£18000 was how much it was going to cost to get him out of jail. Such is the price for public indecency in front of the queen.
It wasn't even that it was so...indecent. It was more along the lines of public infantilism. We'd both been to London before, and we had done all the touristy things, all the things that young men with wild oats were desperately in need of doing, but this time, Adam took it too far.
Adam, he of the propensity for humping things, took one look at the Royal Guard, and in a moment of...
One rainy street was much like another, it turned out. It didn't matter where in the world you were, whether it was city or town - it was the same.
People acted the same. They hustled and bustled, tugging coats around them, hoping that collars could be turned up and their necks could be saved from uncomfortable raindrops. Some - prepared ones - had umbrellas, using them as a more sophisticated method (supposedly). They wore smug smirks - until they bumped into one another.
Nobody had perfected walking down a street of multiple umbrellas.
They all rushed, eager to escape...
Pleasure. Burn. They're the only two words on the whole page - in the whole book if he was honest - that he had read and actually remembered. The rest was a jumble of names, bad descriptions, inplausible mixes of action and consequence.
Pleasure, the word just rolled off the tongue, almost like a cat unfurling itself and stretching lazily, purring as it spots some new distraction.
Burn, more akin to an explosion, though with the same purring quality, it flooded into his ears a lot more passionately than pleasure did, filled his mind with images, tortorous landscapes with dark...
"I'm having no part in this. I'm having nothing to do with any of it. Because it's wrong. You're wrong. This entire thing is...it's wrong. It's just...wrong."
"Have you always been good with words?" He sauntered closer, pale fingers tracing my cheek, my neck. "You're relying quite heavily on that word. Wrong. Have you thought about what it really means? How damning it truly is? I don't think you have."
I hated the feel of his fingers across my skin, hated the jolt that had run straight through me, hated the tingling, hated the - I hated it.
He was...
The first few days she hadn't noticed the bars. She'd noticed very little about her surroundings other than that they were wrong. As her head became less fuzzy and she began to understand why they were wrong, that this wasn't where she was supposed to be she tried to learn everything there was to learn about this unfamiliar environment.
It was on the tenth day that she'd counted, that the sun shone for the first time. Whereas it had looked grey and dreary outside, the glowing sunlight made it look full of possibilities. The bars were on the inside of...
I awoke, pissed, the activity, not the feeling, took a shower, got dressed, made coffee, drank the coffee, fed the dog, the fish, the cat, watered the plants, left a note for the cleaning people, heard a story on NPR that made me think of you, began to write a poem about the us we were, before we became the non-us, still it felt good to think of you, your smile, shoes, the way you opened your eyes after they were closed in the aftermath of our coupling, when we were a couple, it turned me on, I went back...
Our eyes locked right before she went for the stuffed duck. I watched her bite it with resolution, shake her head back and forth like a dog. Her eyes met mine again with a clear and concise message: "My duck."
The duck became her best friend. I hardly talked to her unless she was eating my food. Then I yelled. It probably wasn't the most mature thing to do.. but what the hell. I fell in love from afar. I fell in love with her maple brown eyes, with her glistening nose, with her adorable whimper. She didn't know it...
The results were in, she said. And he ran and ran and ran and ran, disregarding the shouts of teachers behind him, just running and running and running till he reached the office. It was up on the bulletin board, sandwiched between changes in the lunch menu and posters for bake sales. He stopped for a moment, breathless, eager. Slowly he let himself look at it. The names were up. He scanned through them: Joe Malone. Hendrick Smith. Jerry Pandrip. Jonathan Sinker. Hetty Carbuncle.... so many names. He knew most of them: they had been his companions during the test,...
Becky hoped Tom saw what she had written before her teacher did.
Mr. Smith was notoriously tidy about the things in his classroom. Desks were wiped down once a day, not by the school janitorial staff but by him personally. In other classes she knew friends who would write on the desks, leaving messages for the students who sat there after them - a sort of school texting service between students without cell phones, but Tom took only this one class after her. Would he see her message? She could pass it off as a doodle and if he said...
"Tis a penny," said he, and bent to retrieve the copper coin from the sidewalk. Holding it between gloved finger and thumb, he inspected the date with a squinting eye and dropped it into his vest pocket.
"Aye, twy twirrly twee, a penny's enough fer you an' me," he sang and performed a pirouette for the passerby.
A woman, richly attired and ambling along with an aristocratic gate, stopped to consider the man as he continued to spin in circles. A member of the upper crust, she lacked that innate mechanism, honed by the lower classes, which steered one away...