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Tara at the cafe
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Tara at the cafe |
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patchoulipumpkin Member
since 2000-01-01
Posts 196Bermuda |
This is part of an ongoing story i'm working on. Be glad to hear any comments you have. thanks for reading.. After Julian had cleaned up the vomit and broken glass, he headed back home. As he reached the corner where the coffee shop was, he stopped to see a crowd gathering on the outside patio. There was a skinny man, holding onto his briefcase with both hands. He had a pipe in his mouth too, and seemed to be facing off against a crowd of about six people. “Get away, don’t shake my hand, I don’t like people, I don’t like them”, the man said, “no disrespect you understand, I just don’t like to be touched, I don’t like people”. “oh sure, yeh no disrespect taken, you don’t want to shake my hand, I consider you a stand up guy, you asshole”, one man said. “leave me alone, leave me alone”, he said. “Leave you alone, we’re not keeping you from anything man, you’re the one who insists on standing there, I could give a **** if you stayed or left”. Before Julian stepped inside to grab himself a coffee, he recognized a friend that he had gone to Queen’s university with, sitting amid the fracas of the skinny man, and his detractors. “Tara”, Julian exclaimed. Tara, hadn’t heard where the voice had come from, she probably was a bit hesistant because of all the shouting, but saw Julian, and invited him to sit down. “Julian, how are you? I’d heard you were out in Vancouver, but I didn’t know where you were. You are an ass for not writing me with an address”. “Yeh, I’m sorry about that”, Julian said. He wasn’t so much sorry as he was apologetic for his disorganization. For Julian, life revolved around him, so he didn’t put much effort into reaching out to the world, in that he figured the world would simply materialise when it did. The beauty of such an attitude was that it relieved a great deal of responsibility, but the downside of it, which Julian was quickly finding out, was that he was becoming more and more lonely. While at Queen’s and living in Ottawa, he was a popular guy, that was often called upon by people, out in Vanouver, he was alone, without contacts, so the doorbell simply wasn’t ringing. And it took Julian a long time to figure out, that he actually had to work to maintain friends, and that it wouldn’t be as easy as just being in the right place at the right time. When he realized his closest contacts to date had all been homeless people, Julian thrust himself into conversation with Tara, chasing away his future potential of being a homeless spokesperson. “So how have you been?”, Julian asked Tara. Tara had an interesting body and face. She almost looked like an elf, in that her nose was angular and her face looked like ivory, both blanched and very smooth looking. Her hair was short, just about to the bottom of her earlobes, and she pushed a sturdy five feet, even though she would try to argue for more inches. However, the most striking, and immediate feature which one saw, well, if one was a hot blooded male heterosexual, was the size of Tara’s breasts. They were huge, to the point where they challenged her proportions and thus drew attention to themselves. Julian had known quite a few short women with large breasts and wondered if it wasn’t a consolation prize for the lack of height, but, discovered after talking with many of them, that they really proved to be the bane of their existence, either causing them back trouble, or excessive ogling. “You know what’s the ****tiest about having big tits”, one girl said to Julian, “is that everybody thinks you have two sets of eyes, and always end up looking in the wrong pair”. He remembered the experience so succintly because he had been staring at her breasts while she was talking, and when he realized he was guilty of mass behaviour, he blushed until his cheeks felt like they were going to light on fire. In the case of many of the girls that Julian had discussed/ogled breast size with, they were slightly overweight which gave their breasts such a huge advantage over the rest of their body. With Tara, however, she wasn’t overweight at all, she was slim, fit, and her breasts just existed tremendously on her frame, so while they were a unique focus, they were made even moreso, by their ideal fit to the body they possessed. Now that Julian had situated himself with Tara, and the reminders of her incredible body, they talked about school, life, and all of the rest of the important things that one discusses when they have shared experiences like university. In fact, Julian had shared a little bit more than that with Tara. In university, Julian’s roomate Marshall was obsessed with Tara, and would talk his ear off nightly and keep pressing him for information on her, because Julian shared a couple of classes with her. At the time, julian didn’t think that way about Tara, mainly because she was being created through his friend’s lust, and his view of her was tainted by his longing for her. However, as often happens when someone is put as a go-between, Tara confessed to Julian that she liked him, and wanted to see where things could go between them. Unfortunately, Julian didn’t feel exactly the way Tara felt. The way Julian saw it was that he found her attractive and would love to roll around with her, but wasn’t necessarily “after” her in quite the same way that she seemed to be for him. In any case, Julian being the high moralist that he was, had told her that he couldn’t go out with her because of Marshall, but inferred that he did find her attractive, and would be interested in screwing around. It was all very serious, and involved a lot of grandstanding, but nothing came of it at school. However, now that he was in Vancouver, and Marshall was miles away, Julian immediately rekindled his own personal lust for Tara. The two of them talked for about two hours, rehashing their memories, while subtly flirting at their “situation” now that Marshall wasn’t around. There is a point in the conversation with someone you are attracted to that clearly indicates if they feel the same way about you. It can be a look, a particular kind of smile, the way they scratch their face, it can be anything at all, but generally its seen in the eyes-an intuitive communication that is telling you exactly how you feel. Its at these moments when one feels drawn to another that they need more energy from them, more good feeling to satiate the psychic demands. For Julian, his encounter with Tara was a deliverance. It lifted him up beyond himself, took him into somebody else for once, and gave him a chance to forget about how important and meaningful he was. In short, he felt humbled, a feeling he hadn’t relished in quite some time. Ironically, during their whole revisting of the other, the crowd to there left was still in some sort of tangle with the skinny looking guy that Julian had noticed when he first walked into the coffee shop, and for the introductory moments of their conversation acted as a nice umbrella to explore themselves under. However, now that they had “met” the unconscious line of mutual attraction, they got slowly pulled back into the outside world, and into the arguments coming from some guys sitting in front of them. "Just get the hell out of here!”, one guy said to the skinny man, “What do you want from us? What is this, we don’t like you so why do you keep standing there like an idiot?”