Offensiveness: Relative scale: 2/10. (Based on my writing. 1 is a a daily blog, 10 is slasher porn.)
Offensive Details: Highlight (click and drag) over the following empty space to read specific content ratings for this story.

Skip the warnings if don't want any spoilers.

A short little stream of consciousness exercise. Notes follow the story.  They're more interesting than the story as well.

e stood on opposite sides of the small kitchen, looking at each other, both leaning back into a counter.  It wasn't exactly eye-contact, but it wasn't eye-avoidance either.  Gazes met, mingled, and the moved apart amicably. She had amazingly green eyes.

I have an unconscious issue with eye contact, mainly that I don't really like to make it.  It's great if I'm with a woman I really like, romantically I mean, seems very intimate, but with casual friends or total strangers it seems weird.  Too intimate, sort of invasive.  I don't like people looking at me (unless they are pretty women, and I can pretend they are checking me out) and I try not to look at other people for that same reason.

I try to overcome that when I can tell someone wants eye contact, but it seems weird in a conversation, and I often lose the train of what they are saying if I'm looking into their eyes.  I find myself thinking more about how they look, or if they are cool with the eye contact, rather than just doing it as a matter of course that helps me concentrate on the conversation.

She was so pretty, even with the bad middle-parted hippy hair style hiding her ears and neck.  I wondered what her hair was supposed to be doing, since it combined the worst elements of short bangs with long sides and back.  Low maintenance I guess, but low attractiveness as well.

From her face my gaze wandered to the postcards and long-expired coupons stuck to the fridge, to the clean dishes in the drainer beside it, and to the dusty venetian blinds across the window.

"So would you like something to drink?" I said.

She looked at me with a half smile. I enjoyed her eyes. "You don't have any beer though, right?  Cause you don't drink?"

"No beer, sorry. I keep meaning to acquire the taste, but never seem to get around to it.  I would like something to drink with snacks, pizza, chips, that sort of thing."

"Soda?"

"I have a Pepsi or Dr. Pepper at times," I replied, "but the sugar gets me, I break out.  And it just feels unhealthy.  Also I'd swear they are weaker than they used to be.  Like cutting back on the syrup to save money to pay for those stupid Brittney commercials; there's hardly any kick to Pepsi now."

"Bleah." was her opinion of drinking a soda.

"I do have some wine, actually." I dug into the back of the cupboard, behind the cans of peas and corn and vegetarian refried beans and emerged with a bottle of dark red wine.  "I'm sure it's crap, but it was a gift, and I'll certainly save the bottle for nostalgia, but the wine in it might as well be consumed."

She took the bottle from me, looking it over. Our fingers met lightly and there was none of that "magical spark" crap you see in romantic fiction, but I did enjoy the feel of her skin, fleeting though it was.

"Also, there is a 7-11 about 100 yards thataway." I pointed through the wall.  The 7-11 was visible from my bedroom or bathroom windows, across the street past a dry cleaners, but not from the kitchen.  "I'll take you over there and buy you any six pack your little heart desires."

"Charming."

I smiled, as much at my words as her sarcasm.  Seldom do other people find my little remarks as amusing as I do.  Their loss.

She held the bottle in her long fingers, and I had a brief vision of them wrapping around my erect cock.  Something that had never happened and probably never would, and it came to mind and then vanished as suddenly as it appeared. Sort of thing you get all day as a man.

"Why does it say 'Blizzard' on it?  And it's junk, we'll have to drink a lot of it before it's any good."

I laughed. "Yeah, that's what they say about bad wine and beer.  No problem until it turns your pee green."

At this she laughed.

"I got the bottle from a gaming company along with that poster on the wall in the living room and some other stuff when I visited there some years ago.  I used to work on a fansite about one of their games and they invited me and the rest of the site staff to see the game and tour their offices.  It was a great time."

She smiled, probably disinterested, but perhaps that was just my normal defeatist, "no woman could care about my interests" attitude projecting onto her.

I spoke quickly. "There's one problem though.  I don't think I have a corkscrew or one of those two pronged slidey things either."

Thus followed a short and unsuccessful drawer-ransacking project.

"Oh well, screw it.  Not like the management will object to any improperly-stored, unconsumed quantities." I said, and grabbed a potato nail.  She put the bottle down on the counter and held it there.  I bumped up against her side as I grabbed the neck of the bottle above her hand.  This was the first physical contact we'd had that was more than a hand shake, and it still wasn't electric, but she didn't shy away from leaning on me as I leaned on her.

