Should You Choose to Accept It
Gibberish Writing Contest Round 3
Your Challenge This Week: Take your 250 word application story, and expand it to the 2,000(+/-) word threshold! Your 250 word applications were asked to showcase an argument. Now—put that argument in context. Expand the world, give us what comes before, or what comes next. Please, before the story, include the entire text of your 250 word application story as a block-quote. This does not count towards your word count. You may choose to rewrite the scene; you may choose to include it, unchanged, in its entirety; you may choose to cut it into parts. It must be the same characters grappling with the same conflict, and as with any complete story this conflict must be brought to some kind of resolution.
GWC ‘24 Judges:
and .GWC ‘24 Competitors: , , , , and (Seriously, go read their entries—I’m looking forward to it myself.)
We had the experience, but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.
— T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, explaining my response to this challenge.
I was flipping through postcards in a street vendor’s carousel when, from out of nowhere: oak and patchouli. Rob. He had his arm around my shoulder, pulling me into him, before I could move away. “Hey, babe,” he said loudly.
I forced a smile, turning my head a little to keep visuals on my target. Clever men really do make the worst exes. I couldn’t shake him off without making a scene, and he knew it. “I’m busy,” I murmured.
“Yeah, I noticed.” Rob pulled away far enough to kiss my cheek, just like he always used to do, and I blushed. I didn’t know if I hated him or myself for that more right now. I selected a postcard and held it up like I wanted his opinion.
“You don’t think I’m good enough to do recon by myself, do you?” I hissed behind the thin cardboard.
“Tanya, please. I spotted you from halfway down the quay.”
“Because you know me.”
“Because you were twitching around like a landed…uh-oh.”
We must have gotten too loud, because when I looked up, Volpi’s thug bodyguard was locking eyes with me. I felt Rob’s body tense up, suddenly ready to run. He always was good at that. Me, though - I was fully committed and wearing strappy sandals. “We'll finish this later,” he said, squeezing my shoulder.
“Don’t you dare – hey!” There he went. I smiled at the thug, hoping to play innocent, but no dice.
Rob was going to regret this.
There’s something a friend of mine used to tell me: Paris s’en fiche.
It means, ‘Paris doesn’t care’.
That’s why I was here, really. A few weeks getting gently kicked around by the realities of life (but with a Dior bag in hand and the river Seine in the background, please) was just what I needed to bring me down from the thrills of diamond-reappropriation in the South Pacific. I was young, fit, single, and on vacation. It could have been a rom-com.
And then Management called . . .
I tried to get out of it, but with no luck: the primary on the case, several pay grades above my own, had asked for me personally. Still, there was one local option if I wanted backup, and I’d almost considered taking it until I found out who it was. This was a simple job, just a little reconnaissance to confirm a crime-lord sighting in the Tuileries. I didn’t need help that badly.
Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to agree.
I had picked up my target outside the gardens and tracked him down to the Quai de Louvre, where interlaced crowds of tourists milled around the bus stop and the booksellers with their green stalls. I was flipping through some vintage postcards on display, looking for my best chance to sneak a photo of M. Volpi. Then, out of nowhere, the heavy scent of oak and patchouli settled around me, and a strong arm followed.
Damn it. Rob had found me after all.
“Hey, babe,” he said loudly, pulling me into him. “What’cha got?”
“Oh . . . nothing important.” I forced a vapid smile. Clever men really do make the worst exes—I couldn’t shake him off without making a scene, and he knew it. “Get lost. I’m busy,” I hissed.
“Yeah, I noticed.” Rob pulled away far enough to kiss my cheek, just like he always used to do, and I blushed. Honestly, I didn’t know which of us I hated more for that. I’d finally convinced myself that I was better off without this guy, both personally and at work, and he had to start things off like this?
I selected a postcard and turned around, holding it up like I wanted his opinion. “So now you don’t even think I’m good enough to do recon by myself?” I said, eyeing him over the thin cardboard.
