Work Text:
When Victoria Met Joseph
"So, why don't you just state your names and ages, and then we can go right into how you two met and came to be together."
The voice belonged to a nicely dressed woman sitting in the corner of the small plain room. There was a video camera on a tri-pod placed to her right; a red flashing light indicated that it was recording. It pointed towards an old couch, upon which there sat a man and a woman.
The woman was rather short, with a lovely curvy figure. Her red hair brushed her shoulders, with a slight natural curl. Black squarish glasses magnified her green eyes, and sat atop the wide bridge of her large nose. Her small Cupid's bow lips and freckles gave her a youthful appearance. Her skin was pale, pink undertones giving her an appearance of being constantly flushed. She sat up on her left hip, legs folded under her.
Next to her sat a man who was at least ten years her senior. He also wore black glasses, but of a smaller, more rectangular frame. In stark contrast to the woman's petite stature, he was roughly six feet tall. His short black hair was extremely thick and straight. His skin was darker and warmer in tone than the woman's. His eyes were equally warm, a beautiful shade of deep velvety brown. He was broad and solid of body, dwarfing the woman beside him. His right arm stretched across the back of the couch, his hand coming to rest on the shoulder of the woman.
"Okay, um, my name is Victoria, and I'm twenty-two." She spoke slightly awkwardly, unaccustomed to being on film.
The man, after a short pause, where in Victoria looked at him expectantly, said, "I'm Joseph, I'm thirty-six."
"Okay, so just tell me a little bit about how you met." The woman in the corner had an expression of genuine curiosity on her face that helped to put the couple at ease. They were not strangers to disapproving looks and whispers from passersby and acquaintances.
Victoria smiled tentatively. "Well, we actually met when I was only about thirteen. Joseph was a friend of my sister and my brother-in-law. We all got together one evening, in June I believe it was, and along with my younger brother and Joseph's older brother, we all went to a movie together."
Joseph nodded slowly in idle agreement.
"Were you friendly from the start?"
Victoria and Joseph smiled in tandem, glancing at each other briefly in amusement.
"Honestly, I don't think we really noticed each other much. I was extremely shy at that time. I think, I thought he was funny, but I didn't really think about him much after that."
Joseph nodded, and added, "Yeah, it was pretty much the same for me. I was twenty-eight at the time. I certainly didn't have any romantic interest in her at the time. I think the extent of my thinking was that she didn't strike me as an average thirteen year old. There was kind of this sense that she was very intelligent and intuitive. But yeah, I didn't really have any lasting thought."
"And how did the relationship develop?"
"Well, we saw each other in passing a couple times, at various get-togethers at my sister's house. I just kind of steadily became more intrigued by him over the years. But, it wasn't like a consuming thought. I never really thought about him unless he was there in front of me. We only saw each other about once a year or so."
"Yeah, and again, y'know, she was a teenager. I was happy for her to hang, but she was always pretty quiet, so I didn't know her well, and there was really no reason for me to have even a platonic, friendly interest in her."
Victoria nodded slowly as he finished. "Yeah, definitely. I was so young."
"So what changed between you two?"
Victoria spoke through a light giggle, "Things definitely changed on my end first. The summer I was eighteen, I started dreaming about him."
The woman behind the camera raised her eyebrows in surprise.
"I know" Victoria laughed, "I was surprised too. It was completely out of the blue. I hadn't thought about him for more than about thirty seconds in almost two years, and then out of nowhere he started showing up in my dreams. So I was dreaming about him for a month, and then we went on a camping trip. This was myself, my sister, my brother-in-law, and a bunch of their friends, including Joseph. Joseph wasn't the only one of their friends that I knew, but I had known him the longest, I felt most at ease around him, so he was something of a comfort to me during the trip."
She laughed slightly, "It's funny how these things happen, y'know, because, it felt kind of different from the very start of the weekend. I definitely noticed him more than I had before, but the real turning point for me was something that must have seemed so inconsequential to everybody else."
Victoria smiled, lost briefly in her memory, "We were all sat around the fire pit talking in the early evening. I was sitting on a tree stump, talking to a couple of people, with my back to some of the others, and Joseph walks over and sits on the other side of the stump. We were kind of shoulder to shoulder but facing slightly away from each other; and so for a couple hours while we were consumed in different conversations, we kept bumping our shoulders into each other, and we'd kind of glance back at each other."
She paused for a moment, "The whole time I just remember feeling like his presence was so warm. One of those times in particular, I caught his eye when I turned, and I was completely transfixed." Victoria spoke through laughter once again, "I couldn't remember what I had been about to say to the people I was talking to. In that instant, something changed for me. This happened before I even knew how old he was."
"You didn't know how old he was?"
"No, I had assumed that he was about the same age as my brother-in-law, but as it turned out, I was about five years off. Not that it bothered me or anything, it was just a shock. Here I was thinking he was in his mid-to-late twenties, and he was actually thirty-three. "
"Yeah, I actually didn't know exactly how old she was either. I didn't find out until I overheard her telling someone else."
"So did things change for you at the same time, Joseph?"
He chuckled softly, "Oh, no."
"No?"
"No, it didn't really start for me until we saw each other again that October. And, in all honesty, I was completely oblivious to it for a long time."
Victoria nodded vehemently.
"Were you aware of his feelings for you?"
"I had my suspicions. He had started behaving very differently with me."
"What do you mean by that, exactly?"
"Well, he touched me all the time, as much as he possibly could, it seemed. He had his arm around me pretty much the entire night. He had never done that before. We shared each other's chairs, we would communicate with each other just by sharing looks, we seemed to instantly develop an understanding of, and connection to each other. The few moments we weren't right next to each other, we would look up and make eye contact at the same time. There were a few times though, when he would be talking to someone, and he'd look over and notice that I was looking at him, and he'd grin and get all flustered. It was the cutest thing I've ever seen."
They beamed at each other, consumed by old memories.
After a moment, Joseph spoke, "Over the next two years, we saw each other a couple more times, and every time was just like that night in October. Anybody would have thought that we were already together."
"Yeah, but even then, I was still unconvinced that he cared about me at all. I thought that it must have been all in my head. And my sister's attitude about the whole thing didn't help with that."
"Was your sister unhappy about the situation between you and Joseph?"
"She seemed to be, but she would never say it. She'd just make comments that I shouldn't get too attached, that he was like that with everyone."
"And were you?"
"Not really. I hugged people a lot, but it was nothing like how I was with her."
"Yeah, it was very much on another level with me. I knew she was just trying to protect me, but it was a very difficult time, because I didn't really feel like I could talk to many people about it. For those two years I really just felt very alone, and I was out of my mind most of the time, just frustrated, and missing him more than I ever would have imagined."
"So it was another two years before you guys finally got together?"
They looked at the woman, and then at each other, something akin to embarrassment on their faces.
"It was my fault, really. I didn't even realize how I was feeling for so long, and even then, when I finally did, I was in total denial. I didn't want to be that guy.
The woman prompted, "Who is 'that guy'?".
"That thirty-year-old guy who was dating an eighteen-year-old. I felt like a creep, and it took me a long time to make peace with the situation. It was an extremely difficult time in my life. I had an enormous weight on my chest for two years. At a certain point, I just couldn't deny it anymore."
"There was no helping it really, we might as well have been magnetized", Victoria added.
"Well if that brings us up to the present, I think this is a good place to stop."
The woman stood and turned off the camera. She smiled at the couple, and approached them as they rose from the couch to prepare to leave.
"I want to wish you two the best of luck."
They smiled at the woman once more, and thanked her for her kindness, and the opportunity to tell their story. They turned and left the room with their arms around each other.