed me fiercely on my gag. Then she turned to the front again, staring at the flimsy wooden fence at the top of the cliff. She let the handbrake off, turned to me and said, “I love you.” Then she stamped on the gas.
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