AN: Hello, sorry about the delay here! Finals and Christmas prep have kept me enormously busy, but I've finally got some time to post some more! Thanks so much in advance, and reviews are VASTLY appreciated!
THE LUCKY ONE
All the young things line up to take your place.
He has taken a definite dislike to the young man who lives next door.
He is a forgetful one, this man—he is always forgetting something. His pen, his book, his coat—it is always something. And, of course, the retrieval of these items always requires several minutes of chatting with Mees Marsch…
Once, he walked in on them in the kitchen, and he did not at all care for the way he looked at her.
"Oh, yeah, she's quite something," he heard him say casually to a friend as he (Fritz) was passing. "Legs for miles, y'know, and all that hair. Really kind of a knock-out in the right lighting."
(He had to stuff his fists firmly in his pockets and force himself to walk quietly on.)
"So," he says once, when he and Jo both happen to be in the kitchen at the same time. "I uh—I see you are making friends?"
Jo stops looking brooding and pensive for a moment and shrugs.
"Yeah—y'know, just being friendly."
(He does not say it, but friendship appears to be the last thing on the young man's mind.)
"Ah," he says. "So. He is, ah—very ah…"
"He's enormously clever," says Jo in a very flat, grey voice that isn't anything like her. "He's read a lot of Kafka, and he's working on a novel about how there's no such thing as free will. I guess he'll be quite famous soon enough."
He never realized until this moment what a raw hatred he had for both Kafka and determinism.
"Ah," he says again. "Well. It is—lucky, then, that you haf these insights now."
Jo smiles a little; her eyes remain brooding.
"Yes," she replies, and he doesn't at all like her voice. "I guess I'm just the lucky one."