It, I began, and then deleted that and triedthe. After a few moments of chewing on my lower lip, I trieditagain, took a breath, and then tapped my way through the rest of the sentence.
Well. That was progress.
Just write this scene, I told myself.Thisscene didn’t have anything to do with whether or not Alex liked boys. I could write this, and I wouldn’t have to change it later.
I wasn’t even sure that was what I was worried about, but once I told myself that, the words came a little easier. One word after another, I wrote and wrote until it was pitch black outside and I was sitting in the dark, with only the light of my laptop screen to see by.
I must have been writing for hours.
I must have writtenthousandsof words.
A glance at the wordcount in the bottom corner of the screen told me I’d written a grand total of…
Two hundred and seventy-eight.
No, wait.
That included the three sentences I’d already written, so… less than two hundred?
How? I’d been working for…
Fifteen minutes, based on the timestamp on my last message to Angelica.
I wrote 200 words
Angelica: 59800 to go, then
Thanks
I sighed.
All I had to do was exactly what I’d just done… three hundred more times.
Well. Two hundred and ninety-nine, now. Not thatthatnumber was meaningfully less daunting.
I couldn’t do this.
Alex was in love with Eliot and I wasn’t getting anywhere until I was allowed to say so.
Kieran… Kieran seemed to agree with me. And he’d been so nice, he’d treated me like I’d only gone on vacation or something.
Plus, he’d been comfortable sharing a bed with Carter.
I wasn’t jealous about that. Not even a little bit.
… maybe a little bit.
My teeth dug into my lower lip as I stared down at my phone.
In the darkened screen, I saw fourteen-year-old Felix desperate to kiss his best friend and terrified about what that meant.
Heneeded me to do this. My own teenage self needed this.
And if it happened to mean getting to spend more time with the boy I’d wanted to kiss all those years ago, that was a bonus.
If I convince the publisher that I am a model gay man with a nice steady boyfriend, would that really work?
Was I really planning on doing this?