. Julian had a softspot for the outcast. In high school, he had been witness to too many incidents where one of his headstrong jock friend’s would randomly berate somebody because they didn’t fit into his standards of acceptability. Invariably, Julian would approach the victimized after these verbal assaults and apologise to him for his friend’s behaviour and try to help him realize that he wasn’t to fault for the outburst but that his friend was the moron. “Why do you hang around him, if he’s such an asshole?”, would usually be their question to Julian, to which Julian would often reply, “I don’t know”, he would answer not in a wanton way, but simply stating there was no answer to the question. So Julian would wave the flag of the underdog as much as possible, probably because he felt like an underdog too, and knew what it felt like to be facing the firing squad. “What’s going on here guys”, Julian entered the conflict diplomatically. “This guy wants to talk with us, but he won’t sit down to do it because he doesn’t like people, he’s afraid to touch them or some such ****”, one guy says. “Frankly I don’t even know why I’m here” another one said “I’m going back inside to finish my coffee”, he left. “They don’t understand, is all, they are lumpheads, they won’t listen, I tell them, and I tell them, but they won’t listen”, the skinny man started talking. “Well I think if you call them lumpheads they’ll probably want to hurt you before talking with you”, Julian replied. The man was strange. He couldn’t have been more than five feet, was as thin as a sign, and was gripping onto his briefcase to the point where his knuckles were white. Julian began to think that maybe this guy had some sort of secret tucked away in his briefcase that was top secret and nobody was allowed to see and that was why he was so nervous. But from the man’s stature, and the circumstances (why would he be standing outside a café at three in the morning with top secret documents) Julian disregarded his theory that he didn’t believe to begin with, but for the skinny man’s defense it was the only thing that would seem to vindicate him from his erratic behaviour. Considering it didn’t, Julian swiftly removed himself from his diplomacy, tucked his idealism under his sleeve, and moved back to the table with Tara. “You just want to save the whole world don’t you”, Tara laughed. “Yeh, I’m a sucker what can I say, I can’t see reality, I always have to put a sugar coating on it, its never just good enough on its own. Its like coffee, you have to spice it up with a bit of sugar or else it tastes too bitter”, Julian told her. “But you drink your coffee black?”, she said. “Its probably the only thing that defines me as a normal human being, otherwise without black coffee, I would have my head in the clouds all day long, you wouldn’t be able to find me”, Julian struggled. “or maybe that you just like the taste of black coffee”, Tara suggested. “or yes, you’re right there might not actually be a metaphysical explanation for why I drink black coffee, it might just be that I like it.”, he paused “A slight chance, but slim”, Julian looked skyward in a dramatic pose. Tara laughed, “you are just full of bull**** aren’t you”, Tara said admiringly “Yeh, I guess I am, but as my Dad told me if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull****”. “Well you don’t baffle me Julian”, Tara said as she looked into Julian’s face. “Uh oh, you mean I’ve been found out, you mean I have to be real, nooooooo, what am I gonna do if I don’t have my bull**** with me, I’m a lost man”, Julian played “You’re not so lost. I think you like to think you’re lost so that you can get people to get you to where you need to go, without having to do it yourself”, Tara said. “What do you mean”, Julian asked. “I mean you give the impression that you are wandering around, but you know exactly where you want to be, you just want someone to tell you that you can do that, that you are allowed”, Tara said empathetically. “You are waiting for an okay from somewhere, but you should realize that there aren’t any”, “The okays have been extinct for thousands of years, originally from Greece”, Julian put on the serious voice of scholar, pretending that he was recounting a historical tract. Tara laughed. “No, I know, you’re right, I just….well yeh, you’re right, I know”, he finished. “Cheer up Julian, I’m not putting you on trial, I’m just giving you my point of view, with the very distant hope that maybe it can make sense in Julianland”, Tara said. “50 billion satisfied customers”, he mocked. “You’re an ass”, Tara joked and threw her napkin at Julian, “I’m going to the bathroom, and when I get back, I want to go see your place”, Tara said. “You sure, its already 4am”, Julian asked innocently, not picking up on the alluded hint, but realizing it as soon as he spoke the last word. Before Tara could even come up with a response, that Julian was sure would disrupt her eagerness, he blurted, “Yeh, sure totally no problem”. “Okay I’ll be back in a minute”, “alright”. Julian suddenly felt the pull of something he hadn’t in quite a while. Julian was definitively happy. < !signature--> quote: [This message has been edited by patchoulipumpkin (edited 01-29-2000).] |
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Dusk Treader
Moderator
Senior Member
since 1999-06-18
Posts 1187St. Paul, MN |
Great tale, good writing used here with interesting descriptions and dialogue was used well too. If I might suggest something, you may want to put more paragraph breaks in, it can get a little hard to read. In flames I shall not be consumed, but reborn. -- Abrahm Simons |
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Christopher
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-08-02
Posts 8296Purgatorial Incarceration |
Hey Abe, you're stealing my lines!!! Actually he's right patch- The paragraphing is VERY important, especially when reading prose on a monitor. It helps to break up the read, keeping it easier to follow. As to the story. I see potential in it, thought I would suggest more character development through description rather than "thoughts." |
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