[story] sincerity hurts my ears
author: kiran (lellian)
email: kiran.lyn [at] gmail.com
You know, I really wish he wouldn't do that every time. I walk in and his face lights up, all tentative and quietly joyous, and my hopes all leap into my throat. But no, then he goes and remembers that he's not supposed to be happy to see me and the shutters come rolling down again. He’ll pretend so much, just for propriety’s sake. It's kind of silly, really.
I doubt he'd listen to me if I tried to explain it - he's awfully close-eared when I try and beat anything into the brain of his. Too many morals I say. They take up too much space and don’t leave much room for expansion.
So while he's doing his best to act like he’s not glad to see me (and between you, me and the whole God damn world, he’s a crummy liar) I make myself at home. I know my way around the place because we've done this a hundred times. I fix myself a drink, pull off this stupid school sweater and untuck my shirt. I'd unroll my skirt as well, but he always gets antsy when I fiddle with my clothes too much.
The whole time he won't have moved. He’ll still be at his desk, staring at his laptop, but I know that he hasn't typed a word since I came in. Sometimes he calls me his muse, but most of the time I'm just a distraction.
He won't look at me. Fine, I won't look at him. He won't talk to me. Fine, I won't talk to him. I'll just pick up whatever soda cans litter the area around him and empty his over-flowering ash tray while I wait for him to -
"What are you doing here?"
Heh. While I wait for him to crack. I give him my best good-girl smile. He can never resist the dimples.
"What I'm always doing here, Jeff. It's Friday."
He must have been productive this week. The more words he writes, the more smokes he goes through. Or is it the more smokes he goes through, the more he writes? Whatever - I'm still the one who chucks them away and there's a lot. I can feel him trying to glare me into going away, but that never works.
He sighs. He does that a lot. "I thought I told you not to come back."
"Yeah well, you always tell me that," I reply, putting the trash can back. He's vexing me today so I stalk right up to him and stand there, hands on my hips. "I've kinda stopped believing you. 'Sides-" I do my best to look all winsome and shit. "Aren't you happy to see me?"
He snorts, but hasn’t quite got the hang of, you know, not staring at my hips. His denial loses credibility when he does that.
For all that he's sitting right in front of me, looking all grumpy and disgruntled, it's an awfully lonely place to be. See this guy, the man I love, he won't even admit being happy to see me. That tears a girl up a little inside. I know I’m all tough and mouthy most of the time (fine, pretty much all the time) but would a little bit of affection be too much to ask for?
Of course it would. There's no doubt in my mind that Jeff's as in love with me as I am with him, perhaps more, but those compunctions of his get in the way.
See, Jeff’s problem is that he's guilty. He's guilty over me and figures that if he can act like he doesn't want me, then all this guilt is going to just disappear and me along with it. I'm a little more practical. If I were sleeping with a kid half my age, I wouldn't go and add lying to the list of things I have to be guilty over.
So, yeah, it's awful lonely to be here and have him not look at me like I know he wants to.
He's swivelled his spinny chair back towards the laptop again and is pretending to work, but he doesn't really fight me when I clamber in his lap. I'm not bothered that my ugly skirt's riding up around my thighs because, suddenly, all I want to do is lay my head against his chest and listen to his big old heart run like clockwork.
Jeff tries real hard - he manages to last, oh, a few moments before he caves and wraps his arms around me. His chin's on top of my head so I can feel as well as hear when he sighs.
"What am I going to do with you?"
The guy's a fucking writer and that’s all he can say? No wonder he's got issues being published. It makes me laugh and it's halfway through that I start to cry.
He actually holds me close for once and it makes me cry all the harder. His shirt's all wet and gross because of me and he doesn't seem to care because, just for now, he's decided he's going to be nice.
What a fucking bastard.
I wish she wouldn’t do that. Lounge around on my bed like it's perfectly acceptable for her to be naked aside from a few lines of comforter, I mean. And I know that the vapid look she gives me every time I ask her to not be so casual about it is completely orchestrated. There’s a brain inside of that skull however tough she talks or naïve she acts.
It's just a tad difficult to argue further when she wages war upon me with those dimples. Delilah's dimples could bring about world peace if she wanted.
Its a lot easier if I avoid looking at her. My mind functions more efficiently (Delilah is the figurative spanner that clogs up my consciousness.)
"Going so soon?" she asks, rolling onto her back so she can survey me upside down.
