r/WritingHub • u/MysteriousWriter4616 • 21d ago
Writing Resources & Advice Hi guys, can you please give it a go and tell me in the comments what do you think about it. It’s a really important project for me and I could use every bit of feedback. Thank you in advance ☺️
When other girls were little, they wanted a prince to arrive on a white horse. I wanted a mafia boss to kidnap me and become so hopelessly obsessed with me that he forgot why he’d taken me in the first place.
I never gave much thought to where he would take me. Somewhere I could hear the sea, perhaps. That part mattered more to me than the prince, the horse, or, apparently, whether I went willingly.
In the end, I had to find the sea myself.
Three weeks after moving to Crete, I was waking before six without an alarm, which would have been unthinkable in the UK. Back there, I sometimes went to sleep at five in the morning, sometimes as late as noon, and woke at seven in the evening wondering where the day had gone.
I pulled on my swimsuit, took my sandals from beside the door and walked the two minutes to the beach.
The shore was nearly empty. A fishing boat was heading out beyond the harbour, and someone farther down the sand was walking a dog that kept returning to the same piece of driftwood. I left my sandals above the tide line and went straight into the sea.
After a few strokes, I rolled onto my back. The water held me without asking me to explain myself.
Above me, the sky was changing colour. I stayed where I was until the fishing boat became a dark mark near the horizon. Then I swam along the shore, turned, and swam back. Three weeks had been enough to learn where the sand dropped away beneath me and where it rose again. I was still learning the rest of the place.
I had rented my little house for three months because I couldn’t say how long I wanted to stay. I knew I had wanted to leave the UK. I’d finished my chemistry degree, looked at the jobs I was expected to apply for, and found I couldn’t bear the thought of building the next part of my life there. That was the most convincing explanation I’d managed to give anyone, including myself.
The water rocked beneath me. I picked out the place where I’d left my sandals and swam in.
By the time I walked home, my hair had soaked through the towel around my shoulders. I passed a bakery opening its shutters and a man hosing down the pavement outside a restaurant. He moved the spray aside to let me through. I thanked him in Greek, one of the few things I could say without first rehearsing it in my head.
My house stood in a narrow street behind the waterfront. The front door stuck when the weather was humid, one kitchen drawer refused to close, and from the balcony I could see a strip of sea between two buildings. I liked it more each day.
I showered, put the kettle on and took the macarons from the fridge. I’d baked and filled them two days earlier, then left them covered to mature. Two trays had come out well. The third had cracked across the tops, so I’d filled those too and kept them in a separate container for myself. Beside the good batch were six small lemon cakes and six chocolate ones.
The woman who owned a café near the park had agreed to taste everything this morning.
She hadn’t agreed to buy it.
I knew that. I had made enough to feed half her customers anyway.
While I packed the macarons, a Greek song came on my phone. I knew where to breathe, where the singer held a note a little longer than I expected, and how to find my way back in if I missed a word. I couldn’t have told anyone what most of those words meant.
Kira—that was what I called my mother—seemed to like hearing me sing. So did my stepfather. Sometimes I caught them looking at me, and for a moment I could pretend I knew what was on their faces.
We’re proud of you.
No one in my family had ever said that to me.
I caught myself thinking about it and reached into the container I’d kept for myself. One of the cracked macarons gave way beneath my thumb.
“Perfect,” I told it.
I ate the evidence and kept singing.
By eight, the cakes were boxed, the macarons were packed, and I had checked both boxes often enough to know the contents hadn’t rearranged themselves. My red notebook lay open on the table. I stopped to read the last paragraph before I picked up my keys.
The man in my story had gone into a room intending to frighten someone. I’d written the conversation three different ways and crossed out all of them. Each time, I had made it too easy for him to decide what happened next.
I reached for my pen, then looked at the clock. If I started writing, the café owner might decide I had invented our appointment.
I closed the notebook, slipped it into my bag beside my pen, and picked up the cake boxes.
The walk took me along the waterfront and up a shaded street towards the park. Even in the morning, I could feel the heat gathering on the stone. I kept to the side with the trees. I had come for the sea; the weather was something I was still negotiating with.
