Understand the Difference

[sterling]

Title: Understand the Difference
Challenge/Prompt: #60 - Accident
Original Fiction
Rating: PG
Warnings: None

"It won’t happen again. You have to believe me."

"What makes you think you deserve any of my trust?" He turned away, either unable or unwilling to look at me. He was shutting me out and I was losing him. "You cheated on me. With him. After you told me so many times that you were just friends."

The sinking feeling in my gut only intensified as I tried to explain. "I didn’t mean to. It was an accident--"

"No," he said, with a coldness that I hadn’t expected. "It was a mistake. You don’t seem to understand the difference..."

Comments

[lovepeaceohana]

Ouch. This one hits a little close to home for me ^^; But that kind of gut-wrench has got to be a sign of good writing - the emotions, the scene comes across quite clearly.

I like that the narrator is ungendered. I hadn't noticed the first time I read it, and got the usual heteronormative reading with a female narrator ... but then I reread it, and realized that the narrator's gender is never specified, and was deliciously tickled to realize I could just as well be reading a gay male couple fighting. Which made me squee a little.

Another thing I'm realizing as I'm reading it through yet again is that I'm somehow reading the middle second paragraph as dialogue first, then action. The way you've written it has an action interrupting the speaker, but I keep processing it - backwards? - and I think it's because the way the action sentence is set up leads me to think that the narrator is speaking again, which doesn't actually happen until the third paragraph. Hmm.

Well anyway, I like it. :)

[sterling]

Thank you for your feedback! ^_^

I'm glad you caught the unspecified gender with the narrator. I specifically crafted it that way, so that the reader could interpret it the way they wanted to, rather than have me place a specific ideal there.

It could be, that the first person narrative feels like speaking when you read it. Sometimes that happens to me, too. I was playing around with pacing a bit, trying not to deluge the reader with talking as much, even though this scene is largely a dialog. Not sure I succeeded there... XD

I'm glad you liked it. Your comment brought a smile to my face. ^_^