Taming the Author

12: Do not Over-think

I read this on @dEityVenus' comment, and it just cracked me up.

So who in here's #TeamLoraDean? Show of hands, please? 'Coz we'll be shaking this up a bit SOON. ^ v *

***

Loramina yawned and squinted. I didn't want to shock her eyes, but it was already dark so I turned the lights on. She winced and scratched her eyes. 

"Hey, sleepy head," I said, smirking at her. 

She snapped her eyes open and frowned at me. "You're still here?"

I shrugged. "I didn't have anything else to do anyway," I said, leaning slightly on the clean sink.

"You washed the dishes?"

"I was bored."

She smiled. "That's really sweet."

—Of course, that's not what happened. 

I was, as my brothers coined it, a wuss. I walked out of the apartment building and forced myself to not look back.

So for the next days, I spent only the afternoons in her flat professionally discussing her manuscript – if you ignored the storytelling part.

As I walked down the white-washed hallway, with a basket of fruits I bought in Loramina's insistence, I couldn't help but wonder how things would have been if I just stayed with her that day.

Would we be really close friends? Would she hug me for washing the dishes? Would she kiss me again?

Yes – we hadn't kissed again; not that I missed it, of course. I was not that needy for intimacy. And she was a bully. I didn't fall for bullies.

Looking back at my past relationships...I winced. The few relationships I had all ended with me being too loving and understanding to realize they had been cheating on me. So yeah...I've been with bullies.

I took the line "it's not you, it's me" to heart all the time. It wasn't her, it was me. I was boring. I was lame. I was the wuss. I was the weakest link, and I would always be the weakest link.

I knocked on the door of the hospital room before twisting the doorknob and pushing it open. "Hey Rupert," I greeted the old man sitting on the bed.

I stiffened at the sight of his bony physique. It had only been almost two weeks since I last saw him but he already looked so...worse.

"Oh hey, Dean!" he greeted, smiling at me. "Come in! Take a seat. I didn't think I'd have visitors... How's your new job so far?"

I tried to smile as I walked into the room.

I wasn't really planning on seeing him – at least not yet. It was Loramina who ordered me to pay him a visit. She told me she won't give me the rest of her manuscript if I didn't see Dear Old Gandelf in the hospital.

"I'm coping," I answered, smiling at him as I took a seat on a chair beside his bed.

He chuckled. “She's a handful, isn't she?”

I nodded. “Has she always been like that?”

Rupert sighed. “She's eccentric, I'll give you that,” he said. “But aren't all artists eccentric?”

I smirked. Michelangelo rarely bathed, Van Gogh cut his ear off, J. D. Salinger of The Catcher and the Rye spent the last 50 years of his life in almost complete isolation, Virginia Woolf of A Room of One's Own heard voices that made her commit suicide... Come to think of it, I was glad Loramina was just an impulsive bully.