I was enjoying a casual session of head pats from Violet while she used my pad to watch some videos on the internet. I wasn’t feeling like going anywhere until it was time for us to get ready and go pay her mother a visit. Her lap pillow and fingers were simply way too nice and hitting the right spot.
She could have taken out the earphones after I woke up, today being one of the rare times she wakes up first, but she kept them on, so I didn’t have a single clue of what she was watching.
I was stretching my body when, completely out of nowhere, she cried out that people were stupid as she unplugged her ears.
I asked her what had gotten her in such a foul mood so fast while she rubbed her face. She asked me if I was aware of the book she had finished reading last night. I knew she had finished reading a book, but what its name was, or what it was about, I had no idea. I knew those things about the previous two, but since she read it in about two days instead of her usual week-long reading time, I didn’t have the time to ask her about it. If she wasn’t doing anything related to the house or school, she’d have her nose buried in its pages, so I mostly left Violet be and enjoy her time with it.
“You see, the story is kind of your typical hero’s journey while also having the themes of loss of innocence, dealing with loss and trauma, time travel stuff... the main character starts as a kid and... well, at the end of the story, because they didn’t get to enjoy their childhood, they are sent back to before their adventure started to live it out, but the very last chapter is him meeting again with the person that sent him in his adventure.”
“...Ok,” I said with a nod as she caught her breath. She was very worked up over it, more than I’ve ever seen Violet get with stuff not related to me or us.
“So, and get this, there’s this guy saying this is a bad story because, in the book, the author doesn’t explain why the protagonist meets with that person again or what he does after that! But it’s super obvious, isn’t it? It should be if you read the book! I bet even you can answer those questions with just what I told you!”
“Because... he chose to go through it all again to maybe avoid some mistakes he committed on his first try?” I asked my wide-eyed girlfriend.
“That’s it! That’s exactly it!” she huffed. “Despite being given the chance to ignore it all and live a peaceful life in his village hidden away in the mountains, he chooses to go back and help the kingdom again! And he lost so much too! Can you imagine? He was forced to leave his birthplace, fight monsters as a child, make friends and see them die horribly, to then be imprisoned for ten years before finally being able to escape and bring peace to the world! After all that, he—”
“Babe, breathe a little,” I told her with a raised hand. “Also, slow down a bit. I can barely keep up with you.”
She shut up and sat on the verge of bed, trying to calm down while also rustling her body non-stop. It wasn’t like her at all to get this mad about anything so inconsequential.
“Mind if I give it a read?” I asked her, grabbing the book that had caused my Violet to get mad at some stranger on the internet. She only had to return it at the end of the week, so I’d have plenty of time to go through it.
I was never much of a reader. At least, not regular books. Comic books were more to my taste since I could easily pick one up and read a chapter in a minute or two. Wordy books like the ones Violet preferred were a different matter. They demanded me to stay put for far longer than I could.
She didn’t say yes or no right away, instead, Violet expressed the same doubts that I too thought about. Was I even going to be able to get through the first chapter without getting bored?
I reasoned that, since I could stay a couple of hours quiet when we were snuggling, then maybe I could now be calm enough to get into the right mindset those kinds of readings demanded.
“True,” she now quietly hummed with a head shake. “Hmm, I’d also like to hear your opinion about it.”
That was also a very nice extra. One more thing we could share as a hobby.
She then asked if I wouldn’t prefer something a bit lighter, but I promptly refused. If I were to start reading now, then I wanted to start with the book that got her jimmies so rustled. In fact, why was she watching a review of a book she had already read?
“I wanted to know if it had a sequel,” she explained. “But then, I saw the title of the video saying it sucked appearing close to the top of my search results, so I clicked on it.”
“I see, I see,” I nodded. “Well, next time, maybe don’t click on it unless it’s titled as an analysis or something along those lines. Anything that doesn’t show such a strong bias, you understand? I’m not saying they all are filled with bad arguments, but...”
“If you say so, but when I saw the title, I just felt like I had to click on it.”
