Desires and Dreams

The pair walked for a short distance without exchanging a word. The temperature had dropped further, and Hope had to embrace herself further into her coat to prevent a shiver. Deciding to distract herself, Hope regarded Joe’s profile as it was lit by the dusty moonlight.

He was ridiculously handsome but didn’t appear to be over-aware of it. From what Hope had heard him say, he sounded charismatic and friendly. And he was clearly a caring person for walking a stranger home.

Suddenly, Hope wondered why he had offered to walk her home. It was strange, and if the roles had been reversed, she would not have offered to walk a stranger home in the dark in an unknown city.

Looking away from the profile of his face, which she realised she had been staring at, and he was no doubt aware of that fact, Hope decided to start a conversation. ‘Thanks for walking me home. You didn’t need to. Mack was just being over-protective. If he wanted me to have an escort, he should have just come himself. There was no reason to send you.’

Joe smiled down at her. ‘No, I suppose there wasn’t a reason for him to send me, but I wanted to. I wanted to talk to you, get to know you a little better. You seemed spunky and clever, so I’ll admit I was curious to know more.’

Taken back by his directness, Hope wondered what to say.

Joe continued, looking out ahead of them. ‘I’ve gotta ask; how did you get involved with a crew like Mack’s?’

Hope sighed, looking up as the snow began to fall lightly again. ‘I’m not really involved with the gang. I try to avoid them as much as I can, but sometimes it’s impossible. Mack and I have known each other since we were kids. He keeps the other groups in the neighbourhood around here off my back, and so I do him the odd favour now and again in return.’

‘It didn’t seem like a favour when that guy Bobby brought you in.’ Joe pursued, and Hope knew that he was highly perceptive.

‘I don’t like Bobby, as I imagine you grasped, but he’s Mack’s right hand man, so I have to put up with him. If Mack came and asked me to sing for his boys, I wouldn’t mind so much. Being pulled off the streets by his cronies rankles a little. Especially when he lets Bobby manhandle me.’ Hope laughed brittlely.

‘Tough.’ Joe nodded pensively.

‘You don’t know the half of it.’ Hope raised an eyebrow as she side-glanced at Joe.

‘So, tell me.’ Joe looked down at her directly, and for a few moments, Hope forgot that she had only just met this boy. Spurred on, Hope found herself pouring all her troubles into the ears of her perfect stranger.

The door that led up to her aunt and uncle’s apartment came into view as they wandered down the street, the odd street lamp flickering off and on in the darkness. Hope couldn’t see Joe’s face. At that present moment, she decided it was a good thing.

’Mack’s crowd isn’t my only issue. Really, I suppose my time with the gang is the only time I get to express and enjoy myself.

‘I live with my aunt and uncle because I'm an orphan, spend most of my time looking for a new job, then work at the café all the other hours I can find. At the moment, I’m trying to find a job that’s less soul-crushing, with no positive results, and I…’ Hope stopped, taking a painful cold breath of air deep into her lungs. ‘I just don’t know where I’m going.’

Joe stopped walking on the doorstep of the apartment, intently meeting Hope’s eyes. ‘Where do you want to go?’

Hope looked into his eyes, lost in the depths of them, feeling compelled to complete honesty. She didn’t understand why, but something about him brought out the need to talk about all the things that mounted inside her. Somehow, she felt he would know what to say. ‘That’s just the problem; I don’t know. I feel like I’m just wasting my life at the moment. I keep dreaming that there is something else out there for me, but I’m beginning to think that there isn’t.’

Joe nodded. ‘Well, if you don’t know what you want to do, what about what you think you should do? Maybe that’s an easier question to answer.’

Shrugging, Hope conceded. ’Yeah, I suppose it is. If I do what everyone around me wants, I’ll abandon hope of the new job and end up working at the café full time. Aunt Sophie would love it if I’d take on her business, but I honestly can’t think of anything worse.

‘I’ll probably end up getting with one of the dudes in Mack’s gang, that he approves of, of course. Hopefully whoever he is will marry me and get a place where we can live. Then I’ll most likely have a kid who’ll fall in with their crowd.’

‘So, is that what you want?’

‘No.’ Hope’s answer was an immediate reaction without any thought behind it. ‘I can’t think of anything worse. If I stay here and do that… I live that life, I… I’ll just have existed. Not properly lived, if you get what I mean.’

‘Completely. I felt exactly the same.’ His soft voice was like balm to Hope’s frayed nerves.

Until the words had exploded from within her, Hope had not realised how mad she had been going over what was happening to her life. The job rejections had hit her hard; they’d just reinforced the idea that she had no way of escaping the life she’d been born to. No way of changing the cards she’d been dealt.

Facing the truth, Hope was having a mid-life crisis at sixteen.

And yet, the look in Joe’s eyes showed that he understood what she was going through. That he sympathised with Hope.

