A previously untitled draft found in my phone's notes.
First written on a whim in early 2018, briefly extended in 2019, and (very) minorly revised on 2/24/2021.
This was created without much in mind,  
other than the inspiration from a guilty enjoyment of popular Victorian fictions and the eternally fantastic "rivals-to-lovers" cliché.
Though the usual stiff and linear prose is present, I hope to redeem it somewhat in the coming future.

This is now an ongoing work.

 

The room was swollen with dust, and the furniture in it seemed to stand on an awkward footing as though every other leg had been made a hair too short for the floor it rested upon. Despite the stifled air, it was rather cozy, and the murky plum-colored

light that always seeped through the curtains at this time of night blanketed it with warmth.

 

[...]

 

She draped her hands across the seat, and the man keenly watched the marvelous way her nervous fingers jittered in tandem with the leather that shriveled helplessly beneath her weight.

 

Ramrod straight, rattling as full of glass, she took a breath.

 

 

"It's been a long time since I've even written for pleasure, you know."

 

The declaration, though at once stale fare and relieving confession to her, did nothing to cork the rubbery mirth-lit gleam leaking from his skin. [...]

 

Having been relieved of one of her present debts, she sighed; and seized up and away, streaming into the future, and in the  imagined him as an elastic old man: his gravity-plumped rubber ears waving around in the breeze, peaking towards the cataract-stained eyes which shone buttery with faraway amusement, the drooping lips betraying nothing but taking silent delight in the wax-muffled screams of the little pennycatchers who had wandered into the old farm property in hopes of finding someone to peddle trinkets to, and instead drew out the dreadful spirit of the very old that the very young knew only as a half-living anti-miracle that God no longer claimed—

 

"...Oh?"

 

She fell back into her body with a start and realized that she likely had been pantomiming her strange projections for him to see. She desperately hoped she had only nodded, as not to entertain him with her betrayed inner monologues. Worse, her rational mind realized, was the dreaded question he was certain to ask! How could someone who so clearly spent most of their time in some state of neuroses — or deep in the stupors of the chronic daydreamer, whichever fit the popular picture the best — ever bear not to find the act of writing so dearly pleasurable?

[...]

“Well, why don't you?"