The following is my entry into Leah Petersen‘s Five Minute Fiction Challenge. It’s my second piece, and I’m quite proud that it made it into the finals!  The wordprompt was ‘inability’.

“I don’t understand.” She stared out the window, eyes so liquid they mirrored the lake without.

“Oh come oh, Tina, you know how things are, how we are.” She could follow his steps by sound as his feet brushed aside twisted up balls of failed drafts.

“No. No I don’t. Explain it to me. Or is that yet another inability you’ll lay at my feet?” His stricken reflection failed to act as the blow he’d expected and she turned, throwing her ring across the room.

It bounced, with accidental accuracy, off his chest. “Explain it to me, James,” she snarled, her voice something she couldn’t, wouldn’t recognize, as she crossed the room.

“Tina, it just is, okay?” He stepped back once, then again. And still she advanced.

“No. It’s not okay. You’re throwing away everything. Explain. It. To. Me.” She punctuated each word with the impact of her finger against his chest. His face darkened, a glower tightening his eyes and her stomach twisted.

“I want to know why. I want to know how. I want to know why it’s my fault.”

As her finger jabbed at him once more his hand closed around it, jerked her against him, twisted her arm into the small of her back, lifting her up onto her toes. His eyes bore into hers. Her heart fluttered like a rabbit’s before a wolf.

His lips pulled back from his teeth in something that should have been a smile but looked much more dangerous.

“Because you won’t shut up, Tina,” he growled, his lips descending to hers in a vicious kiss that was everything she’d been pushing for and more.