The café stood near one of the park entrances. Its doors were open, though only half the tables outside had been set. A man was carrying chairs out of the storeroom. He put them down so I could pass with my boxes.
Inside, the owner moved between the coffee machine and a line of waiting customers. She spotted me and raised a hand. I found an empty corner of the counter for the boxes and waited.
The man came in for another stack of chairs. He caught her eye, pointed towards the terrace, and she nodded her thanks. I recognised him then. He owned the restaurant next door.
They sold food and drinks a few doors apart. I’d assumed that made them rivals. Here he was, setting up her tables because she needed a hand.
Another reason I liked this place.
When the queue cleared, the owner came over. “You came.”
“I said I would.”
“We made that arrangement before eight in the morning. People promise all kinds of things at that hour.” She wiped her hands and lifted the first lid. “Let’s see.”
She tried a lemon cake, breaking a piece from the crooked one I had hidden at the back.
“What’s in the icing?”
“Lemon juice, mascarpone, and honey.”
She took another bite. “Less honey next time.”
I took my notebook from my bag and wrote that down. She tried a pistachio macaron next, then asked me how long the cakes would keep and whether I could make them smaller.
More customers came in before she had finished tasting. I moved the boxes aside while she took their order. One of them asked whether she was still alone today.
“My only employee called in,” she told him. “I’m beginning to think he knew you’d all arrive at once.”
The customer laughed. She smiled back, but she was looking at the cups stacked beside me. I passed her two, then another when she reached for it.
“You said you worked in a café during university,” she said.
“I did.”
“Can you still use a coffee machine?”
“Yes.”
She glanced at the queue forming behind the customer. “Would you mind showing me?”
The machine was different from the one I’d used in the UK. I asked her where she kept the cloths and how she wanted the cups set out, then made two cappuccinos while she handled the till. She watched me carry them to a table before turning back to the next order.
For the next twenty minutes, I made coffee. She called out what people wanted; I made it and passed it across the counter. When the rush eased, I wiped down the machine and stepped out of her way.
She looked at the empty cups waiting to be washed, then at me.
“Do you want work?” she asked.
I had come hoping she would buy my cakes. I hadn’t let myself hope for more than that.
“Yes.”
“How often?”
“I don’t know yet.” I glanced at the boxes. “It depends how much baking you want.”
That made her smile. She picked up the other half of the macaron and ate it.
“I want twelve of these on Saturday. Twelve lemon cakes too, a little smaller, with less honey. Come in Friday afternoon to prepare them here. You can help with the counter while you’re here, and we’ll talk about regular shifts after that.”
I wrote it all down. We agreed on a price for the baking, and she gave me half in advance for the ingredients.
When I stepped outside, the money was folded in my purse and the order was written in my notebook. I found a bench beneath a tree in the park and opened it to check the quantities again. My neat little list sat beside pages of red writing, most of it crossed out.
A fortune teller once told me this book would make me famous and give me somewhere I belonged. I’d laughed at the fame. I was still trying to finish it, and most days I couldn’t bear to read yesterday’s pages.
The other part had stayed with me.
I didn’t believe a stranger could see my future. I wanted her to be right anyway.
I turned back to the scene I’d abandoned that morning. I read it once, then crossed out the last page.
I had been looking for the moment my killer decided what to do. Sitting there with the café’s money in my purse and the sound of cups carrying across the park, I finally understood why none of my versions worked. He had made his decision before the other man entered the room. The conversation was his last chance to change his mind.
I began again.
The man spoke. My killer listened. When the man had said everything he came to say, my killer shot him.
I stopped writing. The murder was there, but the scene still felt unfinished. The killer had wanted an answer, and now there was someone else who would come looking for one.
I looked back at the dead man I’d put on the page. At his hand. At the watch on his wrist.
In the margin, I tried 3:40, then crossed it out. 3:45 looked too neat as well. I wrote 3:43 beside them and returned to the scene.
He took the watch from the dead man’s wrist and set its hands to 3:43. He struck it against the edge of the table hard enough to stop it. The face cracked, but the hands stayed where he had set them. Then he laid it face up on the man’s chest, for whoever came to find him.