Page 40 of Guys Can't Write Romance
Chad nodded. “Exactly like me in the library. Beer gets you past that. You just start writing whatever. It lets your conscious mind get out of the way so your subconscious can do its thing and start creating.”
Once again, Daisy found herself studying him. He had actually thought this through; and something about it made the slightest hint of sense. There was a method to his madness that she hadn’t expected.
“What?” Chad said, unable to read her expression. “Do I have calamari stuck to my nose?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. You just surprise me.”
“I do that a lot to people.”
She grinned. “I don’t doubt that. I’m still gonna pass on the beer, though.”
“Boring Banker wouldn’t approve?”
“Don’t you start too,” she said, her smile fading. “It’s bad enough I have to hear it every day from Chloe.”
“I noticed she’s not a fan.”
“Nope. And you’ve only seen her on her calmer nights.”
The waitress passed by, depositing another beer in front of Chad without being asked. Clearly, he was a regular. This observation did not surprise Daisy in the slightest.
Chad grinned. “Okay. I’ll call a truce. You were brave enough to come here, which I never thought you’d do in a million years, so I’ll cut the guy some slack.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “That’s surprisingly human of you.”
“I know. It feels weird.”
She chuckled. “I shouldn’t get used to it, should I?”
“Probably not. Ready to get started?”
“Yeah. Let’s do this.” She reached into her tote bag and pulled out her laptop, then looked for a clean spot on the table to put it. After a moment of futile searching, she sighed and settled for balancing it on her knees.
“You’ll probably want to write on paper, unless you want your laptop smelling like a bar.”
“I didn’t bring a notebook.”
“Here,” he said, ripping several pages from his notebook and handing them to her. The edges were slightly ragged, and he’d already doodled what appeared to be a surfboard in the corner of one page. “Do you need a pen?”
“I have one,” she said, pulling a pen out of her tote bag. “But thanks.”
For the next thirty minutes, Chad scribbled away in his notebook, in between gulps of beer and calamari rings. His writing process seemed haphazard at best, sometimes pausing mid-sentence to people-watch or tap his pen against the side of his beer glass in time with the Beach Boys song playing overhead, other times hunching over his notebook in intense concentration, oblivious to the increasing noise level around them.
Meanwhile, Daisy stared at her page, doing her best to drown out the ‘creative energy’ from the other tables. It was like trying to compose a symphony in the middle of a rock concert. She’d managed exactly three sentences, all of which she’d crossed out. The sun had shifted, casting a glare on her paper that made her squint. She adjusted her hat, rearranged her position, and tried again.
From time-to-time, she saw Chad look up from his notebook to watch beach-goers walk past the patio’s rail (especially when those beach-goers were girls in bikinis). These ‘mini-breaks’ would last for only a few seconds, and then he returned to his writing with renewed vigor, scribbling down words as fast as he could.
Something about his approach to this piqued her interest. He seemed to be having fun, even laughing on occasion at something he’d written. And from what she could see, he’d written a lot. In the time it had taken her to mull over one poorly structured paragraph, he’d written over two pages.
On the table next to them, a man in a Hawaiian shirt was regaling his friends with the story of a fishing trip gone wrong, complete with exaggerated arm movements that threatened Daisy’s hat.
“Okay. Time out,” Daisy finally said, putting down her pen. “I’m gonna try a drink.”
“Atta girl, Fields,” Chad said, putting his pen down with a triumphant grin. “What do you want?”
“Do they have a wine list?”
Chad snickered. Daisy shot him a confused look before it dawned on her.
