Song-spiration Saturday: Served Cold

Posted on by Teagan Riordain Geneviene

Saturday, November 23, 2024

Hello, everyone.  Welcome to my sanctuary.  Come on in, put your feet up.  Get yourself a cozy beverage from the bar — coffee, tea, mimosa, Irish coffee… whatever you want.  We’ll have a little music and some friendly conversation.  Yes, that title contains a new addition to my “Teaganese dictionary” — songspiration!  It’s fun for me to use the lyrics of songs as prompts to inspire stories.  Hence the Carley Simon video above.

I’m repeating a little story from 2022.  The character names are not meant to suggest anything about real people.  They came with a stream of consciousness songspiration — so did the story.

Served Cold

(You Walked In Through the Blue Door)

Image collage by Teagan
Image collage by Teagan

Warren walked in through the blue door, with a confidant swagger.  He could have been walking onto a yacht, rather than into the party at my home, where friends came to watch the eclipse.

He smirked when he caught my eye.  Putting a finger to his hat, he winked with the one eye that was visible beneath the brim.  I knew how strategically he placed that hat.

“You were not invited,” I told him flatly when he approached.  “Shouldn’t you be at some fancy party.  I’m sure the Lear jet crowd is having a blast.”

Every woman in the room, and some of the men, turned to watch as he walked up to me.  Some had stopped dancing when they saw him.  Others looked up from drinks and conversations.  They all dreamed that they’d be his partner — for one kind of dance or another.  That was how it always was around Warren.

“I came to return this,” he said, removing my apricot scarf from his neck and handing it to me.

My hand remained at my side.  Grinning, he took both ends of the scarf and suddenly tossed it around me, then used it to pull me close to his chest.

“We made such a pretty pair.  We could again,” he murmured.

“Pretty?  Funny, you never told me that when we were together,” I remarked.

iStock image
iStock image

I noticed one of his twinkling eyes was on the mirror, as he watched himself.  He hadn’t paid any attention to my words.  Warren used to do the same thing when we made love.  He watched himself, with no real interest in me.  He often flirted outlandishly with his reflection.

When we got dressed up for parties, he went on at length about how great he looked.  Particularly the time I had made last minute alterations to a jacket for him, hand stitching it to accentuate his narrow waist and broad shoulders, sparing no time for my own cocktail dress.  He had wriggled his eyebrows at his reflection in the rearview mirror as he drove, nearly running off the road.  All without so much as a “Thank you” or a “You look nice” for me.

As he pulled me close, I heard a girl sigh enviously.  If she only knew…

“It’s starting,” another Ex, David, exclaimed looking out the window at the sky.

David and I didn’t have much of a romance.  It happened too soon, and I was still unsteady after all the things Warren did.  Besides, David told several lies.  Big lies.  Particularly about being divorced from his first wife — he wasn’t.  However, we were still friends.  Sort of.  After the whoppers he told, I didn’t really even want to be friends.  He led his third wife outside, via the kitchen door, chattering happily.

I hoped those two made it work.  Not counting our relationship, David had been through wife number one, wife number two, and then husband number one.  He seemed to have found himself when he found his third wife.  Looking at them made me smile.  Or it would have except for the vain man in front of me.

“You know you dream of being with me again,” Warren whispered into my ear. “You loved it.  Proof of that could be heard a block away.”

Shuddering, I remembered how he was when we were alone together.

“I was young and still quite naïve,” I replied, my face expressionless.  “Any dreams I had of you, of us, were just clouds in my coffee.”

Limitrofe at Pixabay
Limitrofe at Pixabay

I grew cold inside, thinking of the mess he had made of me.  Of the wreck I would always be.  The aftermath of that nightmare was endless.  Although no one could understand it.  Looking at him, no one could believe it.

No one ever believed me about Warren.  Except Mick, I thought as Mick hurried in through the blue front door.

Mick stopped abruptly upon seeing me shove Warren aside.  He walked past us without comment, but kept an eye out, in case I needed him.

Two men couldn’t have looked more different.  Warren was tall and classically handsome, polished, and educated at a prestigious university.  Mick looked more like a street thug.  Frankly he was not an attractive man at all, but there was something… something that attracted me more than anyone else.  His full lips and large blue eyes could express surprising gentleness.  I knew that he would always come if I needed help too.

Rather than swaggering into the room as Warren had done, Mick jumped from one cluster of friends to the next, with exuberant hugs for everyone.  It wasn’t flirtatious.  That was just Mick.