“Tanya, please.” He already had his phone out, and I heard the camera’s shutter-effect faintly through the crowd. Presumably, Volpi would be in the background. “You’re so twitchy, I spotted you from halfway down . . . uh oh.”
“What?” I half turned to see the sizable man whom I’d clocked as Volpi’s bodyguard headed our way.
“Incoming,” Rob said, sliding his phone back into his pocket as he returned the postcard to the rack for me. “Act natural. Oh, actually—"
“Don’t you dare,” I said, but he already had his arms looped around my waist. There was nothing for it. I let him kiss me.
Come to think of it, I thought, this is kind of how our first kiss went, too. At least this time I knew well enough not to take it seriously.
I wondered who else he’d pulled that on since he got himself reassigned. It was a bitter thought, and I grimaced a little as he let me go.
“C’mon, we’re good,” Rob said, already leaving and gesturing for me to follow. “He kept walking. Let’s go.”
I stumbled for a second as I hurried to catch up. “What do you mean, ‘let’s go’? This is my job.”
“Really? Did you get the photo?”
“No. I gave you the excuse to get it, though.” I frowned. “How did you know about that, anyway?”
He rolled his shoulders back, like he was thinking about shrugging. “I pay attention, that’s all.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said. He couldn’t even slow down to match my pace while I was taking care on the steps down to the quay. “I think you just had to check up on me. You never did trust that I knew what I was doing.”
“Tanya . . .”
I ignored the hand outstretched to help me down the last step. “I’ve told you many times that I don’t need your help.”
“That’s not it,” he said.
“Well, what, then? Were you trying to get the credit for yourself?”
“Not at all.” Rob held his phone up. “If you want to turn it in, just give me your number. I’ll text you the photo. You don’t even have to tell them I was here.”
We stood there at the foot of the steps for a few seconds, looking at each other in silence while I stretched out a breath for as long as I could. Rob could probably still dial my work phone by heart. It was my personal number he wanted—I’d changed it since we broke up.
Who was I kidding? I’d changed it after we broke up, because we broke up, because I knew that all he’d have to do was call me, and my principled stand for independence would crumble . . . but I was past that now. Obviously. I gestured for him to go ahead and listed off the number as he typed.
My phone chimed somewhere inside my bag. “Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome.” He hesitated. “And I didn’t save the number, before you ask.”
I looked out over the Seine, at the slowly thinning crowds on the other bank and the sinuous, wind-roughed water between us. Did Rob think I was that petty? I mean, I had been that petty, certainly. Recently, too. But whatever remained of it was undercut by seeing him suddenly drop below his usual absurd level of self-confidence.
He nodded down the quay, and we walked on.
“You never answered me,” I said, pushing my bangs out of my eyes. “What’s all this about?”
“I just wanted to see you again,” he said. “I missed you, Tanya.”
I could feel myself blushing a little again. I wanted to grab him by the arm and admit that I’d missed him too, but I knew better than to stop pushing. There was always something he didn’t want to say. “So?”
He sighed heavily, kicking at loose gravel. “So—all right, it is my job, actually. I called in a favor to bring your name into it, because I knew that if I asked you to help, you wouldn’t. Are you happy now?”
I pressed my lips together tightly. “This is exactly why we broke up. I don’t need you to manage my life for me.”
“I’m not trying to manage anything. It was an excuse to see you, that’s all.”
“I didn’t want to see you.”
He turned and fixed me with those blue eyes. “I don’t know how you do it,” he said. “You’re a great actress, but you’re a terrible liar.”
“And you’re a condescending son of a bitch,” I snapped.
“Heh. That’s fair enough.” Rob broke off and looked away. “I guess I knew how it was going to go, but . . . at least part of me hoped that you’d be ready to give me a second chance.”
“Not like this,” I said.
“I see.” He was silent for a minute, while I eyed the steps at the bridge up ahead and considered how I was going to get out of this.
