The Indie Collaboration Presents
Kiss and Tales
A Romantic Collection
Another collection of free original tales brought to you by The Indie Collaboration. This time we present a chocolate box selection of love stories. Some are romantic, some funny, some sad and some mysterious. Whatever the style, there will be a story in here that will melt even the most hardened of hearts.
ISBN: 9781310699047
Copyright Retained By Authors
Cover Art by Book Birdy Designs
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The Tales
ALL THE WAY TO GENEVA BY Alan Hardy
LOVE ISN'T FAIR By Madhu Kalyan Mattaparthi
SUNNYSIDE By Peter John
ONE DAY IN THE RAIN By Priya Bhardwaj
WHEN LOVE CAME KNOCKING By Sonya C. Dodd
TALES OF ERANA: THE LEGEND OF OELIANA By A. L. Butcher
THE PRINCE By Gunjan Vyas
LOVING HEARTS AND BLACK ARTS By D. C. Rogers
A LATTE TO GO By Chris Raven
YOU CONTRADICT YOURSELF By Gunjan Vyas
THE HEART WISH By Kristina Blasen
The Poems
EVAN AND JOAN By P.W Collier
WISHES By William O'Brien
A VALENTINE FROM MARCELLA By Greatest Poet Alive
YOUR SMILE By Madhu Kalyan Mattaparthi
TO THE MOON By P.W Collier
FORETOLD By William O'Brien
TWO FLAVORS By Madhu Kalyan Mattaparthi
JUST HEAR ME OUT By Greatest Poet Alive
BONDED By William O'Brien
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT By Madhu Kalyan Mattaparthi
ETERNITY By William O'Brien
FIRST KISS By Madhu Kalyan Mattaparthi
THE FLEETING KISS By Peter John
SERENE By Chris Raven
WAIT FOR ME By Greatest Poet Alive
About The Authors
Also By The Indie Collaboration
EVAN AND JOAN
It was late fall, almost winter, when Evan and Joan walked along the shore;
It was the very place Evan always loved to explore;
He was too thoughtless on that cold winter day;
It was much too cold for straying that way;
Joan just wanted to go home;
She wasn't dressed too warmly and didn't want to roam;
She felt chilled right to the bone;
“Don’t wander too far down the beach,” they were told;
For her, the day was much too cold;
Then Evan saw those two greyish rocks, with big black dots;
The beach looked back at him, with two staring stone eyes;
He knew they’d be perfect for his winter surprise;
He put the rocks in his pocket and they returned to a fire;
It wasn’t too soon for Joan; she felt so tired;
Winter snows began, the beach was white;
A snow storm covered everything in sight;
It started in November and seemed to last forever;
Everyday seemed colder to Joan;
When the blowing stopped, the snow outside had really grown;
It covered the house, right up to the roof;
Most everyone stayed at home, staying inside and cold weatherproof;
Evan built a large snowman that looked alive, with those two rocks for the eyes;
It made Joan smile, under those dark winter skies;
That snowman with those two eyes of stone;
What might a snowman have thought, looking back at Joan?
They spent weeks trapped by the cold winter weather;
Joan sat quietly, in the big armchair;
Every day she looked out, and smiled to see the snowman there;
Winter was so long that year, and death came much too near;
For Joan's well-being, they all had fears;
Evan felt the blame, when the reaper finally came;
The snow melted, but the rocks remained;
Evan placed the pair, inside with her there;
Buried all together, on a hilltop of Scottish heather;
On Valentine's Day, Evan succumbed from the loss;
He's buried beside her, near the stone cross.
P.W Collier ©2014
ALL THE WAY TO GENEVA
By Alan Hardy
Sebastian glanced at the snow-clad mountains and, in the foreground, the fields with their distinctive-looking cows munching grass. People travelled far to see such classic Swiss scenery, but he was indifferent to its splendours.
He’d often been moody of late. The weekend over, he was back on the train to Lausanne and that soul-destroying Business School. The weekend at home in the quaint streets of Vevey had gone so quickly, as always. That was what he loved: the old picturesque town with its grey houses and cobbled streets which, from his parents’ balcony, he had so often painted. He loved everything about Vevey, apart from his arsehole of a father, that is. It was his father who had made him enrol on this wretched business course. Then of course there was his girlfriend, Alice. He wasn’t too sure if she was one of the things he loved about Vevey, or if she was someone to be bracketed with his father, someone who was oppressing him and taking away any chance he had of doing what he really wanted.
“All good experience for when you come to work in the family business,” his father had said. “And don’t forget, you’ll be taking it over one day. A secure future, that’s what you have. Imagine what others would give for that.”
He twirled his ridiculous-looking moustache as he spoke, with a great, self-satisfied grin on his nauseatingly red-cheeked face. He had gone even redder, even seemed close to an apoplectic fit when Sebastian had told him he wanted to attend art school. Alice too had advised him not to be silly, and to concentrate on a viable future of steady work and money.
No, Sebastian was completely disinterested in the scenery outside the train window, but it wasn’t just that he wasn’t in the mood to stare at undulating hills and vales, with their huge, stupid cows. He was interested in something else at the moment, and had been ever since he entered the carriage.
