Today’s writing prompt and my response.
The sixth and last prompt for the week. A poem? A short story? Link the prompts into a longer piece? Your choice.
The look she gave him could have curdled milk
Joe got on splendidly with women. Little girls, young women, mums, grannies all responded to his cheerful teasing, his smiling compliments. The way he held a door for them, bowed them through, gently took their arm when crossing a street, and let it go once they were safely across – where he always walked on the traffic side.
At parties, he would be found at the centre of a group of laughing women, each of them vying to tell him their latest, most newsworthy anecdotes, eager to have his attention but willing nonetheless to share him.
Yet Joe had never had a girlfriend. On the rare occasions he asked a woman out, he would discover she’d assumed they were with a group. When it turned out to be a twosome, she would shrug, enjoy the evening, insist on paying her own way, and go home from the restaurant in a taxi after kissing him chastely on the cheek and thanking him for a fine old time.
Joe asked his male friends about this.
‘You have brotherly stamped all over you.’
‘You’re too gentlemanly.’
‘You joke around, they can’t take you seriously.’
Joe pondered. He decided he was happy enough to be a friend to all, a lover to none. Up until now. Now there was Kat and everything changed.
She wasn’t stunning to look at, except when she smiled. She didn’t talk much, but what she had to say was intelligent and beautifully said. She listened to other people, offered consolation when such was needed, was always on their side.
Kat was new in town and one day, at the coffee machine, Joe offered to show her around.
‘That would be lovely,’ Kat said. ‘Who else is coming?’
Joe hid his hurt. ‘Just us.’ He gave her a different kind of smile. One he had practised so it didn’t come across as brotherly. ‘Thought we might get to know each other better.’ He raised an eyebrow, stretched out his hand to clasp her firmly on the arm, squeezing in what he trusted wasn’t a too gentlemanly way.
Kat gave him a look which could have curdled milk. ‘You can’t be serious? Is this a joke?’
Joe avoided all women for several days, and when he did return to being sociable some remarked how much quieter he was these days and wasn’t it a shame he seemed to have lost that charming, teasing way of his. A real pity because one day, they noted, with that old manner, Joe had been going to make some lucky girl a lovely boyfriend.
Follow the daily writing prompt on Facebook or Instagram.
Find Cheryl’s flash fiction and short stories here!