OCTOBER 10, 2019

A Walk in the Woods ~ A story written with Bill Kirton

The image entitled “Summer Goeth Before the Fall” was the prompt for episode #90 of R.B. Wood’s WordCount Podcast.

For this one, Scottish author Bill Kirton and I are collaborating again. We’re getting the hang of this! I’ve written several stories with Bill in the past.

Bill started the story and wrote part 3, while I wrote part 2 and the conclusion. There was no discussion of plot or characters prior to writing each part. As per our previous collaborations, we simply played off each other’s segment.

If you’d like to learn more about our process, feel free to read Bill’s post on it. It’s a great summary of what we did in case you want to collaborate on a project with another writer.

Listen to Bill and me reading the story here. You can also learn all the latest from the Facebook page for the Wordcount Podcast. Please DO LIKE the page. It will give us more visibility and increase our listening audience. Thank you!

Hope you enjoy the story.

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After her experience with Tom and his poetry, Lynne was more careful when she was ready to start dating again. As her hungers grew and she listened to the other girls’ tales of the satisfactions they were getting, she wanted the same things, but not if it meant losing control.

But, back then, girls didn’t take the initiative; they had to wait to be asked.

And Lynne was asked. Frequently. She definitely had it (whatever ‘it’ was), and got invited to plenty of clubs, shows and the perilous ‘walks in the woods’.

Tom’s obsession with ‘love’ had got him nowhere but most of the boys wanted the same thing – commitment, exclusivity, groping plus.

They were nearly all in their final year at school, but Richard, who’d only moved into the area that summer, had already had a year at university, and looked the part. Fair hair cut short, sweaters and pants as casual as those worn by the others but classier, and a way of using shrugs and gestures that meant he could get away with saying very little and yet convey a sort of maturity. He seemed content just to listen.

All of which, of course, increased his attractiveness. So, when he singled out Lynne and made it pretty obvious that he was interested, her curiosity was roused.

He didn’t make his move until they were into September and back at school. He still had three weeks left of his vacation, and his invitation, typically, went straight to the ‘walk in the woods’ option.

He was happy to let Lynne choose which path. Her favourite was one which wound towards a little lochan at the centre of the woods. Both looked around as they walked, holding hands, saying nothing. There was not a breath of wind, the branches were still. At one point, the path emerged from the trees beside the lochan. They stopped, held suddenly by what they saw. The water was flat, undisturbed by ripples. All around, the foliage, reflected in its surface, was showing early signs of autumn but, directly ahead of them, the long branches of one tree stretched their dramatic covering of flaming red leaves out over the water. Lynne leaned closer to Richard.

‘My favourite place,’ she said, her voice soft, gentle. ‘And my favourite tree’.

Richard nodded.

‘Acer rubrum,’ he said.

Lynne looked up at him. He looked at her and smiled.

‘A genus of trees and shrubs called maple. The genus is in the family
sapindaceae. Type species, the sycamore maple, Acer pseudoplatanus.’

Lynne’s face wrinkled into a frown. Richard raised his arm and pointed at the leaves.

‘Some cells form across the base of the leaf, stop sugars moving back into the tree. They react with proteins in the sap. Produce anthocyanin.’

Lynne began to wonder whether she was cursed. First Tom with his ‘Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams’ and now this scientific encyclopedia spewing out lecture notes from his botany classes.

Unaware of his loss of poise and cool, Richard droned on about acers, palmatum, japonicum and others.

‘Let’s go home,’ said Lynne.

+++

Richard was several steps ahead of her when he stopped and turned around. “What—what? Don’t you want to stay a bit longer?”

“No I don’t,” Lynne said too quickly and with no emotion in her voice, then tried to soften her tone with an excuse. “I’m tired, need to get up early for a class tomorrow.”

If her irritation bothered Richard, he didn’t seem to show it. He walked toward her and took both her hands in his. “I’m sorry. I went on a bit about the tree, didn’t I?”

Lynne angled her head toward the water until Richard leaned his face sideways to catch her attention. She turned back to face him and offered a tiny smile. He had a way of lowering her defences despite her annoyance. Perhaps that was the biggest difference between him and Tom. Richard knew when to stop talking.

“Look,” he said. “Sometimes I have information in my head, so I like to share it. I’m no poet. You’re not going to get ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’ from me.”

“I don’t want poetry, trust me!” She inadvertently snorted with the absurdity of his words. She had not told him about Tom.

“Phew!” Richard mimicked wiping sweat from his brow before he spoke again. This time, his voice came across in a low, dulcet tone unlike the authoritative voice of earlier. “Lynne, I think you know I like you … no, more than just like.” He hung his head and stopped talking altogether.

Lynne felt a pull toward Richard then, the strongest feeling she’d had about him since they met. There was a vulnerability to him she had not noticed before. “What is it?” she asked.

Richard sighed and took a deep breath. “I’m nervous, feeling a bit insecure right now.”

“Why?” Lynne’s stomach fluttered, a feeling she’d never experienced with a man. Perhaps these were the ‘butterflies’ her girlfriends spoke of when they really liked a boy. Here was a young man finally speaking her language, words that touched her on a sensory level, made her insides feel warm and cozy, made her want to crawl into a warm, cozy bed with him.

