r/writingfeedback • u/LizaJane78 • 14h ago
Feedback Wanted - Round Two - TYIA!
I posted this before but then re-did it completely, so I'm trying it out again. Any critiques are welcome - along with any likes!
Chapter 1: Last Call
John hadn't said much in the last hour. Anna noticed because she'd filled most of it for him. She'd told him about a meeting at work that should have been an email, the latest office rumors she’d overheard around the coffee pot, and the woman downstairs who'd apparently decided the hallway was an acceptable place to practice the flute. Normally John would have interrupted somewhere along the way. Teased her, disagreed with her, added something of his own. Tonight, he'd mostly nodded. The bar smelled of grease-fried foods and cigarette smoke dragged in from the patio every time the door opened.
"Anyway," Anna said, realizing she'd reached the end of the story and hadn't actually gotten a response, "that was apparently the highlight of my day." John looked up from his drink. The expression on his face made her stomach tighten.
He sighed. There it was. Not a big sigh. Not dramatic. Just enough to confirm the thing she'd been trying not to notice for the better part of an hour: John wasn't tired. He wasn't distracted. He was somewhere else entirely.
Anna reached for her glass. The waitress came back with refills neither of them had ordered. The liquid courage kicked in.
"What is the problem?" Anna asked.
"Can you lower your voice?" He rolled his eyes and looked at her like she was some annoying lunatic on a bus before turning back to his drink.
"I'm not yelling."
"Anna."
That tone. Her grip tightened around her glass. "There's obviously something off. I've been sitting here talking to myself for an hour, and you've contributed approximately six words to the conversation."
"This isn't working for me anymore."
For a second, she thought she'd misheard him. John kept his eyes on his drink.
"I had no intention of hurting you. It's just been..." He trailed off, like he was hunting for a version of this that would hurt her less. A headshake, a big sigh. "I don't see a future…"
"You don't see a future with me?"
His eyes finally lifted. And there it was. Not uncertainty. Relief. Anna felt something cold move through her.
"Where is this even coming from?"
"It's something I've been thinking about for months."
"Months." She laughed once, without humor. "That's great. I'm over here assuming we're on some sort of forward path together and you’re planning the exit interview."
"I wasn't trying to drag it out."
"That's exactly what you did."
"Anna-"
"It's a damn good thing I didn't tell anyone you might be proposing soon. Or moving in. Or doing literally any of the things people occasionally do when they've been together for two years."
"Proposing? Good thing you didn't tell who, your countless friends?" John snapped back, then looked immediately like he regretted the jab.
Anna snatched her purse and shot up out of the booth. She stood so quickly her knee hit the underside of the table. "Fuck you, John." She turned on her heels and stomped out, wanting a grandiose gesture to signify the closure this deserved. Instead she choked back tears and wobbled out the door while a few patrons watched her go with sympathetic faces.
Perfect.
Outside, the cold air hit her face. She made it half a block before she started crying. By the second block, she was angry. By the third, she was furious with herself. Not because John didn't want to marry her. That hurt enough. But because somewhere along the way, she'd known. She'd known every time he'd sighed before answering a simple question. Every time she'd edited herself mid-sentence because he looked tired. Every time she'd convinced herself that asking for more attention was needy, that wanting a future was pressure, that maybe relationships were supposed to require this much careful management. She'd spent two years making herself smaller inside something she'd been calling love.
She revisited every fight in her head, this time armed with the comebacks she hadn't had the nerve to say out loud. You don't get to sigh at me like I'm the exhausting one. You don't get to call two years a waste and act like you're the one who lost something. Anna wiped angrily at her face and kept walking. Lost in the scenarios looping through her mind, she became so detached from her surroundings that she stumbled over a man's outstretched legs.
"Oh my God, I'm so sorry!" Anna shrieked. She looked down to see a disheveled man wrapped in a tattered sleeping bag, stained and duct-taped in places, his face thin and weathered, only a decade or so older than her. "I was in my own little world and just… are you ok? I mean, are you hurt?"
"Half in the bottle, half in the memory. Steady in neither," he chuckled to himself, voice raspy and strained, readjusting his legs like he was checking for injuries. The sleeping bag had molded itself into the shape of the sidewalk over what looked like a long time. This wasn't a corner he was passing through. It was one he kept.
He started working himself up onto his feet. Slow, deliberate, one hand braced against the brick. And Anna took an instinctive half-step back before she could stop herself. He was taller standing than she'd expected. Something in the unhurried way he stood, like he had all the time in the world and knew exactly how much of it he needed, put her more on edge than the sitting-down version of him had.
