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Jealousy.
Their little heart-eyed glances. The way Greyson laughed at Zach's jokes. How they finished each other's sentences. How they complemented each other, like their relationship was the materialization of a perfect song.
My stupid mind began to wonder how you got something like that. How did someone like me rewire their brain to be romantic, to be monogamous, to behave appropriately so that someone would want to be with them?
I had no answers. I knew nothing, except for the fact that twenty years of casual sex and one-night stands was a long time. To wipe that slate clean and start over seemed like a bigger feat than getting over the embarrassment of asking for help when I’d once needed none, and I had no idea how to process the desire to do it, let alone actuallydoing it.
But one thing I knew how to do was write songs, and once my mediocre burger and decent fries vanished, that was exactly what I did.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Lennon
I’d always been a storyteller.
When I had been a toddler in day care, I would tell stories through finger paintings, and my teachers would interpret them in words. They would explain to my parents that it was unusual for a kid that age to have the ability to tell a story, complete with a beginning, middle, and end. My mom would tell me about this later in life along with all the other reasons why I needed to answer my calling as a writer.
And it had made me angry.
Life was already full of things you had no say in. You didn’t get a choice in what family you were born into, where you grew up, or what economic class you began life in.
I hadn’t been given a choice when I was born with an extremely rare condition that would leave me unable to drive, unable to find work, and unable to appreciate some of the simplest joys in life, like the color of the sky or the beauty of a rainbow.
The least I could ask for was to have a choice in what my calling would be.
So, I had stopped writing for years. I resisted the urge to write down the stories that attacked my mind on a regular basis, all due to a stubborn refusal to give in to the only thing that was more natural for me than breathing. I tried to find other things I enjoyed just as much and came up empty because I knew deep down that there wasn’t anything.
I had been born to write, and that had been made even more evident to me when I started again—thanks to Connor and his suggestion.
The words came easily, and after two months of typing endlessly, I was almost done with the first draft of my first full-length novel.
He was right; the time would pass anyway. It always did. Except this time, I had something to show for it.
Peter sighed loudly from my bed, where he sat, waiting for me to finish the chapter I was working on. I glanced over to watch him flop backward, his arms spread out like he was about to make a snow angel, and I resisted the urge to grit my teeth.
“Are you almost done?” he asked, impatience displayed in every huffed, drawn-out word.
“I’m just trying to finish this thought,” I rushed to say before leaning back into the keyboard, bringing my face only a couple of inches from the screen, and typing again.
“You said that twenty minutes ago.”
“I know.” I hadn’t known. Time moved differently when I was locked inside my head with my characters and story. “I’m almost done.”
“They’re waiting for us.”
Peter and I hadn’t been dating for long. Only a month or so, and for the most part, I was happy. But right now, he was getting on my last nerve.
He had shown up about thirty minutes ago, asking if I’d like to hang out with his friends. I reluctantly agreed even though I wasn’t at all prepared or showered enough to meet the gang. But I had agreed under the condition that he hang around while I finished what I was doing, and he had, in turn, agreed to that.
He wasn’t doing a good job at upholding his end of the bargain.
“I’m sure they wouldn’t mind waiting a couple more minutes,” I murmured, typing away during the most pivotal part of the story.
Peter sighed again and stared upward at the ceiling. His display of obvious annoyance quickly pulled me from the zone, rendering my creativity useless. With a sigh of my own, I saved the document without finishing the thought I’d once had but since disappeared and closed the laptop.
“Oh, are you done already?” he asked, sarcasm heavy in his tone.
“I’m not suredoneis the word I’d use, but I can’t finish this now, so …”