Richard continued, but his words came out choppy, hesitant. “I know when I recite facts … like Wikipedia, it’s unattractive to a woman, makes me seem like a show-off, a narcissist even.” He let go of her hands and crossed his arms awkwardly in front of his chest, then opted to drop them by his side. “That’s not what I’m about … I’m not a show-off. I’m introspective. When I spew facts, it’s to hide how I feel, and right now I feel …”

“Yes …?” Lynne leaned toward him and put her hands gently atop his chest. “Please tell me, it’s okay.”

+++

He looked hard at her, gave a deep sigh and sat on the bank, patting the moss beside him by way of invitation. She sat, too, giving him a wee peck of a kiss on the cheek as she did so.

‘It’s more than OK,’ he said. ‘I … I couldn’t believe it when you said you’d … well, come out with me.’

Lynne smiled. ‘That’s silly,’ she said. ‘Why would you think I wouldn’t?’

Richard shrugged. ‘There’s this thing I’ve got. It’s…’

He stopped, shook his head.

‘Tell me,’ said Lynne.

He put his arm round her and pulled her close. After some seconds, he said, ‘It’s sort of shyness plus… more.’

‘What sort of more?’

Another silence, then, ‘It’s called… social anxiety disorder.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Lynne, keeping her voice soft.

‘They call it social phobia, too. Basically, I’m… well… I’m allergic to people.’

Lynne gave a little laugh.

‘Yeah,’ said Richard. ‘Stupid, eh? That’s why I sort of blurt out stuff all the time. To cover it.’

Lynne didn’t answer right away. She’d heard of this, but in a different, uncomfortable context. Her friend, Chantelle had said… but, no. It couldn’t be the same.

‘Poor you,’ she said at last. ‘Have you always had it?’

Richard nodded.

‘Yeah. It’s panic disorders, anxiety – stuff like that.’

‘What happens?’

‘Depends.’

‘On what?’

‘Who I’m with. What we’re doing. Could be performance anxiety, psychiatric reversal, dermatillomania. Things like that.’

His words sounded a tiny alarm bell for Lynne. She was pretty sure there was no such thing as ‘psychiatric reversal’, but she’d definitely heard the word ‘dermatillomania’ from Chantelle. She’d told Lynne how she’d found herself stuck with Richard at a party and he’d told her all this stuff about being shy and giving her a list of impulse control disorders, the drugs he took for them. And Chantelle had felt sorry that such a big, handsome guy like him should suffer from something so, well, unlikely. It was only when he’d started listing conditions like dermatillomania and others which sounded, frankly, like things he was inventing, that she began to feel she was being conned. Then came the moves he made on her when he thought he’d got her sympathy – far too violent and aggressive to be tried by the feeble, little-boy-lost he was claiming to be. Chantelle said she’d been lucky to get away. But Chantelle was well-known for her frequent fantasies. She’d been crying wolf since she was thirteen and, if all her stories were true, most of the boys were near-rapists and she was lucky not to be a mother several times over.

Richard was still talking, his voice soft, almost ashamed of what it was saying.

‘… not psychosis or anything like that. Probably parental motility or some transphobial genetic disposition.’

For Lynne it was just like when they were looking at the tree, sharing a beautiful moment, only for his blustering words to crash through the mood. He was as bad as the others, after all. Worse than most. At least they could blame their immaturity, and their hungers made them almost respectful. She sat up, tried to disengage herself from him, but his hand on her shoulder gripped more tightly.

+++

“No, no … it’s not time to leave yet, Lynne.” Richard’s expression turned serious as did his tone. “As a matter of fact, I’m only just getting started.”

Lynne felt her heart in her throat. It was a similar feeling she had the last time she saw Tom, not far from the very same spot she now shared with Richard. Tom wouldn’t listen to her either, wouldn’t shut up.

What was about it about men?

Did they think she was so gullible? As if their deceit, cloaked in poetry and so-called knowledge was not just another way to get inside her pants?

She saw through their bullshit. She saw it when her mother wrestled for years with her cheating father, and she saw it with every boy she’d ever dated. She had hoped for better with Richard, but he was no different. In fact, he was worse than Tom.

It was so easy with Tom. She didn’t even have to see his expression when she crushed his skull with a large rock. He was freely reciting a poem at the time, his back to her, staring out at the trees, the horizon, the sky, the moon, the stars, or whatever other word that popped into his brain. That he thought he was a good poet was laughable, but to hold her hostage with his amateur meanderings was just too much. And now, here was Richard making up stories about illness, sickness, phobia, dementia, psychosis, neurosis, this mania, that mania.

All for what? To garner her sympathy?

“Richard,” Lynne said, an angelic smile crossed her face. “These conditions you speak of sound horrific. How awful for you. I’m so sorry.”

Richard relaxed his grip on her shoulder. “They are pretty difficult to live with sometimes, not to mention my bout with RLS last year.”

“What is that?”

Richard knit his brows together, hesitated before speaking. “It’s restless leg syndrome, and I still can’t seem to shake it.”

“Oh my.”

“Yes, and it affects …” Richard stared at the ground, “specifically my middle leg.”

And with a shy tilt of his head, he grabbed her hand and they walked deeper into the woods.

Lynne kept her eye out for large rocks.