Freewrite 9 18 19 in General

I am supposed to be freewriting 2-3 hours a day. I haven’t gotten anywhere close to that.

Every time everything seems alright I remember and the wind comes out of my sails.

My very last interaction with Sandy was me asking if she had time to review a piece of writing I had done for one of my classes. She texted back “Send it.” I emailed the file and told her it was on the way.

An hour later she sent it back with recommendations of what to change. It was a depressing piece I had written for the genre studies class. I had to stay within the realm of “romance fiction” which is difficult for me. I like to think of myself as a fairly romantic guy, but writing about it?

I thanked her.

Four days later she was dead.

You better believe I beat the shit out of myself every day for sending something so sad.

You don’t need to critique it. I see every single flaw in the story. 1000 words to tell a story is a bit of a challenge. My classmates loved it. My professor gave me an 86%. I miss you Sandy.

She will be buried in Pima on Saturday. I don’t know what the fuck I am feeling right now.

Celaena.

She stood looking through the blinds staring west as the last of the sun sank into the Pacific Ocean. There wasn’t enough sunlight left at dusk to hurt her, and she loved to remember how she once was, imagining the feel of the sun on her face.
James sat on the bed behind her, admiring the way the last light shone through her long auburn hair.
“Celaena. Do you have to tonight?”
“You know I do. I’ll make it quick. I’ll be back in three or four hours.”

She slowly turned toward him. By the look on her face he could see he was losing her again. She was going to become, again, what she was.

She stepped toward him and took his face in her hands. He could smell that same perfume she had been wearing the night they met. She had put on some makeup. She leaned forward and stared into his eyes. He felt the same quiver of excitement and fear he did every time she did this. His blue eyes unblinking. Absolutely hypnotized by love.

“I’ll make it quick. I’ll be back soon.” And she was gone.

James and Celaena had been together for a little over a year. Meeting at a bar in Coronado on a Navy payday Friday, he didn’t think anything would come of the little flirting he accomplished while the crowd pulsed and the jukebox blasted. She hadn’t seemed impressed by another Navy Pilot, just another of dozens in the bar that night.

It had been his first night out. He had rented a shore side bungalow across street from the public beach from a friend who was forward deployed to Japan and would be gone for a few years. He spent his days in physical therapy at Balboa Naval Medical Center across the bay in San Diego, and his nights staring at the ocean. Until that night when his friend Rocky convinced him to go out.

He walked because he needed the exercise. They met up at Freddy’s Lounge. They were on their third beer, Rocky’s girlfriend was telling an inane story James had heard at least a dozen times when a beautiful girl wearing a green, gauzy mini sundress walked in. James was incredulous because no one else seemed to notice. Rocky’s girlfriend, Tammy noticed James staring, turned to see what he was staring at, looked back at him and smiled. “She’s out of your league. But go for it.”

James met her at the bar and turned his charm up. She was polite but firm in rebuffing his efforts. He went back to Rocky and Tammy. Rocky laughing: “Crash and burn, Mav!”

It was later that night James walked down to the end of Orange Avenue, to Centennial Park to look at the lights on the buildings across the bay in San Diego. Walking down the sidewalk he froze. It wasn’t voluntary. His body just stopped cooperating.

Eighteen months before he had been in a horrific aircraft accident that left him with artificial hips, knees and metal rods in more places than he cared to count. He wondered is this sudden paralysis had something to do with that. It had never happened before. But there is always a first time.

Standing frozen on the sidewalk, the lights of San Diego dazzling on his left he smelled that perfume for the first time. Heard her voice for the second time. She stood behind him and whispered in his ear “Why. Can. I. Not. Take. You?”

She walked around in front of him. He shivered in fear and at her beauty.
An hour later she appeared at his bungalow and they talked.
Titanium and cobalt. It turns out those elements are poison to the Guaxa, the Spanish Vampire.

She told him of her frustration at not being able to feed on him. And once she started talking, her story spilled out of her. She had been a young woman once, in Toledo Spain. Seven centuries ago she had be transformed. Since then she fed every three days and moved on frequently.

As she spoke he was transfixed. When she expressed her frustration of being this creature he saw a tear form and roll down her cheek. And he fell in love with her.
For a year they spent most nights together but not. Because of the titanium and cobalt in his joints, there were microscopic particles of it in his blood. Anything more than a touch
could kill her.

So they sat close and talked.

For the first time in almost a millennium she felt human feelings that she had long suppressed because the entirety of her relationship with humankind was as the huntress.

She could flirt until she picked her prey. Quick kill, feed and move on.
Now she was remembering the girl she had been. Parents and brother long dead and all but forgotten. She could barely remember what love was supposed to be, and to now feel it but not be able to show it. It terrified her because it made her weak, and out of control of an aspect of he being that had always been so tightly controlled.

They were in love, and yet their worlds could only intersect a few hours at night. Instead of pushing them apart it pulled them dangerously close.

She was what she was. He volunteered to transition if there was a spell, or some ancient magik that could make that happen. She consulted with her Galère, and there was indeed a process. But the underlying problem remained. Titanium and cobalt. Transitioning would kill him as surely as her feeding on him would. They were stuck. Here. With what they had.
So they held on through the months. Wondering what the future was for them, but knowing that all they had was now.

He would continue to age, and she would not. One night she would come home and his body would be there but he would not. That realization made them both tremble with
grief.

He dared not cry.

Tears are made of blood plasma and he couldn’t risk hurting her.

He sat on the front porch of his bungalow as the sky began to lighten, staring at the beach and listening to the gulls squawk. The sounds of the aircraft carriers at the Naval Air Station waking up, the shipboard public address systems calling “Reveille reveille. All hands heave out and trice up…”

He knew she was behind him before she wrapped her arms around him from behind and kissed his neck.
“Oh Celaena…“

“Shh baby. We have now.”

Authors Note: This is based on a larger, and very unfinished work I had been working on off and on for ten years. To a degree I quit working on it because the Vampire Genre is so damned saturated. It is a freewrite composite of two scenes – the night they met, and a scene in the bungalow that was actually an argument. It took some effort to try to stay within the realm of romantic fiction, and some aspects of this scene will eventually find their way back into the original. There are only aspects of romance in the longer story – James and Celaena are in love. That is a sub-aspect of the story.