9,471 Words... And Still Nothing is Happening

Well, Annie and Ryan are still at Jackie's Place and I continue to write the back story. So whatever I post today will have negligible effect on moving the story forward. My first excerpt... once again, Jackie's specialty, the coffee, has made its way into my story.

Moments before, the thought of a cup of coffee had seemed like the most wonderful, terrible idea she had ever heard. But now, as she sat in the decrepit diner attached to Jackie’s Place and also called Jackie’s Place, she had decided it was only terrible. As she looked down at the cup of black coffee that rolled thickly around in the crud-encrusted mug, she thought she might never stop throwing up if she put that in her stomach. The oily sheen on the top was highly suspect, but she noticed that oddly enough, Ryan was smiling at her from across the table. It was a grin she had always found infectious, full of a lopsided sort of mischief but also full of goodwill.
“I don’t think I can drink this,” Annie said.
“The first sip really sets you back,” he said, “but then it’s okay. It gets better.”
A more resounding endorsement for a cup of coffee she had never heard, and so, reluctantly, she took a sip. It did indeed set her back. She was convinced that the oily black sludge contained a rather heavy-handed jigger of rum, but she caught Ryan’s meaning. She quickly took another sip and realized he had been bang on in his assessment. She felt better. A lot better. She squinted her eyes and nodded at Ryan.
“It’s Jackie’s specialty,” he said by way of an explanation.

With the oily rum jiggered coffee rolling around unpleasantly in her stomach, she was finally ready to ask the question that she had been too afraid to ask since he had shown up unexpectedly at the Las Vegas airport.
“How bad is it?” she asked, taking another sip for good measure. The smile on Ryan’s face disappeared quickly, like a light going off. It was hard to even imagine it had been there only a moment before. He sighed deeply.
“Bad.”


I also finally wrote about Tom's injury. Here is more foreshadowing leading up to it:

Annie was living with Tom by then, and attended every single game, even the travel ones. She was something of a team little sister, a position she both loved and despised. She was comfortable among Tom and his teammates, in a way she would never be comfortable with men again in her life, but she didn’t know that then. When you’re young it seems like the good times will go on forever, and 16 year old Annie had much to learn about life, about love, about dreams, and about what it means to live in the dark emptiness that follows when a dream is shattered.
Is it a sad story? Yes, it is. It is tragic, but it isn’t terribly original. Many people lose their dreams as they grow. For many it’s the sad state of achieving adulthood. Rather than realizing all that is possible, you realize that life is a series of narrowing possibilities, a hallway filled with closed doors, the years taking rather than giving. Many never get to dream as big as Tom Donovan did, and perhaps that is a blessing, because when the mighty fall, the ground shakes with their thunder.