‘It still doesn’t change anything,’ I say. ‘Right? We agree that we can’t be together.’

He is silent for a beat.

‘If that’s what you want,’ he says.

‘It’s what we’re both agreeing to.’

‘All right Brooke. I agree,’ he says, and lightly jumps down the last few steps and walks away.

32

32

‘I’ve been thinking about your story,’ Jesse says on the drive home.

‘Oh yeah?’ I say. I was worried things would be weird between us after last night, and they were, at first, when I got in the car and looked out the window, feeling shy. Then we got takeaway coffee at the little cafe on the way out of town and made the requisite jokes about how Melbourne coffee is better, which felt very adult, and that smoothed over the awkwardness. I stare straight ahead, sipping on my average coffee and hiding behind my sunglasses.

‘Okay, so if you make them younger—’

‘Which I have decided I will do,’ I say. I thought about it a lot in bed last night, in part as a way to stop myself replaying the real-life couch scene between Jesse and me over and over. I worried it would be like when I play a song I love over and over, or watch one scene of a show over and over, and I strip all the pleasure from it. I need to keep the pleasure of the couch memory because who knows how long it will be before I kiss anyone like that again. It might never feel that good again in my life. And thinking of our night on the couch was also getting my feelings all scrambled and making me deeply regret saying the words ‘we can’t be together’ even though we obviously can’t be together. So I focused on my story, and as much as I resisted the idea of changing the characters’ ages, it suddenly clicked into place and I saw he was right. Damn him.

‘Ah, see. I am a genius,’ he says.

‘Okay, calm down. It was one good suggestion.’

‘Genius. Say it. Gee-nee-us.’

‘Don’t make me regret letting you read it,’ I say.

‘I have plenty more ideas, so get ready for your mind to be blown,’ he says, grinning.

We talk about the story more, and laugh, and I start taking notes in my phone. Some of his ideas are terrible, some are just things he’s saying to make me laugh, but some are pretty good. The most important thing is that I feel the spark, the very particular writing energy I need, and even though I have less than twenty-four hours to do it, I feel like there’s a chance I can crack the story open and rewrite it into something to send to PJ by tomorrow morning.

We stop for petrol, and as we’re pulling back onto the highway, he turns to me.