Who Names The Colors

First Time

First time

They don't talk, ever.

Jo is fairly certain he and Ethan check in, once a year, like old friends with a deep past.

A complicated past.

Complicated by her and harry, by their, whatever you could call it.

True love or something fairy tale like that, but real ones, grimm.

In any case, since his alumni show and apart from her sad tracking of his rising career, they don't communicate, don't commune. She feels him sometimes, knows he must be home at his mother's but blessedly, she never crosses his golden path in the village. Jo is lucky like that.

Her lucky strike was golden even, still sometimes. Like on the morning she woke up to a beep on her phone, just at dawn, a message from an unknown number.

The artist was familiar, beloved, but one she decidedly did not listen to. In fact, when she went into her music app to play the song she noticed she'd missed several releases and then remembered she'd turned off her notifications after a moment's silence crossed her conciousness and something dormant, a sleeping giant, awoke in her chest and core in a way that unsettled her so greatly she had to. After she set up a tinder date in Manchester, scratched the itch and moved on with her life.

He might have been younger with long brown locks. She might have forgotten  his name, or just called out the one that was right for her when she came.  They parted amicably, and she never texted him again, Andrew, and she changed her preference so the other Andrew stayed off her playlists.

It could only be from him.

"Jesus!" She swore, prayed. Did she write this, did he? A whole song about how the first time a Lover called them baby they were killed and resurrected new.

She spent the rest of the day listening. Yeah, wasteland baby would not have been ok. She would not have been ok, if she listened to this when it came out. Too sexy, too in love. She'd been in love then, but alone.

She supposed those two things were still true, but the ache was bearable now. A pleasant soreness, like muscles used after a good gym session, not like her flesh had been ripped from her body and she was walking around raw, not anymore.

The new album must be about a relationships end with the love still in tact. My god, it really felt like they wrote this. It was like Hozier always wrote for them.

Should she text him back? Block him? Send a nude photo?

Jo laughed at herself for the last one. Yeah, that would be a terrible idea. She wondered if he was loved up. She didn't think so, if he texted her. But Cidra may have been right, did it really matter, his usual faithful spirit when confronted with their wine?

Best not to risk it then. He made her drunk and powerless to her desire for his body, his self. She didn't think it was ego to assume she made him a little off his face too.

Best not to think of his face either.

Jo really wanted to respond in some way though.

'Truly' was all she responded.

She stared at gray dots as they appeared, disappeared, reappeared, then went away.

God, what if it wasn't harry?

Well, she was a cat with it's neck extended for a chop, she had to know.

After a cup of tea and busy work, not the office stuff she was doing to get on with her life and finish what could be her very last semester at the university, if the summer festivals and shows went well for her sales. she opened the two line text field again.