Page 25 of Not That Impossible

My excitement withered. Those words, I didn’t want.

“Iamyour type,” I tried, and didn’t even sound convincing to myself. “I am, you—”

“Jasper, I’m sorry. I got carried away. I came over to… Okay. You were standing right there, looking like a fucking wet drea…Jesus. Looking like you do. Which is no excuse for my behaviour. I lost my head for a minute, and I apologise for that.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Liam, no. Don’t apologise for it, I—”

“I am apologising,” he said relentlessly. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” I sat down hard. “I’m not sorry. I wanted you to do it. I’ve wanted you to do it for years, and I want you to do it again.”

“I won’t,” he said, and fuck him for sounding kind about it. “Listen, I’ve got to go.”

“Wait.” I scrambled for something, anything, to keep him on the phone. “Why did you even come over in the first place?”

He hesitated, then said wryly, “To tell you that just because I’m divorced, it doesn’t mean I’m available, and you shouldn’t go getting your hopes up.”

My jaw dropped. “Holy shit,” I said on a laugh. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything so arrogant in my entire life. You actually took time out of your afternoon to get in your car, drive over to my house, knock on my door, and tell me that?”

“When you put it like that—”

“There’s no other way to put it, Liam, you—”

“It’s not that much of an assumption. Let’s not forget that when I left the pub, you were talking about taking me like a mighty warlord takes his eager war prize.”

I whined with embarrassment and pressed a hand to my hot cheek. “Oh my god. That was a private conversation! About! Stuff that is not your business! It was afantasynot a declaration of intent!”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

This time, I hung up on him.

7

Afew days after the embarrassing phone call, I was sitting in my writing ‘studio,’ searching for inspiration. One day, I planned on having a dedicated room for my studio. Currently, I was making do with the corner of my sitting room.

I’d set up my ageing MacBook on a small desk, and arranged the chair to face the wall. If I faced the window, it was too easy to get distracted.

My phone was on silent and safely tucked away in the kitchen. My giant water bottle was filled to the brim. I had some background music playing—a mix of nature sounds and gentle piano. Two of my clients had canceled due to a sore throat that was making its way around town, and I only had one class at the gym after supper.

The day was wide open for me to write.

The problem was, I didn’t know what to write about.

It was a big problem. I had a personal goal to submit no less than four articles to Ralph at theInquirerin February—more if possible—and here we were, over halfway through the month, and I hadn’t even managed to produce one.

I glared balefully at the motivational banner I’d made and taped to the wall behind my MacBook.

It said,Write! Write! Write!

It had taken me three days to design the banner in Canva. I’d had to cycle into Oxford to buy some more ink for my old printer, some fancy paper to print it out on, and if I’d spent that time on writing, I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

It wasn’t that the words wouldn’t come. The problem was that therightwords wouldn’t come.

Because real life was boring. Or at least, not exactly story worthy.

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