She's full of whimsical sarcasm perfectly accentuated by a raised eyebrow. If she were a weapon, she’d be a poniard.
A lady who's a poniard. I like that. Remind me to write it down.
She speaks like this is her house and I tell her just that. She merely laughs and turns away, content in her wantonness. She has this habit of not noticing her nakedness. On the one hand, it speaks of her nature and could certainly be taken in a positive manner.
On the other hand, I can notice her nakedness and doing so makes me more than a little uncomfortable.
For someone who's supposed to be as well versed as I am in the finer aspects of the English language, I still lack the exact vocabulary or mindset to describe exactly what it is about Delilah that first drew me to her in spite of... obvious difficulties.
While she's striking, she's hardly beautiful. Her figure is lean, her face all angles and her hair raggedly long. She looks like a demented changeling with those tip-turned eyes and their illegal coating of smoky lashes, but she is not beautiful.
So why?
Did you know she goes through life laughing at it? She lives in a constant state of quiet amusement. It's not obvious when your eyes skim over her, but if you linger on her face (as mine did what seems like a long, tiresome lifetime ago) one can note the quirk of her lips, the placid humour in those dark eyes of hers.
There's always a chuckle lurking. And that kind of wicked, languid amusement wasn't anything I could have walked away from easily. She captivates me.
My shirt's inside out when I pull it off the chair and even as my hands work to correct that I'm assaulted by the memories of just how it had been shed in the first place.
I... I can't justify it. She tempts me, but I succumb and if it’s a road to the devil that we’re on then we’re both walking it. So why do I feel like the bad guy?
Thirteen years. That’s why I feel like the bad guy.
See, at twenty-nine I should be used to having a woman in my bed, unclothed or not and at times (usually when I’m too tired or horny to care) I can delude myself into believing that there’s nothing wrong with the intimacies between myself and Delilah. Then she'll turn a certain way, revealing the line of her body and my breath will hitch as guilt drops lead weights in my belly. The body I see before me is a child's body - her curves are still unformed, but the crime that is me knowing my way around said curves is a high one and it damns me. Possibly eternally.
I'm still unable to shake the idea that I'm taking advantage of her. Despite the fact that she, more often than not, is the one who does the cajoling. But I'm the adult; I'm supposed to be the responsible one. She laughed when I first mentioned this, and then sighed when she realised I was serious. I remember being somewhat shocked when she reached down and, quite calmly, pulled a switchblade from the top of her boot and waved it with practiced ease under my nose.
"See this?" she asked me with that world-weary air of hers, as if I were the child. I nodded because, hey, when a girl has a knife under your nose, you usually agree with her. "I have my ways of making sure no one touches me where I don’t want to be touched." A quick flick of her wrist (so delicate and deceptively weak looking) made the blade disappear and she smiled. "You aren’t bleeding on the floor. You aren’t taking advantage of me."
I'm sure her logic is circular, but arguing with Delilah and her dimples has always been a strenuous task that is rarely fruitful.
"Hey," she says from behind me, softly. "Hey." I pause, back still to her as I fumble with the zipper on my jeans. "I've still got a while. Come back to bed." I still don’t move because I'm trying so hard to muster enough strength and resolve to say 'no.' "Please."
... Damn.
I go back to bed.
The man sits at the table with a cigarette clenched fervently between two long fingers. The set of his jaw suggests tension, the hunch of his shoulders unease. More telling a sign though, perhaps, is how he is very definitely not looking at the girl across the room from him.
She sends him an impatient if wry glance as she sweeps her dark hair back over her shoulder (hair that doesn't quite curl and doesn't quite lie straight.) Her bag is repacked in its usual casual disarray and she has no real excuse to tarry longer, but still she lingers.
It’s a simple process the one that he performs - inhale, exhale, dash the ash from the tip - and she watches with a morose fascination, unable to look away. Rapt.
Studiously, he ignores her. The ember-bright end of his smoke is making its lazy way up the rolled cylinder and he concentrates on that instead. Not on how her eyes are black holes in her face or how her hair shrouds that unfinished body or how, at times like these, she looks so hopeless.
"You never look at me."
The silence shatters and it's a while before the man clears his throat and glances in her direction. "I look at you," he says and notes, distantly, the way she hugs her arms to herself, as if she's cold. "I'm looking at you now."
"You don't see me."
He turns away again with a sigh, intent on not being drawn into her ridiculousness, but it's a little difficult to ignore her when she’s kneeling before him all of a sudden.