“Yeah, that’s why it’s titled like that,” I explained to my net-illiterate future wife. “It’s called ‘click-bait’ for a reason.”
She leaned back and stared at the ceiling, wondering out loud if maybe she was the one in the wrong and that her tastes were lacking.
I had to agree up to a certain level. Liking something doesn’t necessarily make it good after all. I also didn’t see her liking it as a problem if the book was in fact poorly written. There’s such a thing as liking things that are objectively bad either because they are exactly that, or because they satisfy some part of your mind or feelings.
“I agree that there are things that could have been better explained and a scene or two where the focus should have been on different topics, but... I don’t think it’s a bad book just because of it,” she kept talking more to herself than to me. “I’d say it’s a solid seven and a half out of ten.”
“Don’t spoil me even more, you hear,” I told her, bonking her shoulder with the cover, giving her a small startle.
She laughed and pulled me in, teasing my ear with her breath as she playfully asked if I was including that kind of spoiling in my warning.
I tried tickling her back, but she isn’t nearly as ticklish as I am. I still managed to get a laugh or two out of her, but I was playing a losing game.
“We should go now,” Violet said from over me, having managed to pin me down on my tummy on the bed. “Before we forget ourselves.”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Violet had this—strange but understandable—philosophy of not venturing beyond kissing until after we visited her mother’s grave. It wasn’t something she had discussed with me, but something I understood and agreed to, nonetheless. It was only for the day before up until we came back from the visit, so I could wait. If, for some reason, we were unable to get physical, I wouldn’t be all that bothered if we still could hug and stuff. Like Violet and I said plenty of times before, I was very easy to please and keep happy.
I’d add going on walks to my list of things I needed to be happy. Today, the air greeted us with a slightly damp sensation from the drizzle that fell from the sky during the early hours of the morning—or late hours of the night if you’re like Violet. The municipal services were cutting down the overgrown grass in some of the places we had to cross, so you can add the scent of cut grass to the experience too. Calming and reinvigorating. It was an exceptionally good day to spend outside, and I was regretting not having gone for a morning run.
With how nice the weather was, I was feeling more playful than usual, and so did Violet.
As we walked through the graveyard gate, I asked her at what time did she draw the division between night and day.
She promptly said that, for her, it was only morning after the sun had risen. As for when dawn ended...
“I’d never go as far as saying that nine in the morning is still dawn!” she hushed as an answer to my joke of a question. “You make it sound like I’m a lazy bum!”
I muffled my snicker trying to keep a modicum of respect by the space we walked in, and we weren’t alone in the graveyard. When I realised that two of the people that were on the side where Charlotte’s grave was located were in fact standing in front of it. I grew completely silent.
One of them I recognised being was Papa Stan when he turned his face to look at his companion, but what got me completely by surprise was that my sister was the person accompanying him.
“Is that Sophie?” Violet asked, also finding it strange.
“She must have wanted to pay her respects to your mum,” I told Violet.
“Hmm... That’s got to be it,” Violet hummed. “Let’s leave them alone then.”
There was a tree with a bench close by that we sat under. Above us were some birds chirping that we listened to in silence as we waited.
Some people don’t like graveyards. Personally, I don’t mind them. Right now, however, I was leaning more on the side of those that enjoy them. It was peaceful, and the graves kind of made me think about life and stuff on a far longer timescale than normal.
“I never asked, but do you have family buried here?”
My family was relatively new in the town. My parents moved into my grandfather’s place after he passed away, having moved his company here from the big town because almost everybody who worked for him lived here. The fact that the building he turned into the offices was a lot cheaper didn’t hurt either. I also wasn’t sure where that side of my family was buried because mum always said it was pointless visiting dead people. Maybe I’d find his grave here if I looked around, but I never knew the man, and he hadn’t been a good person, so there was no point or curiosity.
My grandma from my mother’s side, as far as I knew, was still alive and in a retirement home, heavily medicated to the point of barely knowing her name. As abusive as my mum had been, I was very lucky to not have suffered what she and her own mother suffered under my grandfather.
“What about your father’s side?” Violet asked, shifting on her seat to be a bit closer to me, ready to provide me with emotional support.