‘You need to stop asking yourself the big questions.' Joe told her. 'Ask yourself the simple questions that you have an answer for and leave the rest to fate. You’ll feel much better about the whole situation I think.’

‘What kind of simple questions?’

’What do you like to do in your spare time? What makes you smile? Where would you like to go, if you could? Where do you want to be in five years? Stuff like that.

Hope smiled. ‘I don’t understand how, but it feels like you know me better than I know myself.’

Joe laughed. ‘No, I just was you. I know what it’s like.’ He trailed off, looking down at his hands momentarily, and Hope wanted to push him to tell the story that was on the tip of his tongue. Before she could, he looked up with the enigmatic smile and continued. ‘I think you are a very special girl, Hope, and I think I might just have an idea that could help you.’

Hope smiled again. ‘I’d be glad of some advice if you have any to give. As you can tell, I’m beginning to lose all hope.’

Thrusting his hand in his jacket pocket, Joe produced his phone. ‘I think I could give you some back. I’d love to share what I have learned in the last six months with you, but not here in the middle of the night with the snow about to pelt down on us. Give me your number, and I’ll text you a time and place to meet me.’

Raising an eyebrow, Hope hesitated to trust Joe for a moment. But then, what other chance did she have? If she wanted to get anywhere, she needed to take a leap of faith, and perhaps Joe was that leap of faith.

She’d read somewhere that life is measured in the amount of times you say yes. So, she would say yes.

With a smile, Hope recited her number as Joe typed it into his phone. The snow began to fall around them a little heavier, and a flake dropped down the front of Hope’s top, chilling her breastbone enough to make her shiver.

Joe smiled. ‘You better get in or you’ll catch cold. I don’t want you to freeze to death.’

Hope turned to her door, the cold brass handle in her hand, and looked gently over her right shoulder to face Joe. Having just popped his collar out and thrust his hands deep into his pockets, small snowflakes gently caressing through his wavy hair, he reminded Hope a bit of Mark Darcy in the first Bridget Jones movie. Hope had always been a bit in love with Mark and seeing a sort of reproduction stirred mixed feelings in her.

‘Are you going to be alright to get home alone?’ Hope asked, her voice surprisingly quiet in the night air.

Joe nodded his head, dislodging the snowflakes from his hair. ‘I’ll be just fine. Mack’s putting me up for the time being, so I’m just heading around the corner.’

Surprisingly thankful to know that he wasn’t walking through the dark streets on a cold night, Hope nodded. ‘Good. Anyway, it was nice to meet you.’

Smiling, Joe nodded his head forward slightly. ‘Believe me, it was my pleasure. I’ve had a very special evening’

Before Hope could decipher what that meant, Joe turned on his heel in the snowy street, his black coat defining his strong back as he strode off into the darkness. Hope watched him walk away for a few moments, filled with the urge to run after him and let him take her in his arms like Mark had with Bridget.

But she firmly reminded herself, she was not Bridget Jones, and Joe was definitely not her Mark Darcy. She’d clearly been reading too many romance novels; that sort of stuff didn’t happen in real life.

A few flights of stairs later, Hope arrived outside the apartment door. Pulling her keys from her pocket and fumbling with the lock for a few minutes, Hope managed to successfully open the door without the creaking hinge disclosing her presence.

As it was around eight-thirty, Hope could hear her aunt and uncle watching television in the lounge. Every night, as if it were a religion to them, they watched television from eight pm whilst nine pm. Hopefully that meant they would be distracted whilst Hope walked along the creaky boards to her room.

Taking a deep breath and tiptoeing along the corridor, Hope cringed every time she misstepped and a floor board creaked. Thankfully, her aunt and uncle didn’t seem to hear, and she managed to slip into the safety of her bedroom unnoticed. For Hope, sneaking out had never been a problem; even when she got caught on her way out, her aunt and uncle were always calm about it. It had always been sneaking back in where the issue came.

Chucking her bag across the floor and collapsing onto her snug single bed with a huge sigh, Hope was glad to be home, feeling all the tension of the day seep out into the comforting mattress beneath her. Stretching her arms above her head, Hope rolled over and pulled her soft, furry pale pink blanket around her to keep warm.

There was a chill in the room, and the curtains over her window flapped about in the breeze. Rising from her bed, Hope fixed the latch on the small window, pulling the curtains back to reveal the New York night time scene.

As the apartment was on the twelfth floor, Hope could see across some of the skyline of New York. The view always calmed her down, no matter what kind of day she had had. Leaning against the window sill, the silky curtain slipping softly through her fingers, Hope reached up and pulled the tie from her hair free. Shaking her head gently, her brown curls fell about her shoulders.

Somehow, as she changed into her silky lilac nightdress that night and snuggled under her duvet, looking out at the vast sparkling sky that was only obscured by some dark towers rising up into the gloom, Hope knew that something was changing in her life. She had a strange feeling that she had to cherish these moments looking out over the skyline because they would not last much longer.