"Please," she says, "Please, Jeff. Don't."
"Don't what?" His spine is stiff and his leg jogs restlessly.
"Do this." Her hand gestures expressively at the distance between them and he looks at her blankly. "Every time, Jeff, it’s like I'm a stranger again."
"Delilah..."
"No, don't speak." Her gypsy eyes flash and the ends of her hair brush his knees. "I'm talking and maybe you'll listen to me for once. I love you -” He makes a move to stop her but she tramples his efforts. “I love you and I know I'm young, too young, and I don't know much about anything really, but what I do know...” Her hands are tiny around his, but there’s a desperate force in them as she brings it to her chest. With her pressing his palm up against the severe jut of her clavicle, he can feel her heart beat bird-fast beneath her skin. "What I do know is that you don't touch someone you don't love the way you touch me."
She's an idealist and he really can't think when she stares at him so imploringly.
"Don't you -" Her voice cracks. She tries again. "Don’t you ever think that maybe, just maybe, if you let go a little, we might actually work?"
"Delilah," he starts again, but pauses. Her skin is cool beneath his hand and her eyes search his for the answer she wants. It would be easy to relent. So easy.
He takes his hand away.
"You shouldn't be here," he says and he watches as the hope drains from her eyes, like it does every week.
The girl doesn't move for a while, her gaze still flickering over his features. The sun-streaked brown of his hair. The lines at the edges of his eyes. The scar on his jawline that he'd laughingly told her he got when he'd fallen out of a tree as a teenager. She maps it all out and only then does she stand.
"Whatever," she murmurs, shouldering her bag and turning away. “I’ll see you next week, Jeff.”
Her exits are always neat and tidy and the man watches as she lets herself out quietly. Urban life roars outside the window and he sits there, silently, in his chair until her footsteps fade down the stairwell. Then he lights himself another cigarette. The first fades in the ashtray like a dying star.
Cigarette between his lips, ashtray in hand, he walks to the computer and sits down. With meticulous precision, he lays the glowing stick across the china well. Then, features still calm and heavy and old, he begins to type.
'She is the heroine in a tale that is the antithesis of the love story, and she has dimples that could bring about world peace if she so decided...'
the end
email: kiran.lyn [at] gmail.com
You know, I really wish he wouldn't do that every time. I walk in and his face lights up, all tentative and quietly joyous, and my hopes all leap into my throat. But no, then he goes and remembers that he's not supposed to be happy to see me and the shutters come rolling down again. He’ll pretend so much, just for propriety’s sake. It's kind of silly, really.
I doubt he'd listen to me if I tried to explain it - he's awfully close-eared when I try and beat anything into the brain of his. Too many morals I say. They take up too much space and don’t leave much room for expansion.
So while he's doing his best to act like he’s not glad to see me (and between you, me and the whole God damn world, he’s a crummy liar) I make myself at home. I know my way around the place because we've done this a hundred times. I fix myself a drink, pull off this stupid school sweater and untuck my shirt. I'd unroll my skirt as well, but he always gets antsy when I fiddle with my clothes too much.
The whole time he won't have moved. He’ll still be at his desk, staring at his laptop, but I know that he hasn't typed a word since I came in. Sometimes he calls me his muse, but most of the time I'm just a distraction.
He won't look at me. Fine, I won't look at him. He won't talk to me. Fine, I won't talk to him. I'll just pick up whatever soda cans litter the area around him and empty his over-flowering ash tray while I wait for him to -
"What are you doing here?"
Heh. While I wait for him to crack. I give him my best good-girl smile. He can never resist the dimples.
"What I'm always doing here, Jeff. It's Friday."
He must have been productive this week. The more words he writes, the more smokes he goes through. Or is it the more smokes he goes through, the more he writes? Whatever - I'm still the one who chucks them away and there's a lot. I can feel him trying to glare me into going away, but that never works.
He sighs. He does that a lot. "I thought I told you not to come back."
"Yeah well, you always tell me that," I reply, putting the trash can back. He's vexing me today so I stalk right up to him and stand there, hands on my hips. "I've kinda stopped believing you. 'Sides-" I do my best to look all winsome and shit. "Aren't you happy to see me?"
He snorts, but hasn’t quite got the hang of, you know, not staring at my hips. His denial loses credibility when he does that.
