Celia

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Celia sat and stared at the screen. She had no idea where she was going this story, no inkling of how it might end. She did not write romance. She hated love stories. Twaddle and rubbish, that's what they were. She always preferred it when there was either no romance or when it was clear that a budding romance was going to crash and burn.

She hated to think that she had become so bitter and disillusioned about love over the years. It was true that her own love life was hardly stellar. She was not very good at relationships in general, and ones where romantic and/or sexual love were involved were particularly disastrous. After valiantly making it through five affairs of the heart, the longest of which was two years, she realised that she was much, much happy on her own. She was too independent and not at all nurturing, neither traits particularly admired by the male of the species.

Her boyfriends had always complained that she didn't seem to need them, and it was absolutely true. She didn't need them. At best, they were a pleasant distraction. Mostly though, they were an annoyance, forever wanting her to do things with them when all she wanted to do was write. So she had ditched any idea of love in her life and devoted herself to her writing.

And now she had an assignment. She was to write six short stories per year for a themed journal. When she had looked back over the previous issues, she had see themes that piqued her interest and fired her imagination - “When We Were Young”, “Silly Stories”, “A Day in the Life of ...”, “Over the hills” to name a few. There was never any mention of anything to do with romance. Now her very first story was to be for the next issue and the theme was “In the end love won”.

For Celia, love wasn't even in the running.

Inspired by a prompt from Cynthia Morris in her quarterly Free Write Fling.