When Tomorrow Comes

[Hawthorne]

OC: Thread for Ariosto and myself.

Laura
25 years old.
Short, scruffy hair, as if she's hacked it off with scissors, dyed a murky colour. Pale grey/green eyes. Distracted intelligent boho type.

IC:

I was driving. I was in the car and there were things, aspects of the situation, which seemed unreal. The rain on the windscreen that the wipers ineffectively pushed aside. The song on the radio, something old, a country tune. And I think I was wet. Wet from what? When had I been outside? When had I not been driving? But my hands, on the wheel, were clammy.
Ahead of me the road was bleak, almost obsolete beneath the low grey sky and the storm. Either side fields of empty scrub looked black.
I remember a rabbit, darting out, rapidly, racing across in front of me and through the bright white glare of the headlights.
I didn't break.
I was breathing heavily and I remember, I didn't break and I didn't see where the rabbit ran to, or if I killed it, he and I and the car, everything, the whole world, seemed submerged under the rain.
To my left would be the sea, the ragged cliffs breaking off the face of the land to a brief beach of sand and bleak ocean, but I could not see it. and as much as I blinked or the wipers scraped across the glass I could not see the sea, nor the road from the scrub and sudden beams of light swept past me, the movement of roadtrains, they could have killed me, couldn't they?
They could have killed me because I could not see.
I left the road and the land suddenly had form. There were houses, cottages, set back in the scrub and a store with a rainbow coloured windchime turning in the wind, but a closed sign on the door. Then further on sets of houses with shutters drawn and a dog on a long yellow lead barking at the thunder when it cracked overhead.
Upon the water, when I turned and drove along side, there were boats, sick on the waves so that the white flaps of their sails beat back and forth like the hands of a screaming mime. Gum trees from then on and black embankments of rock between the road and the shore.
I was driving.
I was sitting in my car.
I was two hours away from the city and my life and my character at the cottage my mother owned, but never used. I pulled an old blanket over my head to run to the front door and find the key. My fingers were shaking. I looked across and an old man in a dark black slicker was standing at the side of the road looking at me. He had a bucket and something bright and shiny was moving inside. What was he doing there?
Only when inside with the door shut and the gale making the windows rumble, then whistle, only when I stood with the rug around me, still shaking, did I touch my head where I had cut off my hair and did I take stock of my situation.
Why had I come here?
I walked to the back of the house and pushed aside the screen door to look up at a grey hillside of scrub and rocky paths cut into otherwise untouched landscape. There and somehow through the rain I saw the glint of the lighthouse reflecting off the windows of someone else's house. There was a sharp distraction from sudden lightning and I saw too, the hard lines of a man made structure. The man made structure by the hands of that man...
Was he even still there?

 

[ariosto]

The small dark car almost cut him down. A wash of cold filthy water to his waist as she spun around the corner...she... it was a she. His eyes were still good anyway.
The car pulled up the short driveway to the empty silent cottage and stopped. Motor caughed..died. Rain beating down, unending.

Luther Barron stands still as a statue, the fish toss fretfully in the bucket. He watches her leave the car, look around, stare squint eyed in his direction...her eyes are not so good maybe...look up into the waterfall of rain...grimace and run to the shelter of the narrow porch.
She disappears in shadows.
Small girl...short hair...pretty he thinks. Hard to tell.
No ones been in that place since he and his son arrived in the village two years ago.

Luther casts a last look down to the small harbor where his boat is moored but the storm is too thick with wind and rain. Frances is a good boat, he thinks...she'll be fine.
A light has gone on in the cottage but the shades are drawn...nothing to see. He shrugs and straightens his long thin frame against the wind and begins to trudge up the hill to his own shack. His steps are slow and steady ...determined...no trace of hesitation.
He's a strong man, in good shape, only the weathered lines on his face, a face seasoned by the hot sea sun and salt, give away his nearly sixty years...


*************************************************

Benjamin Barron, checked the dials and readouts one last time.
Looking at his watch, he carefully notes the time.
The lighthouse was almost fully automated but still required readings to be taken every four hours and general maintenance of one kind or another on the old structure is unending.
He settled back in the comfortable chair... a chair that nonetheless groaned under his size and weight. The last attendant had bought it, he was a wiry little man and a foot shorter than Ben's six/four. Needless to say it's a tight fit.

