Fiction: It aches when it’s cold

Recently, I received a ‘highly commended’ mention in Writers’ Forum for my entry to the February flash comp. The brief was to write a story about love in under 600 words. Here is my entry:

I remember the day we met because it was the same day I broke my arm. I suppose that should have told me something from the start.

It was January 26^th, a freezing British Tuesday, and the frost lay thinly on the ground. You’d caught my eye in the Starbucks on Westwell Road. It wasn’t that you were particularly striking, not tall or disarmingly handsome, but you had the kind of deep, clear eyes that spoke of intelligence. Your nose was crooked and your smile reassuring, and you were reading a battered up book by Jonathan Safran Foer. So it was with deliberate carelessness that I bumped into you on my way out.

We’d laughed about that later, sat in the dim light of the Indian near your house. Accident prone you’d called me, especially after I told you how I’d slipped in the ice outside the office earlier that day, falling heavily on my arm. A singularly unremarkable accident. Outside mine, you dug a pen out of your pocket and drew a smiley face on my cast. “For luck,” you said.

We met again a week later, bundling up against the weather, to watch a rerun of Casablanca at the local cinema. When Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman met again for the first time you put your arm around my shoulders and I leant back into you. I could feel your pulse beating in your neck when I kissed it.

If I had known our third date would be our last I don’t think I would have gone back to your house after the bar. I would have asked you more about yourself, or made a few more jokes. I wouldn’t have taken so many risks.

Bowling, you had to admit, was a terrible idea for someone with their arm in a cast. We laughed as I struggled, before giving up and heading to the bar for more tequila shots than was good for us.

The night spent at yours was a bit of a blur, and in the morning I made my excuses and left. You kissed me on the doorstep and had text me by the time I got home. “Great night,” you wrote, winky face. “Let’s do it again soon.” But we didn’t.

You didn’t message again. You didn’t call. For a whole week, then two, silence. You didn’t reply to my texts. I kicked myself.

The funeral was over by the time I heard about the crash. It had been on the news, of course, ‘local man killed’, but who would have thought to tell me?

When they released your name and picture I saw it while I was at work, and stumbled out of the office into the cold, gasping like I was drowning.

I went on your Facebook page a few days later, and thought about writing my own condolence post to join the others. I drafted a few sentences, deleted them all and turned my computer off.

I still pass that Starbucks sometimes, a detour on the way to work, and I look to see if I can spot you but you’re never there. My cast is long off, my arm fully functioning. It aches still sometimes though, especially in the winter. It aches when it’s cold.