#DearValentine Week Four: She Smiled

Prompt: Surgical tools, a car, the countryside. This was also inspired, in no small part, by my addiction to Grey’s Anatomy.

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She Smiled

Most people would be afraid if they found a complete set of surgical tools in the back of their boyfriend’s car. Actually, afraid is something of an understatement. Most people would either call the police, run for the hills, or do both simultaneously.

But, there being no hills in the vicinity (it was Norfolk, after all), she simply smiled, retrieved her lip gloss – the loss of which had caused her to find the tools in the first place – recovered the tools with the cloth, and went inside to make dinner.

The next day, when he suggested they go for a drive, she didn’t panic. Didn’t imagine her body lying in a shallow grave, the looks on her parents’ faces when her picture appeared on the evening news. She smiled, she accepted, and she sat in the front seat, determinedly not thinking about what she had uncovered the day before.

Eventually they stopped. It was a field, that was all she knew, and this part of Norfolk was mainly fields so that didn’t exactly help her with getting her bearings. She wasn’t worried though. She smiled, sat on the blanket which he spread out on the slightly damp grass, and made small talk about the shapes of the fluffy clouds floating above them.

Eventually he stopped talking and gave her an unfathomable look.

“I’m just going back to the car.” He said. “I won’t be long.”

She just smiled.

True to his word, he reappeared after a few minutes, hands behind his back. He looked at her, spread out on the blanket, still smiling, and his face fell.

“What?” She asked. Her tone wasn’t accusatory, it was simply amused.

“You know.” He said dejectedly. “Don’t you?”

She kept smiling, bit down on her bottom lip, and nodded almost imperceptibly. He groaned.

“It was supposed to be a surprise!”

He held out his hands. In one was the bundle of surgical tools, in the other a bunch of bananas.

“I knew how worried you were about our first day, and I wanted to make you feel better. One of the second years suggested this….and why are you still smiling?”

She laughed at the irritation in his voice, and pulled him down beside her. And she kept smiling afternoon, as they performed life-saving surgery on the bananas and quizzed each other on medical terminology. She had known better than to be afraid of surgical equipment. She was a trainee doctor after all.

#DearValentine Week Three: His Moment

Prompt: a gun, a tuxedo, an abandoned fairground.

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His Moment

He’s standing next to the carousel, the gun weighing heavy in his pocket. His mouth is dry, his palms sweaty, and he wipes them on the lining of his rented tux, hoping that his nerves aren’t as obvious as he thinks they are. This is his moment. He can’t afford to screw it up.

For the longest thirty seconds of his life there is silence, and he forces himself to remain in position, eyes trained on the gaudily-painted candyfloss wagon, until footsteps alert him to their arrival. He turns, smiles, faces the newcomer.

Drawing in a quick breath, praying for his voice not to fail, he speaks.

“Hello Jack.”

His hand darts to his pocket, withdraws the gun, holds it to the other man’s head.

“Goodbye Jack.”

A shot rings out, drowning out the sound of his pounding heartbeat.

Jack crumples to the floor.

Silence falls.

But a moment later the silence is broken again, this time by thunderous applause. It continues, and he remains frozen in place until the curtain falls.

He barely registers the next few minutes; standing in line with the rest of the cast members, bowing for the delighted audience. Slipping out of that awful tux and back into his comfortable jeans and hoodie. Congratulating the others, accepting their praise with as much modesty as he can muster. It’s a blur of happiness, and he doesn’t think that it can get much better.

But the door opens and she’s there. She ignores Ben Russell, considered by most of the female population of their school (along with some of the males) to be the sexiest man alive, and walks straight past Matt Davis, who is shirtless and displaying his impressive abs to the room at large. The girl of his dreams walks right up to him, throws her arms around his neck, and kisses him passionately.

He had thought that things couldn’t get much better. Now he knows they can’t.

#Dear Valentine Challenge Week Two: Remembering

Prompt: a box of chocolates, plane tickets, the Eiffel Tower.

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Remembering

She couldn’t believe that he’d actually remembered. It had been her dream ever since she was a little girl, something which she thought could only happen in the movies, but which she’d fantasised about anyway.

Still, it had managed to remain safely within the confines of her imagination for years, not even shared with her closest friends. Until she had had too must “champagne” (air quotes heavily in use) at the office Christmas party and had, in the space of two minutes and thirty seconds, disclosed her most carefully guarded secret. She hadn’t really expected him to remember though, at least not in such detail.

The box of chocolates in their innocent gold wrapping, a seemingly unimaginative Valentine’s Day gift. The plane tickets nestling beneath the bottom layer, discovered only when the chocolates had all been eaten. The candlelit dinner on the top level of the Eiffel Tower, with the carpet of lights stretching out below them and the string quartet playing quietly in the corner. The ring in the champagne glass (real champagne this time, no air quotes required). The promise of forever.

Her dream proposal. She hadn’t been able to believe it.

Couldn’t believe not only that he’d remembered, and after all this time, but that he’d given it to another woman.

Perhaps it was time to stop believing in fairy tales.

 

#DearValentine Challenge Week One: Office Gossip

Somehow, I managed to miss the beginning of ‘Timony Souler’s new writing challenge, #DearValentine. But although I’m too late to sign up properly, I only missed the posting date of the first prompt by a day, so I decided to participate anyway. This week’s prompt was: a note, a photograph, the docks.

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Office Gossip

It’s all that anyone in the office can talk about, unsurprisingly really. Why on earth would Barry, who wears string vests under his suit jackets, chews with his mouth open, and seems incapable of continuing a conversation for longer than thirty seconds, why would he have a picture of a beautiful woman on his desk?

“Maybe it’s his sister?” Someone suggests, but this suggestion is quickly shot down. How could that gorgeous creature possibly be related to Barry?

“Maybe he’s stalking her.” This whisper spreads across the office, and heads nod in agreement. It can be the only explanation.

Emily, the giggly girl who was hired to be the boss’s assistant, but who seems to do nothing but gossip and dispense phony relationship advice, creeps over to the desk and studies the photograph. “There’s a note on the back!” She announces, as the assembled crowd hold their breath. “I think it’s a love letter!”

There’s a collective gasp, some quiet murmuring, and then someone speaks up. “He probably faked it.” The voice is malicious, it belongs to Roberta in Accounts, who hasn’t had a date in thirty years and probably never will again. “He just wants us to think he has an admirer. Why else would he have left it out there for everyone to see?”

More quiet murmurings. No-one likes Barry, but no-one much likes Roberta either, so they’re reluctant to pick sides.

“Well we’ll soon see.” Emily declares, with the expected giggle. “According to this note, he’s meeting her at the docks tonight. If he comes in looking like the cat that’s got the cream, then we’ll know that it wasn’t made up.”

But Barry doesn’t come into work the next day. In fact, he doesn’t come into work ever again. And when, a few weeks later, the body of a fat man in in a suit jacket and a string vest is pulled out of the water at the docks, the whispering in the office quietens guiltily. Only for a day or two, though.