Hey guys, over at my LJ I went on a long diatribe about a few aspects of the fanfiction concept. Again you may find it interesting or you may really, really not. Thanks for reading!

20 I Need a Slave

The swankier a press party, the more paparazzi there were; Delilah generally let them take pictures, because she figured the more there were the less they were worth.

"Hey, Delilah, how are you? How's it going?"

"Delilah—hey, Delilah!"

"Hey, Delilah, are you dating Adam? Adam Harlow? Are you dating, are you guys dating? Hey Delilah—"

"Do you like Christina Hendricks? Are you a fan?"

"Hey, Delilah—over here—"

"Can I get an opinion on Photoshopping? What's your opinion on Photoshopping?"

"Hey, Delilah, are you dating Adam Harlow? Delilah? Are you sleeping with him?"

"Can we get an opinion on Photoshopping? Do you disagree with it?"

One of the policemen threw his coat over her bare shoulders. "Give her some room, fellas," he called, walking alongside her and Mr Driscoll to the car.

She slept in her evening gown on the way back from London and got up the next morning to go to the gym. As she came up to the street corner there was a man with no teeth waiting to cross the street perpendicular to hers. He coughed a frightening, guttural cough without covering his mouth and then rasped to her, "Carsh enneh fuhn ger!"

She blinked. "What?"

"Fenneh grash keh nanna!"

She still didn't understand. "What?" she repeated.

"Everybody's coughing!" he said. "Everybody's sick! But I'm not sick, I'm drunk!"

She blinked. "Uh-huh," she said, and crossed the street.

Her drunken homeless encounters quota exploded while she was in Pewter. As she took out her Pokégear to check the time, she saw two men on the next block, one holding a bottle in a paper bag. The other one said to her as she walked by, "Hello."

"Hi," she said.

"Oooh! Don't look at me like that!" he said, turning to follow her as she passed by.

Her face had been blank, so she didn't know what he was talking about.

"Where are you going?" he asked. "Where are you going, love?"

"To the gym," she said, gesturing down the street. "The pokémon gym."

"Well, listen to you," he said. "Where are you from, my little darling?"

She said California and he started to sing a Beach Boys song. She wasn't sure what to make of it; he wasn't threatening but he smelled terrible and the other one said next to nothing, occasionally taking a swig from his bag.

He asked her for her phone number but then realized he didn't have his phone with him. Perhaps she was being a snob, but she found it hard to believe he even had a phone—they had to be homeless. She had still been holding her Pokégear, and he grabbed it right out of her hand and started trying to put his number in it.

"Hey—!"

"Crikey, look at this thing," he said, pressing buttons. "What is this, anyway?"

It started to ring, and she grabbed it back, only to have her psychological welfare threatened by Adam's name on the screen.

"OooOOoooh, it's her boyfriend," sang the homeless man.

She was saved from having to decide whether or not to answer the call when he grabbed the Pokégear back again and finished putting his number in the directory.

It took until she was inside the gym to realize that she probably should have been worried that he was trying to steal her Pokégear. She decided to pretend she didn't know Adam had called her. After all, if she had left the pokémon center just a few minutes earlier, she would have already been in the gym when he called, and she would have missed it because she would have been training. So that made sense.

Maybe he would try to call her again, or maybe he would wait for her to return his call. Either way, at least now she could figure out something to say to him. She couldn't imagine what he wanted to say to her. She didn't really think he would apologize—and anyway, if he had to apologize, she did too, and she didn't really want to, because she wasn't sorry, and she didn't think he was either.

Organizing the way she felt about Adam was confusing and frustrating. She couldn't not think about it, about the way he felt against her, and the look on his face, his handsome features contorted with desire; she wanted to see him make that face again, she wanted to excite him, upset him, please him, anger him, thrill him, she wanted him to feel the things he made her feel.

She wondered if he thought about her. She wondered what he thought about her, and when, and how often. She wondered what he thought about doing to her and what he did to himself instead. She wondered if his thoughts were anything like hers.