“I just had to know for sure,” he said finally. “There’s an assignment I was thinking of picking up. It’s with another agency, undercover. This would be the last chance I had to talk to you.”
I looked back to the river to cover my surprise. Guilt trips weren’t his style. Did he really mean it sincerely? “Well, don’t change your plans for me.”
“Don’t worry,” Rob said. “I figured that much out already.” Under the veneer of self-deprecating humor—rare enough for him—I could hear a resolution that wasn’t there before. He was being sincere, then. I relaxed a little.
“They’ll be glad to have you, anyway,” I said. “I mean, you’ll be good at it. You’re good at most things I’ve seen you try.”
“Most, yeah.” He gave me a little ironic smile. “Not the important things.”
I couldn’t help smiling back. “Don’t tell me that you’ve suddenly discovered how bad you are at apologizing.”
“It’s not working, huh?” He shook his head. “Never mind. I think what I was trying to say was, I really did enjoy working with you. It’s been hard not to have you there.”
I tightened my grip on my purse strap, biting the insides of my cheeks. “It was something, wasn’t it?” I said. We’d reached the steps, and I stopped on the first one to make it clear he wasn’t coming with me. “I’ll get this sent in. Good luck with everything, Rob.”
“I appreciate that,” he said, cool and professional again. “Same to you, Tanya.”
I climbed back up to street level and found myself wandering onto the footbridge to watch him walk away. That was that, then. I pulled my phone out and saved off the photo from Rob’s text before cropping and forwarding it to Management: job done. Back to my vacation . . . but somewhere else, I thought. Today had involved far more of life’s realities than I’d intended to get myself into. Maybe Tuscany would care about me. Florence had quite a few fashion houses—this time tomorrow I could be standing over the river Arno instead.
Although I’d meant to open another window to book my plane tickets, the picture Rob had taken distracted me. His camera was good enough that he hadn’t bothered to zoom in on Volpi, and I took up half the picture even though he could easily have shot over my head if he’d wanted to. That was the distracting thing. I remembered trying to glare at him over the top of my fake smile, but I didn’t look angry at all—actually, the eyes in the picture were brighter than the ones I’d seen in the hotel mirror this morning.
It could have been a legitimate honeymoon snap.
I looked back out at the river, wrinkling my nose as I mentally calculated how long it was going to take me to get over that man again. Sure, he thought he knew everything; always had some secret scheme going; never quite let his guard down all the way . . . well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? The same qualities that made him such an insufferable boyfriend were exactly what I’d admired in him otherwise, and he’d never really let me separate the two parts of our lives.
I thought about going through another several months of throwing myself into jobs I didn’t care about, chasing something close to the way he made me feel. Nothing ever came close. I thought about learning to live without it again.
I groaned and tapped his number to dial it.
Nobody answered the call. I stood there stupidly, holding the phone to my ear and stamping down the urge to hang up early. People were chattering around me, holding pointless conversations, phones ringing . . .
I whipped around to see Rob standing behind me, a smug grin plastered across his face in just the way that always made me want to wipe it off.
“You! You cheeky—” I shoved my phone in my bag, my face reddening. “How long were you waiting there?”
“Oh, a while,” he said. “You held out longer than I thought you would.”
“Thanks so much,” I said. Always one goddamn step ahead of me.
Rob stepped in closer, his expression a little softer now. “So, you did miss me?”
I gave up all hope of winning and threw my arms around him, soaking in the reassurance that he would always come back for me. I might be no saint, either, but I was his.
“You know I did,” I said, and I kissed him slowly to remind him that he was mine.
Wordcount: 2021
This is great. I love the will-they / won’t they, and you set the scene brilliantly. Just enough detail so I feel a part of a vibrant scene, and at no point over burdened or sluggish. Chefs kiss!
I didn't know what direction you were going to take this. Beautifully done! Officially received! Let us know when you sell the movie rights.