For all that he's sitting right in front of me, looking all grumpy and disgruntled, it's an awfully lonely place to be. See this guy, the man I love, he won't even admit being happy to see me. That tears a girl up a little inside. I know I’m all tough and mouthy most of the time (fine, pretty much all the time) but would a little bit of affection be too much to ask for?
Of course it would. There's no doubt in my mind that Jeff's as in love with me as I am with him, perhaps more, but those compunctions of his get in the way.
See, Jeff’s problem is that he's guilty. He's guilty over me and figures that if he can act like he doesn't want me, then all this guilt is going to just disappear and me along with it. I'm a little more practical. If I were sleeping with a kid half my age, I wouldn't go and add lying to the list of things I have to be guilty over.
So, yeah, it's awful lonely to be here and have him not look at me like I know he wants to.
He's swivelled his spinny chair back towards the laptop again and is pretending to work, but he doesn't really fight me when I clamber in his lap. I'm not bothered that my ugly skirt's riding up around my thighs because, suddenly, all I want to do is lay my head against his chest and listen to his big old heart run like clockwork.
Jeff tries real hard - he manages to last, oh, a few moments before he caves and wraps his arms around me. His chin's on top of my head so I can feel as well as hear when he sighs.
"What am I going to do with you?"
The guy's a fucking writer and that’s all he can say? No wonder he's got issues being published. It makes me laugh and it's halfway through that I start to cry.
He actually holds me close for once and it makes me cry all the harder. His shirt's all wet and gross because of me and he doesn't seem to care because, just for now, he's decided he's going to be nice.
What a fucking bastard.
I wish she wouldn’t do that. Lounge around on my bed like it's perfectly acceptable for her to be naked aside from a few lines of comforter, I mean. And I know that the vapid look she gives me every time I ask her to not be so casual about it is completely orchestrated. There’s a brain inside of that skull however tough she talks or naïve she acts.
It's just a tad difficult to argue further when she wages war upon me with those dimples. Delilah's dimples could bring about world peace if she wanted.
Its a lot easier if I avoid looking at her. My mind functions more efficiently (Delilah is the figurative spanner that clogs up my consciousness.)
"Going so soon?" she asks, rolling onto her back so she can survey me upside down.
She's full of whimsical sarcasm perfectly accentuated by a raised eyebrow. If she were a weapon, she’d be a poniard.
A lady who's a poniard. I like that. Remind me to write it down.
She speaks like this is her house and I tell her just that. She merely laughs and turns away, content in her wantonness. She has this habit of not noticing her nakedness. On the one hand, it speaks of her nature and could certainly be taken in a positive manner.
On the other hand, I can notice her nakedness and doing so makes me more than a little uncomfortable.
For someone who's supposed to be as well versed as I am in the finer aspects of the English language, I still lack the exact vocabulary or mindset to describe exactly what it is about Delilah that first drew me to her in spite of... obvious difficulties.
While she's striking, she's hardly beautiful. Her figure is lean, her face all angles and her hair raggedly long. She looks like a demented changeling with those tip-turned eyes and their illegal coating of smoky lashes, but she is not beautiful.
So why?
Did you know she goes through life laughing at it? She lives in a constant state of quiet amusement. It's not obvious when your eyes skim over her, but if you linger on her face (as mine did what seems like a long, tiresome lifetime ago) one can note the quirk of her lips, the placid humour in those dark eyes of hers.
There's always a chuckle lurking. And that kind of wicked, languid amusement wasn't anything I could have walked away from easily. She captivates me.
My shirt's inside out when I pull it off the chair and even as my hands work to correct that I'm assaulted by the memories of just how it had been shed in the first place.
I... I can't justify it. She tempts me, but I succumb and if it’s a road to the devil that we’re on then we’re both walking it. So why do I feel like the bad guy?
Thirteen years. That’s why I feel like the bad guy.
See, at twenty-nine I should be used to having a woman in my bed, unclothed or not and at times (usually when I’m too tired or horny to care) I can delude myself into believing that there’s nothing wrong with the intimacies between myself and Delilah. Then she'll turn a certain way, revealing the line of her body and my breath will hitch as guilt drops lead weights in my belly. The body I see before me is a child's body - her curves are still unformed, but the crime that is me knowing my way around said curves is a high one and it damns me. Possibly eternally.