The nail was easily pushed into the cork, but not through.  I hammered it in with the can opener, and then holding it at an angle, wedged it side to side and pulled the cork out.  Some crumbs fell in as the cork fractured, but it came out more or less intact.

"Wine glasses would be too much to ask?"

"Heh." I said.  "I don't even have beer mugs.  Would you like a clear plastic tumbler, or a dark gray plastic tumbler, or a coffee mug?"

"Oh, what do you recommend?" Her voice had humor in the words.

"I recommend option number four, which is this glass glass.  Wine should be in a glass, after all."  It was a plain glass, made of clear glass, about 8 ounces.  I had two of them, mismatched, hardly ever used, given to me from extras my mom or dad had in their house when I moved out to my first apartment and they shared/got rid of most of their old china and silverware on me.

I rinsed out the glasses and set them on the counter, and she poured the wine.

"I do, however, have appropriate wine consumption snacks.  Cheese galore, French bread, some grapes, crackers too."

"Just wine for now, with perhaps a bit of cheese." she said.  "I want to get drunk in a hurry."

I laughed.  "You'd need more than that bottle to get drunk, it's pretty weak stuff, I suspect."

"I can't hold my liquor at all, I get tipsy quickly." She looked at me and with a toasting motion, went bottoms up, draining about half the half-full glass in a swallow.  I lost eye contact as she raised her arm to drink, my eyes slipping to her chest, and the of course emphasis of her bust that a raised arm created. Her right nipple was just visible through her bra and blue t-shirt.  But not the left.

She put her glass down and handed me mine.  "You drink, I'll cut the cheese."

We both laughed an instant later.  Fart jokes always work, even when they are unintentional.

I grabbed the cheese out from the fridge and handed it to her, and pointed to the drawer where the sharp paring knives lived.

"No cheese cutter, unless you want to use the veggie peeler style one.  I usually just slice off some with a knife."

"My, you are mercifully-unburdened with the accoutrements of gourmet dining, my dear boy." she teased.

"Next date I'll come to your apartment and you can get me drunk and take advantage of me, with all the benefits of corkscrews and cheese slicers, eh?"

"Oh!  Were you planning to take advantage of me?  How exciting."  She smiled, looking very flirtatious.  And pretty.

My heart was hammering in sudden nervousness and excitement.

"Of course I am, why else would I be getting you drunk?" I said, trying to sound joking and seductive at the same time. I moved closer, setting the cheese down on the counter behind her, and slipped my arm around her waist.  She immediately leaned into me, pressing her pelvis and belly against mine, looking up into my eyes from just inches away.

"It's so cool how women are a little bit shorter than men.  Makes for nicer embraces." I said.  It meant nothing, but she didn't mind.

"Drink your wine." she said, with a smile.

I raised the cup from the counter with my right hand, keeping my left one around her waist.  She was still pressed firmly into me, her left leg between my legs, her crotch pushing into the top of my left thigh.  There was nothing sexual about our positioning, just a nice intimacy.  I didn't even have an erection, yet, and I wondered if she were disappointed not to feel anything hard poking her belly.  There's no way she wouldn't have noticed it in our position.

The wine was pretty bad, too acidic and sort of weak.  The usual red wine afterburn was lacking as well, but I could feel a little kick.

"All of it." she said, as I went to lower the cup.  She accompanied her words with a little shimmy and push into me, and I lifted the cup back up and drained the rest, then smacked my lips.

"What, no comment?" she laughed.  "You're never without a quip or joke or clever remark.  And you don't have an erection, so you can't say all the blood has rushed from your brain."

I really didn't have a comment after that, but I did set my glass down on the counter and hugged her with both arms.  She returned it, wrapping her hands around my back.  We held each other and rocked back and forth gently, and as she lifted up her face and gave my neck a few little kisses before moving to my lips, I could feel my dick coming to life.

The kiss was quick, just a peck, and I returned the favor to her, bending down and kissing her neck, nosing her hair out of the way.  She gave another wiggle against me and pushed her crotch harder into my thigh and her belly harder into my cock.

"There's a good sign." she said.

"I was wondering when the Viagra would kick in."