She trained at the gym later than she usually did, aware that it was only because she didn't want to talk to him; when the gym closed, David, a cute and very gay Scottish man with whom she had been training, invited her to eat with him and some of his friends.

Obviously she accepted; if she went home, she would have to check her Pokégear and discover a missed call from Adam and manners would obligate her to call him back. If she went out to eat, she would come back late, and manners would obligate her to wait until the next day because she wouldn't want to wake him up of course. Besides, David was funny and friendly even if she could barely understand anything he said. In the loud restaurant she felt marginally less rude asking that everything be repeated. The only thing she understood without question was "aye", which was actually good, because "aye" made up about 65% of his conversation.

As they ate David showed her a picture on his cell phone of his mustachioed friend Neil wearing a thong with a pink feather boa looping through it. There were two of them, exactly the same except that in the second he wasn't sucking in his stomach. David flipped between them to make her laugh; Neil, who was sitting across the table from her, winked at her incessantly throughout the evening. At first she wasn't sure what to think of it, because he was much older and she was pretty sure he was gay too, but then she noticed he did it to everybody.

It was very loud and dimly lit in the restaurant but she didn't mind if she sat there forever, listening to everyone at the table recite Robert Burns poetry as they got progressively drunker. David was very, very blond, his eyebrows and eyelashes so white it looked as if snow had fallen on his face, and his alcohol flush was quite striking.

But for various legal reasons she couldn't sit there forever and so at some point was back at the pokémon center. She went through the motions of checking her Pokégear for missed calls and what do you know there was one from Adam, but darn the luck if it weren't already midnight. He might have been in bed and who could say.

The smell of Indian takeaway was very comforting on a rainy April Sunday. She crouched down to pet Beau, who sniffed interestedly at the box.

"I don't think that's anything you'd want," she said, letting him smell it.

Adam called again and she knew that if she didn't answer again it would look pretty stupid.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Delilah."

"Hi..."

There was a heavy silence.

"Um, you're the one who called me," she reminded him.

"I know, yeah."

"Are you still mad at me?"

He sighed.

She poked at her chana masala.

"No. I mean, I wasn't mad at you."

"It kind of seemed like you were..."

He sighed again. "Look," he said. "Where are you right now? You're not still in Celadon, are you?"

"I'm in Pewter."

"Oh," he said. There was another pause. "Well, will you be coming to Viridian?"

"Yes, I had planned to go there next."

"Well...why don't you...if you want to, when you're here, why don't you come by and see me sometime."

"Um...okay," she said, unsure if he had evoked Mae West intentionally or unfortunately.

So what did that mean, to "come by and see" him? Severed communication with Adam was easy enough but suddenly she was thrown back into a relation for which she was thoroughly unqualified. Delilah wasn't ashamed of being a virgin but she suddenly felt very incompetent and bumbling. She disliked the feeling of being illiterate in any subject and this was a test for which she had no practical training. She could talk about sexuality hypothetically, with facts and figures and diagrams, but did it mean anything? Was theory good enough?

If they did have sex, what would happen next? Probably nothing. Probably they would continue to have the same tentative, tumultuous friendship, just with sex in it. But wouldn't that be the ideal relationship to have with Adam? To only see each other to have sex, and just not deal with each other at all otherwise?

When there was sexual tension in sitcoms, the quality of the show usually suffered so that the characters could pursue a relationship together (and sometimes this happened even without the sexual tension). The reason this so often was typical of a decline was because it went against what a sitcom was supposed to be: the defining characteristic of a situation comedy was that the situation never changed. The characters were static and easily defined, leading to relationships that were static and easily defined.

But real people were dynamic and always changing, affected by every experience and event. And if people were changing all the time, how could any relationship be constant? Relationships were altered by every passing second based on how the involved parties interacted (or didn't interact).

Negative space was still space.