Excerpt from Book 3 in the “New America” series.
…..Lucan, Ireland
Ed sat on a rickety chair outside the bar and watched the taxi stop in front of his hotel. A voice inside warned that the vehicle’s arrival would hasten Dana’s departure. Things were just too good to last.
“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone,” he sang into his pint of Guinness in a murmur. But there was no doubt what he had. He had, or most likely had had, if that was a thing, the most intoxicating creature in his life.
Now the big yellow taxi had arrived to rip that all away.
Okay, it was a grey Prius, but let’s not be pedantic, he thought.
Five minutes ago, he’d squared his gay circle with the realisation that Dana spanned the gender boundaries. Not in the new, woke-speak way. Dana wasn’t some homogeneous dream for men and women alike to hold. Dana was just Dana. The beautiful Irish girl was a gender of one, a law unto herself…
Only, that wasn’t true, was it? For, were it correct, he wouldn’t be sitting here now, watching her walk away.
Unfortunately, the subset of women that inveigled their way into his otherwise man-centric attraction held two in number.
“And there’s the rub,” he said.
“Jane, Jane, Jane, Jane, fucking Jane.” The chant ceased with another mouthful of stout. After swallowing, his shoulders sank, and he sucked in a lungful of the warm Dublin air.
He couldn’t hate Jane. If he could, it was likely all his problems would evaporate.
He loved Jane. Maybe even more so than Dana. Yet for some bloody, crazy, messed-up reason, he wasn’t attracted to her in the way he was to the alluring woman crossing the pavement and getting into the car.
Dana, about to duck into the back seat, looked up, and their eyes met. The world stopped. Without sound, the stream still flowed. The traffic lights changed from green to red and back to green, but nothing moved. Patrons of the bar took an oath of silence. The pensive world only awaited her voicing his name. Please just cry out, Dana. I’ll come running. But she didn’t. She said nothing. Dana just shook her head, broke his gaze, got into the car, and broke his heart.
The above novel is work in progress and will yet change
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