Love in the Greasy Spoon Café
Title: Love in the Greasy Spoon Café
Summary: She asked me if I ever loved her. Did I? No, not really.
Rating; PG-13.
Claimer: This is entirely my own work. Steal and get hunted down with a sharpened spork.
Notes: Merely a quick practice at narrative voices - nothing more, nothing less.
She called me to the cafe on Stanage Road. Back-street cracked-glass greasy spoon job. Same 'chef' (burger flipping she-male with some kind of sociopathic personality disorder - oh yeah, look who got a degree in psychology) as when we were students.
She never liked it here.
Hell, she used to rant at me. "It'll dissolve your guts, that crap they serve in there." Sure, but you gotta die of something, all the same.
She looked out of place then, in her nice jeans and smart shirts. Gorgeous shirts, you know, the kind they cut to tuck in right under the boobs? She always had a good rack. That hadn't changed - I went to meet her there, on her command (always did as I was told, with her) and she had this smart black suit on that did the same thing.
Felt like I was meeting my lawyer, though. Only my lawyer's paid to be friendlier.
The grease wouldn't have dared touch her, you know. I felt like I belonged here again - same jeans with the holes in the knees, same habit of not shaving as close as maybe I should. Got bollocked for that by the boss the other day - you'd think the customers cared what the cashier looked like.
I exchanged some banal pleasantries, and she looked kind of worried, like. Twisting her nails - same nail polish - and chewing on her lip - same gloss. May have been ten years, but we're more or less the same. Her with her pretty clothes and pretty hair and head full of dreams, and me...
Well, me.
She said something about my job - same old, something like that - and pulled a face, and I wanted to laugh. Ten years ago, I would've kissed her, but I just wanted to laugh. Same old dreams, and my lack thereof. Hell, it was the same old speech. "You'll never go anywhere, you've got to get moving, you have to..."
I don't have to do shit.
I threw up some questions about her life. Predictable. Single, London flat, working for a bank in the City, raking in every month what I haul in a year. Off the back of a truck. ("No way, officer, just a joke, mate, 'course I don't nick stuff off lorries, whaddaya take me for?") What I'd always known; what she'd always known. Why'd she want to see me?
"Did you ever love me?"
Well, there we go. Did I?
Nope.
Maybe I'm a bit of shit for saying it, but there it is. Didn't love her. Didn't even think I did. Knew all along that I didn't love her. It was a bit of fun, her toying with a bit of rough, me pretending I wasn't going t'just settle down with the plain lass next door and have a brood by the time I hit thirty. Bit of fun, messing about.
We all do it, right?
Apparently not.
She dumped me, you know. I wasn't even the bastard in the whole thing. "Sorry, but I need to find someone responsible. Not...not you." I remember that. She looked so upset, babbling about needing some pouf who'd drink red wine with her and discuss golf with her old man at family dinners.
And I can't even shave proper.
I sound bitter. I'm not, y'know. That's the weird bit. Nobody can talk about an ex without sounding bitter or wistful, but I ain't either. Until she rang me up the other night, I hadn't thought much of her since she dropped me.
My girl just about pissed herself laughing when I confessed to ever having dated a bit of toff from the Bedfordshire countryside.
"Did you ever love me?"
Not going anywhere? Yeah, maybe not. But I'm not the guy ringing up his exes asking whether they'd loved him, am I? I'm the bloke getting on with my shit job in Tesco, coming home to find his girl's taken his motorbike apart in the yard again, and arguing about whether to have chilli for tea, never mind colour schemes and babies.
I'm pretty sure I just left the greasy spoon hole-in-the-wall then - pretty sure, and all, that I never even answered her.