I wanted to trust Mick.  I wanted to love him.  Unfortunately, I was far beyond being able to trust again.  I was terrified of loving anyone, ever again.  I looked at him wistfully.  If only I could be… like everyone else.

“Fine then!” Warren sneered.

He tightened his grip on my wrist only to throw it down.  That made it look like I had been the one trying to hold to him, rather than vice versa.

“You never were worth a f—  I’ll take Natalie with me to Saratoga.  She takes care of her body, and she makes three times more money than you.”

“Taking care of herself” was Warren-speak for being rail-thin.  He stalked to the blue door.  Looking over his shoulder, Warren sneered at me again.  He slammed the door as he left.

I knew the name Natalie.  That was the wife of one of his best friends.

My phone rang.  “Speak” of the devil.

I knew something else about Natalie, beyond her wealth and glamor.  She had been an underworld spy.  Now she earned her fortune through her clever and utterly devious mind.  She used that mind to avenge women who had been wronged.

“Yes.  He just left,” I said into the phone.  “The dish is ready.  Serve it cold.”

The end.

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Oh…  I wonder what she and Natilie have “cooked up.”  Thanks for spending part of your day here — it means a lot to me. I love to hear from you, so friendly comments are encouraged.  Hugs!

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Now, the obligatory shameless self-promotion. Speaking of “underworld spies,” awhile back I wrote some full-on-whimsy about the adventures of a young woman who falls in with a very unusual secret organization.

The Armadillo Files

Armadillo Files anime style cover by Teagan Ríordáin Geneviene

The Armadillo Files is a time-travel fantasy adventure. It’s also freewheeling, whimsical, campy, zany fun. Dilly Faraday, a serious young intern in a 1959 NASA program, goes looking for her missing pet, an armadillo of the pink fairy species. However, Fang is no ordinary armadillo. He’s also uninhibited, unpredictable, and outrageous. They are both accidentally launched into space, and that’s only the beginning!

Universal Purchase Links

Kindle:  relinks.me/B0B8XX4ZSL

Paperback:  relinks.me/B0B8XDF1GF

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This is a work of fiction.  Characters, names, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 by Teagan Ríordáin Geneviene

All rights reserved. 

No part of this work may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.  Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

All images are either the property of the author or provided by free sources, unless stated otherwise.

 

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50 thoughts on “Song-spiration Saturday: Served Cold”

  1. Loved the story, Teagan. It sort of reminded me of Jeffrey Deaver’s short story in More Twisted (2006) – A Dish Served Cold. Both Twisted and More Twisted are among my favorites. These books have collected short stories so they are perfect for when I have few minutes to read. Great job.

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  4. That’s a great line about the narrator’s dreams of Warren being “clouds in my coffee.” And whoa, you did justice to the song with Warren! A great twist at the end, how the narrator and Natalie teamed up 🙂

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  6. Well, that was a fun read.

    This is one of those songs I’ll sing for a couple of days in a row, a couple times a year.

    Warren … like warning…worn out …. warrant out for his arrest…

    Love the way you used the name Mick.

    Thanks for the fab entertainment, Teagan! Hugs

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    1. Thanks for that feedback, Resa. Carley Simon was also connected with Mick Jagger and David Bowie. There was a lot of speculation re who the song was about including them and others. So I paid homage to Bowie and Jagger by including their first names. (Hence the disclaimer about the characters not being about real people.) I appreciate you reading and commenting. Hugs winging back to you.

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  15. I’ve always loved the ‘clouds in my coffee’ – I think I used it in my first book. I also like revenge stories with a horrid man as the center character. I do wonder just how the revenge will work. Mayb her husband will show up and level Warren?

    Love this Carly song – but my favorite is Mockingbird with James Taylor. I think this concert was held at Martha’s Vineyard.

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    1. Hi, Noelle. I think she and Natalie will come up with something suitably “cold” without male intervention. LOL. Maybe everywhere he goes from now on, the air conditioners will go to sub-freezing. Or maybe he’ll get locked out on a cold night, naked, with paparazzo immortalizing “shrinkage.” Thanks for visiting. Hugs.

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  16. I grew tired of the song, the way they played it to death, but this story makes me want to listen to it again, Teagan. Well done! I can only imagine the next move.

    Thanks for starting my Saturday off right. Can you slip me an Irish coffee?

    I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. ☕🍩 Irish coffee and a pastry, Dan. I’m happy that you liked the story. I was very young (and quite naive, LOL) when that song came out, so I admit that at the time I found it kind of confusing. I liked her other songs better. But the odd intro made this one stick with me. Also, as an adult, I “got it.”
      Thanks for the mention at your blog today. Hugs!

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