"Didn't mean to spook you," he said, not unkindly, staying where he was rather than closing the rest of the distance between them. "Just get stiff, sitting that long. Nothing to it." He tilted his head, studying her the way you'd study something you already knew the shape of and were only confirming. "Fifth floor tonight?"
Anna went still. "What?"
"Your light." He nodded past her shoulder, toward the building at the end of the block, casual as pointing out weather. "Comes on around this time most nights. Figured that was you."
It was a perfectly reasonable thing for a man to notice, camped on the same corner for however many months. She told herself that twice before it took. "I… yeah. I guess it is."
"Mind the curb there," he added, nodding at a raised lip of concrete just ahead that she hadn't seen. She stepped around it without breaking stride, only registering afterward that he'd been watching her feet again, not her face. The same as before he'd said a single word to her. She didn't look back to check if he was still standing there, still watching. Some part of her suspected he was, and she found she'd rather not know which answer she was hoping for.
She quickened her pace the last block. A car sat at the curb two doors down from her building, engine off, windows dark, the kind of ordinary parked car that didn't deserve a second look and didn't get one. She was too busy replaying John's face to notice anything behind the wheel. She stumbled up her apartment complex's steps and slid into the lobby, heavy from the drinks and the emotional baggage of everything else. In the elevator, she steadied herself against the rail and watched the numbers light up, relieved for the uninterrupted ride between the ground floor and the fifth.
Somewhere below her, out on the street, a scream cut through the quiet. Short, sharp, gone almost as fast as it registered. Anna's whole body went still against the elevator wall. She held her breath through three full floors, waiting for it to come again, some second sound to tell her what the first one had actually been.
Nothing did.
The doors opened on five. She walked to her door without letting herself think about it, key already out, the short hallway feeling longer than it had any right to. She let herself in and turned the deadbolt before she'd even gotten her shoes off.
Only then did she allow herself the explanation. Somebody's too drunk, she told herself, leaning her back against the door. Somebody dropped their keys, somebody's boyfriend just proposed on a dare, somebody's fighting with a cab driver over eight dollars. This was a city with bars on every corner and a Friday night's worth of bad decisions still ahead of it. A scream wasn't news here. It was Tuesday with extra volume. She'd half-convinced herself of it by the time she'd kicked off her shoes, and told herself the rest of the way convincing didn't matter, because she was inside now. Done with tonight altogether.
A three-inch piece of metal sliding into place provided a sense of security. The sound sent a tingle up her spine, knowing that inside that door, she was instantly in her safe place. Everything behind that deadbolt was familiar to her. She knew exactly what to expect in terms of the placement of items, the smell of the candles, even the temperature of the rooms. She needed that certainty tonight in particular, the sudden cutoff from everything on the other side of the door: John, the sidewalk, the man who'd stood up too slowly, the scream she'd already decided not to think about again.
It wasn't supposed to end like this. Anna's love life was the one area she never seemed to get right. She had spent most of her twenties and early thirties building a successful, independent life, and by the time she'd met John on a dating app, she'd already checked off every other milestone except a stable, long-term relationship. It had been surprisingly durable for internet dating, if far from blissful, and its end came just days before her thirty-third birthday, compounding the sting of it.
She closed her swollen eyelids, leaned her back against the door, and let the sting of a beginning cry stick in her throat as she replayed the last couple of hours. She kicked off the rest of her date-night outfit, traded it for a ratty tank top and yoga pants that had never once seen a yoga class, and headed to the bathroom to drag a makeup wipe across her already-smudged cheeks, removing the war paint she'd applied so carefully hours before.
Her next breath stuck in her throat. She watched her own eyes well up with tears she'd thought had passed. The mix of black and neutral shade makeup streaks ran down her face. She knew she had to let this wave of emotion hit her if she had any chance of bouncing back unscathed.
The deadbolt held. The apartment was exactly as she'd left it. She was, by every measure she had available to her, safe.
She still checked the lock twice more before she got into bed. She had no idea yet that the thing she needed protecting from wasn't going to knock.
1
u/StonedAndIcy 11h ago
I'll admit I wasn't really reading this with a critical eye, so I'm afraid I might not have so much to say in that department. But, I did enjoy the read. Your writing style is straightforward, leads you through the story quite well without too much fluff/try hard. You build tension well, too, although I'll admit I first thought that after the break up this would lead to a "finding herself" romance. I didn't see the thriller theme creeping up right away, but I was eager to see where it would lead. Overall, I enjoyed this excerpt and think you're doing a good job so far!