I'm still unable to shake the idea that I'm taking advantage of her. Despite the fact that she, more often than not, is the one who does the cajoling. But I'm the adult; I'm supposed to be the responsible one. She laughed when I first mentioned this, and then sighed when she realised I was serious. I remember being somewhat shocked when she reached down and, quite calmly, pulled a switchblade from the top of her boot and waved it with practiced ease under my nose.
"See this?" she asked me with that world-weary air of hers, as if I were the child. I nodded because, hey, when a girl has a knife under your nose, you usually agree with her. "I have my ways of making sure no one touches me where I don’t want to be touched." A quick flick of her wrist (so delicate and deceptively weak looking) made the blade disappear and she smiled. "You aren’t bleeding on the floor. You aren’t taking advantage of me."
I'm sure her logic is circular, but arguing with Delilah and her dimples has always been a strenuous task that is rarely fruitful.
"Hey," she says from behind me, softly. "Hey." I pause, back still to her as I fumble with the zipper on my jeans. "I've still got a while. Come back to bed." I still don’t move because I'm trying so hard to muster enough strength and resolve to say 'no.' "Please."
... Damn.
I go back to bed.
The man sits at the table with a cigarette clenched fervently between two long fingers. The set of his jaw suggests tension, the hunch of his shoulders unease. More telling a sign though, perhaps, is how he is very definitely not looking at the girl across the room from him.
She sends him an impatient if wry glance as she sweeps her dark hair back over her shoulder (hair that doesn't quite curl and doesn't quite lie straight.) Her bag is repacked in its usual casual disarray and she has no real excuse to tarry longer, but still she lingers.
It’s a simple process the one that he performs - inhale, exhale, dash the ash from the tip - and she watches with a morose fascination, unable to look away. Rapt.
Studiously, he ignores her. The ember-bright end of his smoke is making its lazy way up the rolled cylinder and he concentrates on that instead. Not on how her eyes are black holes in her face or how her hair shrouds that unfinished body or how, at times like these, she looks so hopeless.
"You never look at me."
The silence shatters and it's a while before the man clears his throat and glances in her direction. "I look at you," he says and notes, distantly, the way she hugs her arms to herself, as if she's cold. "I'm looking at you now."
"You don't see me."
He turns away again with a sigh, intent on not being drawn into her ridiculousness, but it's a little difficult to ignore her when she’s kneeling before him all of a sudden.
"Please," she says, "Please, Jeff. Don't."
"Don't what?" His spine is stiff and his leg jogs restlessly.
"Do this." Her hand gestures expressively at the distance between them and he looks at her blankly. "Every time, Jeff, it’s like I'm a stranger again."
"Delilah..."
"No, don't speak." Her gypsy eyes flash and the ends of her hair brush his knees. "I'm talking and maybe you'll listen to me for once. I love you -” He makes a move to stop her but she tramples his efforts. “I love you and I know I'm young, too young, and I don't know much about anything really, but what I do know...” Her hands are tiny around his, but there’s a desperate force in them as she brings it to her chest. With her pressing his palm up against the severe jut of her clavicle, he can feel her heart beat bird-fast beneath her skin. "What I do know is that you don't touch someone you don't love the way you touch me."
She's an idealist and he really can't think when she stares at him so imploringly.
"Don't you -" Her voice cracks. She tries again. "Don’t you ever think that maybe, just maybe, if you let go a little, we might actually work?"
"Delilah," he starts again, but pauses. Her skin is cool beneath his hand and her eyes search his for the answer she wants. It would be easy to relent. So easy.
He takes his hand away.
"You shouldn't be here," he says and he watches as the hope drains from her eyes, like it does every week.
The girl doesn't move for a while, her gaze still flickering over his features. The sun-streaked brown of his hair. The lines at the edges of his eyes. The scar on his jawline that he'd laughingly told her he got when he'd fallen out of a tree as a teenager. She maps it all out and only then does she stand.
"Whatever," she murmurs, shouldering her bag and turning away. “I’ll see you next week, Jeff.”
Her exits are always neat and tidy and the man watches as she lets herself out quietly. Urban life roars outside the window and he sits there, silently, in his chair until her footsteps fade down the stairwell. Then he lights himself another cigarette. The first fades in the ashtray like a dying star.
Cigarette between his lips, ashtray in hand, he walks to the computer and sits down. With meticulous precision, he lays the glowing stick across the china well. Then, features still calm and heavy and old, he begins to type.
'She is the heroine in a tale that is the antithesis of the love story, and she has dimples that could bring about world peace if she so decided...'
the end