He stole a glance at her again. He just knew she was foreign, something about the shape of the face, and the aquiline nose. He was pretty sure she was English. An English rose. She looked as if she were in her late teens, maybe twenty. A couple of years younger than him. She seemed quite shy. And so slim and petite, as she sat there in her beige raincoat, self-consciously glancing around, swallowing occasionally, and twiddling with the straps of her handbag on her lap. She had long, blonde hair, and the most amazingly intense blue eyes he had ever seen. He wanted to stand up, go over to her and speak to her. He longed to lick that beautiful nose and gaze deep into those eyes, but he just didn’t have the courage needed for such spontaneous affairs of the heart. Any more than he had had the bottle to tell his father where he could stuff his Business School, or give money-grabbing Alice the big heave-ho.
He didn’t have the determination to pursue his dreams. And what guarantee was there that he would succeed as an artist? Did he have real talent? He’d often seen those arty-farty types about Lausanne, artists and writers who wandered around in grubby shoes, torn jeans and frayed shirts, who had chosen an alternative and, no doubt, unwashed lifestyle, whether it brought money or not. That was the problem: he couldn’t see himself spending an impoverished lifetime following his own personal rainbow. He was ashamed to admit it, but he had grown used to
his comfortable, bourgeois existence.
She had a great French accent for a foreigner, let alone an English girl. Sebastian had devoured every word of her short conversation with the ticket-collector. He felt himself falling in love. She was his fantasy-girl. A girl from the land of tea, muffins, and egg and bacon. The land of rain, and driving on the left. He reddened as she unbuttoned her raincoat; she stirred in her seat, coughing nervously. Sebastian coughed too as his eyes lit upon her firm, ample bosom, and the tiny waist he so wanted to place his hands around. She turned her intense gaze upon him. He looked quickly away. They both blushed. Say something to her, you stupid bastard. But the words wouldn’t come. She licked her dry lips. She looked down, mindlessly scuffing away with her hand an imaginary crumb or two. She was so shy, so vulnerable that he wanted to grab her in his arms, hold her close to his body, and give her all the reassurance she needed. He wanted to be the rock on which she could build her life. There was a fear in those eyes, he felt, a need to find the person who could save her, and bring her happiness. If she didn’t find him, she could be lost for ever.
In his mind he went over and over things he could say. He dismissed them all. He was as big a baby as she was. Friends of his at the Business School, in his situation, would have already found out where she lived and what she was doing next Friday evening.
The train would soon be arriving in Lausanne. He reached into his bag, taking out a pen and a note-pad. He wrote on it, and then tore off the top sheet. He read and re-read it. He folded the paper around the pen. The train began to brake in stops and starts, and Sebastian glanced out at the familiar houses that marked the approach of the station. He stood up, stumbling against the seat as the train lurched to the side. He moved up to her and stood in front of her, his heart about to burst. She looked up, her eyes uncertain and oddly furtive, yet managing to look him in the face.
“This is for you,” he said in English, handing her the pen with the paper folded around it.
She instinctively reached out and took it. He stared a moment longer into those deep, yet troubled eyes, feeling as if he could be lost forever within their bright beauty. He lingered a moment, looking at her face framed by her blonde hair, and the pale skin he wanted to lavish with kisses, even stole a glance at her supple body and slim legs before returning to be sucked back into the dreamy delirium of those blue orbs of exquisite, heart-breaking, agonising heavenliness. In no time at all, their little tête-à-tête was over. He moved away as the train jolted to a halt.
As he walked along the platform, and through the station, he didn’t look back. He knew it was stupid, but he was sure he had met the love of his life. And had he lost her for ever? In those last seconds when he had stood before her, he had appraised her with an artist’s eyes, measuring her, judging her tints, hues, shapes and twists of flesh. He had mentally prepared the palette, the brushes and the tubes of paint he would use time and again to picture and frame her forever, against the passing of time and its forgetfulness.
*****
Miriam felt sad, as she often did. She was returning from Sierre, the pretty town in Valais where her uncle and aunt lived. She’d spent the weekend there. She had promised her mother she would visit them when she could. Her uncle was fine, polite and friendly enough, in that distant Swiss way of his, but she liked his wife more. She was bubbly and chatty, immediately taking to Miriam. Maybe she sensed Miriam’s loneliness, and her difficulties in a world of men and women who were polite and friendly enough, and yet remained so far away, so far away from the fears in her head and the dreams that plagued her at night.
Miriam was returning to Lyon in France. The Brig-Geneva train was taking her to Geneva in a couple of hours, and then the French train would take her to Lyon in another three. It was her year abroad, the third year in her four-year French course at Manchester University. She was twenty. She was the English language assistant at a Lyon school. It was either that, or attend a course at one of the local universities. She’d had enough of universities for a while, with their silly young men and women pretending they were cool and mature, while all the time unsure who they were and what they might become. She’d already been in Lyon quite a few months. There were one or two other students there from England whom she knew, but they weren’t close friends. Miriam hadn’t really had any close friends for a number of years, not since her mid-teens to be exact. It had been nice to have this break in Switzerland, the land of her mother, the land her mother had left to follow the English boy she had fallen in love with so passionately, and then, equally passionately, fallen out of love with, and divorced. Her mother had stayed in England, bringing Miriam up to become an English rose, with just a hint of edelweiss. A strange little mixture, introverted, uncommunicative, gloomy, almost clinically depressed at times.
