vanilla and honeydew with malt and hot fudge
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: Annoying
Rating: PG (mild language)
Challenge: Vanilla #18: a dream/nightmare/trouble sleeping, Honeydew #13: do not disturb
Toppings/Extras: malt, hot fudge
Wordcount: 657
Summary: Miss Merritt deals with lovesickness her own way.
Notes: Malt trick-or-treat prompt from cofmanynames: And all I ever meant to do was to keep you. Takes place shortly after Not Fair. Adele is entertaining when she's broken-hearted.
Her cabin was a dark, dull room: it was narrow, nothing more than a slice of privacy for her bunk and a small cupboard for her things. Adele Merritt didn’t mind living on bare essentials too much-she was a bare essentials kind of woman. All she needed were her smart shoes and poison-coloured lipstick and she was happy. Or else that used to be the case.
She missed the stupid things. How he idly picked cotton from her hair as she lay against the pillows, how he had looked at her sometimes when they were stood out on the deck of the good ship Kraken.
And she had been so convinced, so convinced that he was besotted with her. That as usual she was in control and that he was the hopeless victim to her womanly wiles, that he adored her, loved her even-that the game of cat-and-mouse they played was merely sexual release to her but meant so much more to him. She had fancied that he watched her while she slept, and she could have sworn she felt the lightest kiss brush forehead one night as she lay in the twilight between slumber and wakefulness. It had felt so warm, like lava and chocolate stirring in her stomach. Surely nobody kissed anyone on the forehead unless they loved them? That was what it meant.
Then he’d cut her loose, just like that.
She rolled over in her bunk and staring at the wooden ceiling. Through a small porthole there was a glossy view of the midnight sky, slightly warped like a fish’s eye. A small amount of light curled into the room and cast a wriggly round shape upon the wall. This is almost enough to make me start smoking again.
Adele Merritt was not the kind for crying, and she did not cry now, but it was certainly the closest that she had been for a long time. Bitterly, she thought that you couldn’t truly loathe someone to the full extent hate allowed unless you loved them just a little. She wanted to beat Isaac Prowse with a shovel at that moment-but he had the moral high ground. That was what made the whole thing so... unreasonable. He was right, after all. She was the one that had always insisted it was just sex, he was the one that looked at her with softness in his eyes, and now he was gone and she’d never felt so empty...
It was hopeless. She would never sleep again. How old was she? Two years off thirty, yet she was still here, mooning and pining over some archaic sod like a teenage girl. She hadn’t even been this pathetic when she was a teenage girl.
What made it worse was that she knew he liked her. She knew it! He was the one that had hesitated to have sex with her on account of some honourable “tainting her innocence” schtick, and after their first sexual encounter he’d followed her around like a damned dog. She’d had to tell him that she wasn’t interested in sentimental crap, and the stupid bastard had seemed confused by the very idea of a woman not being interested in romance!
It had gone smoothly for a while, just sex, all according to plan... but then she’d started sleeping in his room, too. She’d started talking to him more. Oh God, she’d started to get fond of him, and then he’d thrown her over.
Except she couldn’t even say that because they’d never had a relationship. By her own insistence.
She wasn’t sure if she was bothered about Isaac, or the fact that she was bothered about Isaac, or even the fact that she was bothered about being bothered about Isaac... it was making her dizzy, and the fact she couldn’t sleep really wasn’t helping.
“This is so annoying,” she muttered to herself and the cold space in her bunk.