Page 15 of Not That Impossible

I stripped the bed, grabbed a clean duvet cover from my linen closet and changed it. Laundry on, I made a cup of tea and carried it to my desk.

It wasn’t until I’d opened up my daily notes app and taken a sip of tea that the deeper ramifications of what had happened in my sitting room percolated.

“Huh,” I said blankly to my blinking cursor.

Liam wasn’t straight.

Or at the very least, Liam had a heretofore unsuspected flexibility when it came to men.

I’d pined after him for years, and I hadn’t kept it to myself. I’d been obvious and vocal in my admiration of him.

A highlight real of my many youthful and extremely unsubtle attempts to get his attention played through my mind, and I cringed.

No wonder Liam was always irritable with me. He must have been absolutely appalled.

No man wanted a gawky, romantic teenager mooning around after him, like something was ever going to happen if I put myself in the way often enough.

I slunk lower in my seat and hunched my shoulders. I’d been a nightmare.

It hadn’t really sunk in until the day I saw him standing in church beside his radiant, glorious bride, that I was missing some key assets to attract the likes of Liam Nash.

I’m not even talking about her boobs.

His wife, Verity, was tall, athletic, had a mane of gleaming mahogany hair, a First from Oxford University, a stellar career as a barrister in London, a trust fund, a fuckinghorse, and worst of all?

She was nice.

I’d blundered along, filled with optimism and the kind of self-centred bullheadedness of youth that convinces you that if you justwantsomething hard enough, you’ll get it. Until that day, I’d managed to ignore the fact that I was the wrong gender. It didn’t seem relevant.

Forget being the wrong gender: how could I possibly compete with the vision of beauty, confidence and success that was Verity?

I couldn’t.

And that was the despairing conclusion I had reached six years ago when I woke up hungover the morning after Liam’s wedding, tangled up with Adam in his too-small bed.

I’d cracked my eyes open, moaned when cruel sunlight immediately seared my sensitive eyeballs, and attempted to retreat under the covers, where it was dark and safe.

Adam wheezed as I jammed an elbow in his side in the midst of my half-hearted flailing. He attempted to shove me off, but we’d been sleeping in the same bed since we were fourteen. I knew all his tricks. I didn’t even have to think about it. I locked my legs around his and flopped about until I was on top.

“Jesus, Jasper,” he’d croaked. “Stop crushing me or I’m gonna throw up.”

“If you throw up, I’ll throw up,” I muttered, and slithered off him back to the mattress. “We’ll be stuck in a loop. It’ll be disgusting. Your mum will hear us and come in, and she’ll be so mad.”

“Shhhh,” he said, patting at me clumsily.

“Mmf.” I pulled a pillow over my head and sought sweet oblivion.

No go.

I couldn’t stop thinking about yesterday and last night. I really hoped that the worst of the images flashing through my mind were the ragged shreds of lingering nightmares. I had a horrible feeling that was wishful thinking.

“Stop puffing so loudly,” Adam said a few minutes later. The mattress shifted as he rolled out of bed. He snatched the duvet off me and slapped my arse. “Wow. Someone’s been doing their squats.”

I clenched and released my buttocks in a half-hearted twerk, and he laughed.

I hadn’t slept with Adam like this for a while. Everyone thought we were friends with benefits, but other than a brief period when we were each other’s training wheels for handjobs and blowjobs, things weren’t sexual between us.

Since then, I’d shot up from a weedy little five-foot-something kid to a six-foot-one, two-hundred-pound eighteen-year-old, and I wasn’t done growing yet. Adam was keeping height with me, even if he was lankier. I had no idea how we’d both managed to get in the damn bed in the first place.

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