She laughed brilliantly, happy that he agreed and wasn’t one of those jackasses who thought the genre merited reverence. Abi believed that it was down to the author and not the reader to realise a good story when they had one. “An idea is all well and good but 75% of the time, they end up fucking it up spectacularly in over audacious prose. It just puts me to sleep. That’s why I fell in love with your books; they’re real people in a world I can imagine being part of. Nothing would make me want to read on more than believability, Hem.” She wasn’t surprised either that he was annoyed at the censorship. It bugged her no end too. “It was this whole Puritan thing they had in the 80s, when there were STD crises and then it escalated and suddenly the whole revolution didn’t matter any more. Swearing was a no-no, even when you were having a private conversation. I had a woman in a coffee shop tell me once that no man who want a wife who swore more than he did,” she rolled her eyes but laughed. She didn’t dare tell him her reply.
“You have a lot to catch up on,” she said. He had been out of the world for so long; history had been made, and was still being made every day by the time she had been taken. A new world had begun in the 21st century and everything had changed again. “We might end up having to sit through a lot of documentaries just to catch you up on world history. Some of those books make reference to modern ideologies.”
Oh God. She hadn’t got fond memories of that adaptation and it made her giggle to hear him complain, though there were always reports that he’d been disappointed. “Where’s the struggle in two privileged kids falling in love? There’s no struggle, no back story or adversity. Just a disappointment and boredom.” She realised how she sounded and added, “No offence.”
A wild story? What one should she tell him, Abi wondered to herself, playing with her food before she met his eyes. “Okay. So every year my friends and I went to this old house on the outskirts of town that everyone said was haunted. About the time of the third trip up there, we got bored and uh... decided to throw the most raging awesome party there that you’d ever seen.” She chuckled, “I mean like 200 18 year olds with alcohol, drugs and no cellphone distractions, not in those days. I got so wasted at that party that me and my girlfriends ended up waking up in someone else’s house. On their couch.” She laughed, remembering the look on the face of the old lady who had woken them. “We’d broken in, drunk all of the liquor and passed out in the living room.”