His father would be up in time for the next check and the daily report to the Coast Guard on the short wave.
They'd probably eat dinner up here as well. In many ways the lighthouse was more comfortable than the place they'd cobbled together last year when they realised the old caretaker's cottage had been to dilapedated to use anymore.
He looked out the small window at the storm ans saw car lights way down on the beach road. He wondered where they were going in this weather.

In the village there was a lot of talk about Ben, a man thirty years old with the looks and build of Adonis.
The girls sighed over him and gave him long sad glances when he passed by. Too bad, they thought, too bad that someone like him could not speak or hear a single word.

 

[Hawthorne]

I don't think I'm particularly different to most people in wanting something more than average. And I don't think I'm particularly strange in fearing a life of some kind of social subservience so that all I do is get a degree, and get a job, and get a boyfriend, and get pregnant, and get married, and get old.
I know I'm not.
If this girl standing on her back porch after the rain with a glass of cold wine in her hand, barefoot and looking up at the mess of scrub towards some long ago friend's house was somehow singular, somehow, by some strange trick of fate, the only one born with these desires, would I remember him, or even imagine that if not him, someone else like him would understand me?
I walk, I turn into the house and there, in the living room, ordinary things of seaside houses, those seventies style lamps, couches, brown carpet and gawdy pictures of scenic scapes with cotton tails and ragged oceans and sailing boats with numbers painted on their side, suggesting everything about life's mundanity, I face the glass. And in the sweep of ocean, in the continuous wind that, though the rain has stopped, reminds one of the dark weather outside, I recognise the stupidity in thinking that the vast world we understand so little, I could assume I understand enough to find it predictable. To want to escape it.
I drink my wine. I find that my hands are still slightly shaking. And looking down my body, naked now, is pricked with goose pimples. Nothing about my nudity seems ordinary. My breasts are heavy at the bottom, they tip up, they are light at the areole and darker at the tip, there are faint hairs, light blonde hairs, over my skin, and variations, a small mole on my sternum. My belly, a round belly, like the belly of a victorian nude, sloping down but with a deep cleft from my belly button and a sudden unusual tautness of muscle at my pelvis. Pubic hair shaved off, lips swolen because I continue to touch them, and soft innersides of my thighs that swell out into curves I didn't always have.
I lay back on a couch facing the window, legs spread across the rough surface. In this position I am able to hold the stem of the glass on my abdomen with one hand, let the other clutch the arm of the couch and attempt to pull an inanimate object closer to an animate one. Perhaps that's lifes only predictability. The animate and the inanimate - except when the former becomes the latter.
I drink more wine.
I move slightly, up and down, against the arm of the couch, and the material is rough, and on my sex already so swollen it almost hurts.
I don't think I'm particularly different in liking it.

 

[ariosto]

A light goes on in the cottage at the end of the row.
An odd event since no one's lived there in a very long time.
Ben squints down into the rainy gloom but can see nothing besides a shadow form moving through the faint yellow light.
He looks at the clock. Everything is done that needs to be done right now. The thought of another unappetizing dinner with his father offers no great appeal. It's something to be put off as he has many times before, choosing to stay here, high in the tower reading or just looking out over the scrub covered hillocks, the tumbling rocks and the sea.
Not tonight though, he'll go on down to the shack and sit with the old man. They'll talk of weather and fish and his own dead mother. His father will of course. Ben will listen and nod, eat his stew and bread then go into the village.
No matter the storm, the village is his pipeline out, he'll go tonight. There's a girl there who doesn't mind his silence. A girl who asks only what he aches to give.
He records his departure carefully in the big leather book and don's the old oilskin slicker.
He locks the door behind him and steps into the rain.
Hell have to pass close by the cottage on the way.

**************************************************

Luther watches the her masturbate. From the kitchen he can see down the hill and into the living room window of the beach cottage.
He has to keep the back door open to the weather to do it, cold water pools around his feet and washes across the worn linoleum but it's worth it. He wraps his peacoat more tightly around him and clutches his cock.
A slow hardening, an ache...the girl has good legs.
He has good eyes and great patience. He waits for 'windows' through the slanting rain to see. Not her face that's hidden, he can almost see her breasts but not quite. Her body is bisected by the black knife edge of the window frame.
A smooth stomach, a shadowed navel, hands busy between pale thighs. He can not make out the details but he sees enough and groans.
Fingers grip his turgid meat beneath the damp denim of his dungarees, fish stew bubbles on the stove behind him...she has good legs.