Hard Boiled Romance: Three Real Short Stories of Love and Sex

By O'Hara Moon

Enter the imagination of multi award winning writer O'Hara Moon. Tough and explicit one moment, deliciously ironic and sexy the next, O'Hara Moon explores life and love in beautifully written short stories that shift between real and imaginary worlds, revealing the gritty reality of his characters' lives, and the hopes and fears of their dreams. O'Hara Moon creates wickedly authentic vignettes of life that will tantalise, shock and amuse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483502137

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 O’Hara Moon

All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the author.

Jellybabies was first published by Australian Penthouse in July 1987

ISBN: 9781483502137

Table of Contents

Author’s Foreword

Jelly Babies

The Spanish

Diabolical Men

Author’s Foreword

These are real stories. They come from my own life. That doesn’t mean everything in them is literally true, or that these things happened exactly as I have written.

I endorse Socrates’ dictum that the unobserved life is not worth living. Writing is a way to think about life and give it meaning. There is even a sense that what we think, our ideas and the worlds we imagine, are more real, or at least have more meaning, than the physical world we live in.

Writing allows me to reflect on my own experience, to understand the world around me and my place in it. It’s a window through which I can view reality and define myself, simultaneously both as part of the world and separate from it. If this seems self-indulgent, solipsistic, even narcissistic - and it indisputably is - I hope at least to touch on themes that interest other people. It is important to me that these stories say something true about life. I hope you enjoy them.

Jelly Babies

Bronwyn was mad. I knew that from the start. I should never have got involved, but I did. I’m not a strong man. I don’t pretend to be. I was recovering from a disastrous affair and wanted to be loved – liked even. Bronwyn liked me. She liked me enough to drive all day and half the night so she could spend two days with me in my dilapidated caravan while her ex-husband looked after her kids. She left home at midnight on Thursday and drove like a mad woman to join me on the beach as the sun was going down. We spent the weekend together, mostly in bed. On Sunday night she left for home. Every second week for three months she did that. Then I found someone else.

Louise was enchanting. She had the body of a woman and mind of a child. She was a daddy’s girl who had never grown up and she looked for her father in every man she met. A lot of people said she was too good for me.

I first saw her on a rugged headland south of Noosa Heads, crouched precariously on the rocks. She was hunched like a foetus against the wind. The ocean heaved. Great waves that had travelled halfway around the world beat themselves to death against the rocks. The spray whipped about her like devils’ breath. She stared