A Challenging Challenge

This week's challenge over at Clever Fiction~short stories for the real world proved to be exactly that for me -- a challenge! I wrote one story but it ended up too long. I felt I would lose too much by cutting it down. Maybe I'll have to share it here in the near future. Then I considered a sequel to my Secret Shame, but I'm just not quite ready for that one again. That story really moved me for some reason. Her struggles and emotions were so very real to me. I love all my characters but it doesn't happen that often that one gets so completely under my skin. I'm pretty sure we'll be revisiting that story again in the near future.

The prompt for the week was All Day/Speechless/Dinner and my submission was titled Destiny's Visit. It's another departure from my straightforward Happy Ever Afters, although, as one commenter mentioned, "Imagine meeting either your love or your killer ... and the choice is yours." Seems to me, this story could go either way!

Enjoy the first couple of paragraphs and then jump over to Clever Fiction to read the rest:

Arms folded, elbows resting on the lacquered top of the wood bar, Jake watched the woman in the corner. He was perplexed. She didn’t seem the type to spend her day in a pub. Yet that’s what she’d done. She’d been there all day.

He was also perplexed by his attraction to her. She wasn’t young and she wasn’t pretty. Although … He looked her over and decided she certainly might have been. Pretty, that is. Of course she’d been young. Everyone’s young at some point in their lives.

She smiled at him and his heartbeat tripled its speed behind the wall of his chest. Odd again since Jake Donovan liked younger women. Much younger.

So why did he take off his apron and tell Maria to watch the bar while he took a break? Why did his feet walk him over to the table where the older woman sat? What made him ask her if she minded if he joined her? Simple curiosity? Perhaps. He didn’t have the answers. He only knew it was something he had to do.

Enjoy the rest of Destiny's Visit over at Clever Fiction~short stories for the real world.