" is your failure to connect just your way of protecting yourself? "
A BETTER GUIDE TO ROMANCE WRITING PROMPTS / ACCEPTING
𝚆𝙸𝙻𝙻 𝚃𝙸𝙿𝚂 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝙳 𝙰𝚆𝙰𝚈 𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝙷𝙴𝚁, and a heavy snag of his curls, caught in a thick lock, falls across his forehead. Nearly into his eyes. He blinks hard, and pushes his thumb along the notched lip of the table’s edge. She’s being deliberately disappointing—or else she really doesn’t know. Failure to connect. The lack of reciprocation doesn’t make the connection a failure, unless she really came here expecting symbiosis. Expecting anything.
“Maybe, when I was a kid. But not anymore.”
It’s not that everyone is the same. It’s that they think the same way.
“I guess you could call it a—lack of interest.”
He looks at her deliberately; his blue eyes limpid, almost plain.
Basic time management. It had taken ten or fifteen years to fully ascertain that reality, to reconcile the repeated disappointment (and, yes, the recumbent sting) of being cyclically ununderstandable with the unavoidable reality of the ever-expanding sample size. Meeting more people, or different people, in different places and under different circumstances, didn’t seem to have any significant effect on the results. It’s not the lack of connection that’s wilfull. That’s inevitable. What Will can control is the amount of time and cognitive or emotional effort he is willing to expend on reaching that inexorable conclusion again and again and again.
A little, or a lot.
That depends more on the other person than it does on Will—on his assessment of them. How much he likes them, whether they need him. If they need him, how likely he is to be able to actually help. Whether or not they deserve to be helped. It’s a lot of moving pieces. A lot of moving pieces that fall into place for relatively little reward. Usually.
Will glances up at Ray where she’s sitting on the dark corner of his bed beneath the slant of the sideways-vaulted ceiling. It’s a tiny apartment on a narrow alley in a tight, quartered part of the city. Four stories and leaning a little—an old house built on unsteady earth. All of New Orleans is sinking. Two inches a year. At the kitchen table where he’s sitting, the slight variations in the slant of the linoleum floors are offset by the slight variations in the length of the legs of the table. The place was furnished when he signed the lease. All he’s added are his belongings—some clothes, books, his fishing equipment, the old fold-down desk he uses as a tying table. His uniform is hung on the inside of the closet, door closed. Firearm in a lockbox beneath it. He doesn’t like them; doesn’t like to live in the same room with them. It’s not a lot, but the space is small, and with two people in it, Will feels stuck. Defensive.
The city doesn’t suit him, but he likes the sound of the cars passing between the buildings, and the sound of dogs barking in the distance. People yelling far away. A soft curtain of separate sounds that solidifies the singular sense of being alone here in his apartment. Alone, at the moment, with her. In the middle of nowhere, the boundaries between inside and outside, private space and public space, can become meaningless. You can’t get away from people when everything is open. He feels more trapped here, and, therefore, marginally more free. For now, at least.
Maybe he just feels more invisible around people who can’t see him then he does when he’s alone. Maybe that’s what it is. A relief—cool, and passive, even in the salty humidity of the stagnant bay at the edge of the block. Raynne is looking right at him. It makes his skin itch. It annoys him that she’s seeing him the wrong way, because his expectations for her are higher, and when they go aggressively unsatisfied it fills him with resentment.
“Isn’t that what we’re doing right now, Ray? Connecting?” Honey-dark, and utterly insincere. His corner of the room is laced with a biting warmth. Sharp and sweet. Will is being unkind, but she’s being unkind, too. Low brow psychiatry. The first thirty questions on the lowest level of the psychoanalytical bar. Maybe she’s right. Maybe he’s protecting himself. Saving himself for something, someone. For himself. It doesn’t matter. People only want you to open up when they are being squeezed by a desire see inside, when they want you to hand yourself over to them, to give up your name. Flawed external analysis isn’t going to modify his behavior. It doesn’t matter what you want from me, he’s saying, you’ll get only as much as I’ve engineered to give you.