She released me and stood back, looking down to see if my erection was visible through my clothing (it didn't seem to be, with jeans and a loose shirt), then turned and grabbed her glass, and drained it.  She refilled both glasses, handed me mine, and walked into the living room.

"Should I be dragging you into my love den and ravishing you about now?" I asked.

She laughed as she sat down behind my big computer desk, and took a swallow of the purple liquid.  "This is such glorified melted popsicle."

I sat in a chair across the room, and looked into her eyes.

Sorry, that's the end.  It's not working how I wanted it to, trying to become bad porn, and going on to long, so I'm pulling the plug.

Earlier tonight (Wed 27 Feb, 2002) I had the idea for this, ("What idea?", you ask) while in the kitchen.  There was one really good line in my head then, something about "I'd need more wine to get you into bed." "No you wouldn't!" and it was like a double-meaning, sounding both like "you couldn't get me into bed in any event" but also, "you don't need wine at all to get me into bed, I'll go willingly."

The line was by the male character, spoken in jest, and the female was more the aggressor, and more playful.

As I started writing this here now though, I can't remember the exact line, the wording of it that I liked earlier, and as I was writing this it wasn't cooperating.

I wanted the physical descriptions of the room to be very minimal, it was to be all about the chars and their interaction, but I started getting side-tracked by shit about soda and cheese and drinking philosophy and the woman's hair, etc.

I'll have to read this again tomorrow to see if I can stand to leave it on the site. Might be interesting as a vignette, as the first of a series of vignettes, and I could look back in six months and see how far I'd come.

___________________

As for this one, I don't know who the woman is, I had no real clear picture of her in my head.  The guy is me, but not really.  I mean it's my apartment, I have that bottle of wine, I drink those sodas, and they aren't the kick they used to be, etc.  But it's an entirely fictional tale other than the setting and layout of the apartment, its not a fantasy of mine, or something I hope will come about in the future, and it's not how I'd act in that situation.  I made the guy sort of nervous joking, which isn't all that unlike me, but I'm much more sincere, almost too sincere/honest when I'm with a woman I like.  I've had a couple of them remark on how different I behave alone with them than I do in public, and it's not necessarily been a compliment; they liked the funny, sarcastic guy, he was the one they were willing to spend more time with.  They aren't sure if the suddenly-sincere guy has a lap they want to perch upon.

I do realize that I need to get some decent glasses now, at least.  I'm not even sure I still have those glass ones, and I think they are mismatched. Not seen them since I moved here, though I might have dug them out like 3 years ago over the Holidays, to have some sparkling cider in.

I had just written a longer thing here about how readers tend to assume a writer is the character in a novel that's most like the writer physically.  A female novelist could have an old male character who she really identified with, who she had say what she would have said in every scene, etc.  But if there was a woman character near her age who was a screeching, man-hater, some readers would think, "God, she (the author) must be such a bitch.

I moved the longer example to my writing philosophy page, so you can check it out there if you haven't read that page already.

___________________

The problem with these seems to be an inherent weakness in design.  This is not an interesting story, or even a portion of an interesting story. You, the reader, have no emotional attachment to any of the characters, or a plot you are interested in following.  So the writing has to immediately hook you, or you won't continue reading it.  And that's fine: artsy, no-plot stories are viable (though I tend to disapprove, read my writing philosophy page for more details) but they need to be very well-written, with immediately interesting events, or more often very good writing.  Clever conversation, metaphor, nice word choice and flow, etc.

All of which I'm capable of doing, but that's not the sort of thing you crank out in 15 minutes, like a daily blog. It's something you write, and then edit numerous times to streamline and improve the language, define the characters more clearly, make sure it's obvious who is talking, etc.  This is why a great story can get away with very sloppy writing, as most Fantasy and Horror do.  If the readers are hooked by the plot and characters, they aren't picky about how well-worded every sentence is.   But if you (intentionally) have no plot or characters, you'd better have some damn nice writing.  Of course having all of the above is the best, but that's very very seldom seen.  Clive Barker's best work is the best example of it I know of.

Anyway, my objective with these quickies is to do them almost like a blog story.  Not a daily thing, but every now and then if I had the urge I'd pound out a short scene that would in theory stand on its own.  However that's very hard without writing it brilliantly, and the whole point of these is to be something quickly written and done with, not something that I edit numerous times and craft into a mini-masterpiece.

So we'll see if more of these seem fruitful.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.