I started to write this novella years ago.I am usually too lazy to write the longer forms but have ventured there twice just to experience the pain of it....
The idea initially was - Why not Mills and Boon? Sure I've read dozens of them!
HOWEVER Mills and Boon said I didn't follow their formula. Fair enough. I meant to follow it but got waylaid by the characters themselves...
Another publisher or two liked the style but Could I write about something else? Who wants to read about love in a school staff-room???
A fourth Publisher didn't really like any of the main characters. Could I make them nicer??
Now I know that Austen, the Brontes and many other of the greats have suffered lots of rejections but I'm very thin in the skin and I'm not one of the Greats so Three's A Crowd was relegated to a shoe box- a very fancy designer one, but a shoe box all the same.
I am at that "tidy up the loose ends of my life" stage, where possible, and have finally decided to air it again, so the plan is to put it up on Amazon as an e-book.
Will keep you posted and meanwhile here's an intro....
MEET TARA
IN LA TAVERNA…
Tara Jones watches as her friend’s limbs
spin sex to the sound of Spanish guitar. Jane Rooney loves all things exotic
and at the moment she is netting Joshua Williams, a Nigerian medical student,
all six foot five of him, in an aphrodisiac of rolling limbs and smouldering
glances. Jane never seduces an Irish man. “They’re all gobshites! And none of
them can dance,” she declares as she sallies forth in skin tight top and spray
on jeans.
Jane is a dancer; there can be no doubt
about that. The level of testosterone rises by 50% within her orbit. Tara throws another glass of Chardonnay into her as she
surveys the matchbox dance floor now heaving under the weight of poets, well
heeled winos, and Latin American music lovers. La Taverna on a Sunday night is
a heady mix to the English teacher, but with the Monday grind stone hovering
and Emily Dickinson’s poems still to be abridged, Tara Jones wonders if she
might not just call it a night. She extracts her mobile from her Fendi shoulder
bag and with a painted forefinger scrolls down to City Cabs.
Geoff Rodgers spotting Tara
from his bar stool lunges towards her. “Tara Jones? God, I haven’t seen you
since-” He plonks himself on top of her sequenced cardigan, spilling drinks and
upsetting the Moroccan bouncer who is chatting up, what looks to Tara, like a
high maintenance fifteen year old.
“He’s with me, Georgio,” she reassures the
Moroccan who is squaring up to Geoff, not impressed with his drunken slither.
“Any friend of the Salsa Sway Queen’s,” he says
thumping Geoff on the back causing him to spill a few more drinks.
“Sorry Tara ,
I’ll replace that.” Geoff calls to a waiter and orders the most expensive wine
on the list; at a hundred and seventy five euro a bottle Tara
decides that her annihilation of Emily’s poems can wait another day. Geoff
Rodgers springs onto the dance floor where he indulges in dangerous gyrations between
Jane and her score.
He is cute, Tara
thinks, in a boyish sort of way- not really her type, but then why restrict
herself to types? Besides, she is out to get over Trevor Adams who hasn’t
bothered to call her since that smooch at the Oscar Wilde annual bash. He is
probably holed up in his cave writing sonnets to some other muse. A man from
Mars unable or unwilling to deal with her Venusian curves. There is a limit to Tara ’s New Age patience and unconditional loving.
She hates to hide her feelings; in and out
of bed she is passionate, but she had felt so differently about this one. She
had resolved to play it cool, to allow for his fear of intimacy etc, etc. A
poet afraid of intimacy? Who ever heard of it? His feelings were all in his
head and at the tip of his pen. She could delude herself no longer; no return
call three weeks after the event is a bit of a freeze. Tara
sips her Margot.
There is, of course, the prospect of the
new heart throb on the staff of Seapoint High. Dave MacFadden is hot and
handsome, perhaps a bit aloof, but definitely not a would-be artist, rather an
outdoorsy type of man, Indiana
She pours another glass of Margot. It
couldn’t be the top of the range, but still, Margot is Margot and the
alternative is Emily’s “Funeral in her Brain.”
“Leave some for me,” Geoff cautions her
from swathes of body heat and pulsating limbs. Tara
closes her eyes. Her head is beginning to spin. Geoff Rodgers lunges for what remains
of the Margot and places it to his lips. Jane’s snakelike arm encircles his
torso as she attempts to pull him back to the throes of a hot salsa threesome
but Geoff resists and instead sweeps Tara off
to the basement of La Taverna.
*****
Geoff Rodgers certainly isn’t in his cave.
His hands are up her thighs and in a minute it will be full coitus non
interruptus. The thought startles her.
He is beginning to groan as he pushes
himself towards her and is more than a bit surprised when she pulls away and
stumbles past him.
“Geoff, I just have to go, I’ll see you
around.”
“Jesus!” he mutters. “Bitch! Fecking
tease!” he adds, before sinking into a stupor.
Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2019
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