You were wrong about me

Flash 4
Prompt: You were wrong about me
Characters: James and Amelia
Timeline: Present day
Author’s comments: I would really appreciate comments on how these characters came across as people. If you liked them/thought one or both of them was weird/if they were good or bad people/if one of them screwed the other over. I have quite a clear view but I feel like it could be quite ambiguous and I’m keen to get your views.

I suppose it’s fair to say that I fancied Amelia from the moment I moved into the house. Perhaps it was even one of the deciding factors when I chose the house. But it was one of those unconscious kind of attractions. I didn’t look at her and think, god I want to get into your knickers! I just instantly wanted to be around her. It was a big house share. Six of us. Two couples, two singles. We never really saw the couples. They hid out in their rooms being serious and grown up. Sometimes I’d pass them on the landing or end up queuing behind one of them to get in the bathroom but mostly they kept to themselves.

I didn’t have a lot of friends in London. I’d moved from Manchester for work and I was struggling to settle in to a team of people who had been working together for years and weren’t too keen on the new Northerner. Amelia claimed to be the only one of her friends who was single. And so we became close quickly. We spent nights sitting on the couch taking turns watching each other’s favourite films. Tarantino for me. Lurhman for her. We talked about everything. She told me about her ex-boyfriends, her job, her dream that one day she would run away from rainy England and live on an island miles from civilisation. I didn’t have any exes so I told her about my three brothers and growing up in Manchester and my boring Engineering job.

It didn’t take long before we started to focus what I suppose would have been our “romantic” energy, if we’d have had partners, on each other. I would come home from work and find that she had cooked dinner for me. I took her to my black tie company Christmas party. We went to the cinema together and planned nights in. Although our relationship had never crossed a physical boundary, I suppose I thought of her as mine.

I didn’t realise it though until the night we went to that bar. We didn’t go out much but there was this one night where she came in from work all excitable and said that it was “just one of those days” and she wanted to drink and dance. She disappeared into the bathroom for hours, blaring Girls Aloud and then emerged like I had never seen her before. Her ponytail had been released into a cascade of blonde waves around her face and she was wearing a low-cut dress, showing a milky white expanse of cleavage I had never realised existed. She pulled me giggling to the bar. We had shots. We danced. We exchanged innuendo. I returned from the bathroom to find her being chatted up by an oaf of a rugby player. I felt jealousy flash through me like a fiery hand and squeeze my heart. Maybe I had never been jealous because there had never been a situation where I had faced the prospect of not having her undivided attention. The rugby player eventually wandered off and at 2 in the morning I bundled Amelia into a cab and felt needed while she rested her head sleepily on my shoulder.

I don’t know why I didn’t make a move on her. I guess I was crippled by fear, it was less fear or rejection than the fear of the consequences of falling in love with my housemate. I knew these kind of incestuous involvements ended badly. Everyone said it. It was the cardinal rule of house shares. But I started to think of her more and more. Differently from how I had thought about her before. Every time she playfully took my hand or curled up against me on the couch, my heart beat faster and my breath caught in my throat.

About a month after we had been to the bar, we were sitting at the table in the kitchen eating cereal. It was a Saturday and the sun was out. We had nothing to do.
“James, I’m bored,” said Amelia.
“We could go to the cinema,” I said, stirring my cereal.
“I’m bored with the cinema!”
“What do you want to do then?”
“I know,” she said jumping up from her stool. “Let’s go on a road trip!”
“A road trip? In your car. We don’t get further than Hertfordshire before it blows up!”
“Oh, Jamie,” she said, coming up behind me and throwing her arms around my neck. I couldn’t resist inhaling deeply as her hair fell in my face. “We don’t have to go far. We could drive to Hampton Court and have a picnic!”

Of course we went. I would have done anything she asked me. Of course her car broke down, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in a field. People think London is one giant grid city but it only takes twenty minutes and you’re in the countryside. Amelia rung roadside assistance. And so we waited. Just like after the bar, she rested her head on my shoulder.
“I’d rather be stuck here with you than anyone else, Jamie,” she said.
I knew it was the perfect moment and as she looked up at me, I leaned forward and pressed my lips against hers.

She shoved me violently. “What the fuck?”
There was nothing I could think. “I thought you… I thought I… I thought we…”
“I thought you were gay!”
“Gay? Why on earth would you think I was gay!”
“Well you’ve never mentioned a single girl that you’ve been with and you’re a bit…”
“A bit what, Amelia?”
“Effeminate!”
“I never mentioned any blokes either,” I said. “You were wrong about me.”
Amelia turned her car key absent-mindedly and by some miracle the engine turned over.
“I guess we’d better go home,” she said.
“I guess so,” I said.