“Hehe, oh those are just peachy!” I giggled and bumped into her. “They have a small house and a bit of land on the hills. My dad sometimes takes me and sis to stay there for a week or so, but we haven’t done that since sis went to uni. Oh, and despite being almost ninety, they are still sprier than you.”
“Wow, thanks,” she said with a snide smile. “Anyway, do you think you’ll be paying them a visit any time soon?”
“That’d be nice!” I hummed while dangling my feet. “I’ll be sure to beg dad to take you with us.”
“Wouldn’t I be intruding?”
“But I want to introduce them to the person I’ll be spending my life with!”
She blushed but didn’t retort anything about it. Instead, she joked about us using the opportunity of already being there to talk with the grave keeper to save us a spot side by side.
I did think on a longer term while we sat quietly, but hopefully, we still had at least another sixty or seventy years ahead of us before that became something we needed to worry about.
I looked over the shoulder. The other two were walking away and I informed Violet that it was now our turn. It put a smile in my face seeing them walk away holding hands, but Violet seemed preoccupied with something else.
She was walking a bit weird, her legs and arms held too straight and stiff, and her face was frozen in expression.
I stopped and turned, asking if she was feeling nervous.
“A bit, yes,” she said while looking down and to the side.
“...Pfft, hehe, silly,” I giggled as I placed my arms around her neck. “If there is an afterlife, she most likely already knows of our engagement.”
“I’m aware of that, but... it’s still a bit nerve-wracking.”
I honestly hope she never changes, at least not this side of her.
♥♥♥
Abby sat across me, looking at me while I studied my school notes. And while she was paying me a lot of attention, my head was everywhere but there. Ultimately, it wasn’t important because the finals were still far away, but I was already thinking about them. More to the point, I was thinking about the grades I’d most likely get. Great grades all around but in one subject.
“Do you think I should exercise more?” I asked Abby.
“What? Are you feeling like you put on weight or something?”
Not in the slightest. My worry was the grades I was getting in PE and how it was affecting my average. Despite still not knowing if I was going to a university or not, I still enjoyed the boost in my ego that seeing a nice, big number gave me.
“...It shouldn’t affect that much, I think,” Abby told me after running the math in her head. “At most, it’d raise the score by nought point something. Not even with getting a perfect twenty, and that’s frankly impossible for anyone.”
I knew she was right, but I was still quite displeased with the reality of things. I wanted to raise my average from sixteen point four up to at least seventeen and a half, but that was too greedy.
“There’s still next year,” Abby told me to cheer me up. “We could start by doing some running early in the morning this summer.”
And just like that, I didn’t care about it that much. There was no way I’d get out of bed early in the morning to tire myself.
Abby smirked after I told her to never mind my complaints and with an impish smile told me that I wasn’t that reluctant about tiring myself early in the morning when it was to make love with her.
“In fact,” she added with an even bigger smile, horns and a tail starting to pop up out of her. “You show a remarkable amount of stamina that even I find it hard to keep up.”
“Y-you’re exaggerating!”
“Hmm? I wonder about that,” she singsonged as she slithered her way to my lap. “Maybe next time you have to run the mile, pretend that I’m waiting at the finishing line in a cute lingerie.”
That... could work. Not for that reason, but because I’d be so focused on something else other than how much it sucked to run that I wouldn’t even realise that I was done running the distance. Like what was happening right now.
Abby had started to nibble my jawline as I started thinking about her half-joke, and only now that she had gotten to my chin did I take notice of her actions.
“Hungry?” I asked.
“For your love? Yes. Ah! Hehe!”
I tumbled us to the ground and inverted our roles. As I teased her neck, she asked if I was ok with interrupting my studying.
I wasn’t really studying before, and she should have thought of that before turning into her imp version. Lunchtime would be soon, so for the time being, we’d just stay on the floor, hugging and with entangled fingers, talking nonsense and teasing each other until dad called us to the table. Studying, I’d do it later now that my mind was again more at peace thanks to Abby’s shenanigans.