Female, Introduction, Fiction (Mystery/Psychological Thriller), First Person
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (Canadian-General) North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
January 6th. Joey saw Tom Fitzwilliam again a few days later. This time it was in the village. He was coming out of the bookshop wearing a suit and talking to someone on the phone. He said goodbye to the person on the phone, pressed his finger to the screen toe, end the call and slid the phone into his jacket pocket. She saw his face as he turned left out of the shop. It held the residue of a smile. His upturned mouth made a different shape of his face. It turned up Mawr on one side than the other. An eyebrow followed suit. Ah, hand went to his silver tipped hair as the wind blew it asunder. The smile turned to a grimace and made another shape of his face again. His jaw hardened, his forehead bunched a slow blink of his eyes. And then he was walking towards his black car parked across the street, a blip blip of the locking system. Ah, flash of the lights, long legs folded away into the driver's side, gone, but a shadow of him lingered on in her consciousness. Alfie had been a crush for months. She'd watched him around the resort made up stories about him, based on tiny scraps of information she'd collected from people who interacted with him. No one knew where he was from. Someone thought he might have been a writer, someone else said. He was a vet. He'd had a long hair, then dark red, tied back in a ponytail or sometimes in a man bun. He had a small red beard and a big fit body, a tattoo of a climbing rose all the way up his trunk, another of a pair of wings across his shoulders. He often had a guitar hanging from a strap around his chest. He rarely wore a top. When he wasn't working, he had a smile for everyone, a swagger and a cheek in Joey's imagination, Alfie Butter was kind of other worldly. She ascribed to him a sort of supernatural persona and tried to imagine what they would talk about if their paths were ever to cross. Then one day he'd stopped her at the back of the resort next to the laundry, and his blue blue eyes had locked onto hers and he'd smiled and said, Joey, right? She said, Yes, she was Joey, someone tells me you're a Bristol girl. Is that right? Yes. She'd said yes. That was right. Whereabouts? French A. He punched the air. I knew it. He said I just knew it. You know, when you get that feeling in your gut. And someone said you were from Bristol and I just thought French a girl gotta be. And I was right. I'm a French. A boy. Wow. She said, Wow. It was a small, small world. She told him, What school did you go to? And Alfie had turned out to be neither supernatural nor otherworldly off that nor poet, nor even very good at playing the guitar, but spectacularly good in bed and a very good hugger. He'd had her name tattooed on his ankle. Two weeks after the first encounter. He said he'd never felt like this about anyone in his life ever. He slung his heavy arm across her shoulder. Whenever they walk together, he pulled her onto his lap. Whenever she walked past him, he said he'd follower to the ends of the earth. Then when her mother died and she said she wanted to come home, he said he'd follow her back to Bristol he proposed to her after she returned from her mother's funeral. They'd married two weeks after that. But what do you do with an unattainable crush once it's yours to keep? What does it become? Should there perhaps be a word to describe it? Because that's the thing with getting what you want. All that yearning and dreaming and fantasizing leaves a great big hole that can only be filled with more yearning and dreaming and fantasizing. And maybe that's what lay at the root of Joey's sudden and unexpected obsession with Tom Fitzwilliam. Maybe he arrived at the precise moment that the whole in Joey's interior fantasy life needed filling, and if it hadn't been him, maybe it would have been someone else instead.