Miriam was surprised at the interest the young Swiss man had aroused in her when he entered the carriage at Vevey. To be totally honest, boys were a closed book to her, a book she had had no real inclination to open. She had watched him as he moved over to a corner seat by the window, and as he automatically, and shyly, looked out. She had then averted her gaze, in case he would spot her nosiness and give her an annoyed stare.
She closed her eyes and pictured him in her mind. Curly, brown hair. Green-blue eyes, not so large, but so intense. So intense in their awkwardness. So defiant in their shyness. How she wished she could reach with her hand into his mind and take out all his secrets and open them up in her palm. She wanted to know his dreams, what he loved and what he wanted. She ached to enter into those dreams and walk around them, play her part in his fantasies and wishes. She looked at him again. Her body gave a little jump as her eyes wandered over his torso, his limbs, his lap. A hunger took hold of her as he crossed his legs. What was the matter with her? Her eyes kept straying to his lap where he was scribbling something on a note-pad.
Inexperienced as she was, she knew he was fascinated by her. He couldn’t stop giving her intense glances. Mind you, she’d got used to that in France. Southern France. Mediterranean France. Men would stop her in the street, ask her where she came from, if she wanted to go out with them and if she could teach them English. That’s the way it was in France. Men were men, and beautiful women were chased. She found it all quite ridiculous. She would laugh at them, and walk away. She sensed it was different here in Switzerland, a bit like in England, where men were less confident, less brash and less pushy. A bit like this shy, young man seated just a few metres from her, who had caught hold of her heart in a way no other man ever had or, she imagined, ever would. She wanted to take hold of his sweet face, and cradle his head in her lap, and run her fingers through his fine, soft hair. She wanted him to look up at her and whisper nonsense to her, the sort of nonsense that until now she had run from. She wanted him to tell her everything about himself. She wanted to own him.
To Miriam’s intense disappointment, just as the train was arriving at Lausanne Station, he stood up to leave. Then, to her equally intense surprise, he walked straight over to her, and stood in front of her. Miriam felt both excited and nervous. Exposed. She imagined everyone was looking at her. She could sense his awkwardness. She managed to stare him in the face. The presence of his body close to her, its itchiness, its smell even, overwhelmed her.
“This is for you,” he said.
She unthinkingly took the pen he was offering her. She didn’t say a word. She couldn’t speak. Life seemed to have stopped still, with her sitting there looking up at him as he gave her his little souvenir. She would have loved life to remain frozen into that moment for all eternity. Then he was gone.
“I couldn’t stop looking at you. You are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. Here is my phone number. It is your decision.”
She let the paper, and the pen his hands had folded it round, fall on her lap. Tears formed in her eyes. She looked at his phone number. She knew she would never ring him. She would never see him again. She would never know what might have been.
**
***
Sebastian stared listlessly out of the train window. So, that was it. Although he felt depressed, he was, in a strange way, quite relieved. He was his own man again. A bit like he’d felt when his other divorce had come through. Divorce number two was just as depressing, and just as liberating as divorce number one. Two failed marriages. Unexpected return homes to find Alice, and then, life repeating itself a few years later, Olga, all sweaty, naked and bothered straddling some half-witted hunk of masculine beefcake. Grounds for divorce, and for humiliation, and relief.
He was on the train from Lausanne to Vevey, to indulge in a bit of a relaxing amble through its woods, where as a young man he had so often wandered and, when the urge took him, would sit down to paint a perspective of trees and fallen leaves. He had the family home to himself now. His father had died suddenly a few years back, the most helpful thing he had ever done for his nearest and dearest. Sebastian’s mother was now living with a mild-mannered, unambitious clerk in the German part of Switzerland. Sebastian was fully in charge of the accursed family business in Lausanne, for which he had sold his soul and given up all his dreams. He hated every moment of it.
He glanced around the carriage again. He always glanced around the carriages whenever he was on the Brig-Geneva train. Just in case. Thirteen years ago, following that episode of the pen and scribbled message, he had looked out feverishly for that blonde-haired English girl for a few months whenever he was travelling to or from Vevey. He would wander up and down the train, out of himself, a crazed look on his face. Always fruitlessly. He never saw her again, and she never rang him.
He’d chickened out. He knew that now. How could he have expected her to make the first move? She wasn’t that sort of girl. She wasn’t an Alice or an Olga, greedily out for what she could get. He should have spoken to her when he had had the chance.
Probably there hadn’t been a day in his life since that episode that he hadn’t thought of his strange and beautiful English girl, if only for a fleeting moment, or in reaction to a glimpse of blonde hair and a svelte figure in a crowded street that would click his sexual computer.
Initially he had tried on numerous occasions to paint her, but had given up. Her image was so strong in his mind that he didn’t require a visual representation. She was too much part of him for him to need it.