Free Unsoul'd by Barry Lyga

everyone's pants. And I will. Trust me on that. But just 'cause I said you're desperate doesn't mean I'm not right, too."
    I paused at the door to my building, rooting out my keys. "Yeah, I want to sleep with her. So what? I'm a human being, not an animal."
    "The two are the same fucking thing. Do none of you read Darwin anymore?"
    "Whatever."
    "Oh, 'whatever!'" he chortled as we climbed the stairs to my apartment. "The great human comeback! Such wit! Such pith! Dude, she totally wants to bone you. She touched you on the hand, like, five times over the course of three drinks. She's the one who suggested drinks. She leaned over the table four times because she knows how good her goodies look when she does that. Right now she's on the subway home, wondering if you're blind, gelded, or gay."
    I stopped inside the entrance to my apartment. "Really?"
    He threw his hands up in the air. "I don't know what she's thinking right now! I'm speculating! But it's informed speculation! Trust me!"
    Trust the devil.
    "Why should I trust you when you haven't lived up to your end of the contract yet?"
    This seemed to surprise him. He blinked and then held up a lecturing finger and said, "Regarding the contract--" but got no further because I slammed the door in his face.

Wherein I Write. For Real.  
    I had only two dollars in my wallet the next day as I headed into Construct, but I happily gave them both to Lovely Rita, who smiled her tooth-deficient smile and said, "Happy tappy!" which was her little rhyming way of telling me to have a good day writing. I returned the smile, though inwardly I cringed at the very thought of tapping those damned, recalcitrant keys.
    The counter-folk at Construct were cool, but generally not shy about showing their disdain if you tried to use a credit card for something as petty as a cup of coffee. Now cash-less, I could not abide José's guaranteed sneer, so I bought three bottles of water, two bagels (with no cream cheese -- my gut still recoiled at the thought), a homemade brownie in plastic wrap, and a cup of coffee, then decamped with my provisions to a table in the furthest corner of the back room.
    The brownie had walnuts in it. I hated walnuts.
    Now, as to what happened next... I'm not sure where to lay the blame/credit. Maybe it was spilling my guts to Gym Girl the previous night. Maybe I was just finally Ready. Or maybe -- just maybe -- my rage at the walnuts jarred something loose that morning.
    Whatever it was or wasn't, know this: I wrote.
    I mean, I really, really wrote.
    The devil occasionally popped by to take a bite of one of the bagels, but I ignored him because as soon as I flipped up the lid of my laptop, I felt something different and strange and strong.
    My fingertips hit the keys and, yeah, it was Happy Tappy Time for a while there. I tap-tapped and the world melted away until all I could see was the screen and the keyboard, and the next thing I knew, the coffee was gone and I had drunk all of the water, devoured the bagels, and even eaten all of the brownie around and between the walnuts. The light filtering in through Construct's flier-and-poster-be-decked windows had changed its slant and its intensity, and many of the people who had been slogging along with me when I'd arrived had now left, replaced by a new coterie of night-time laptop warriors.
    Despite my two bagels and three bottles of water and cup of coffee and most-of-a-brownie, my stomach complained. A glance at the clock told me why: It was long past breakfast, long past lunch. Well nigh on dinnertime, in fact. I had been writing in a sort of auto-hypnotic state for hours.
    I checked my daily word count and then checked it again, certain that I'd mis-read it.
    On an average writing day, I usually write somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand words. On a good day, I might go as high as fifteen hundred. Usually those words are of middling to decent quality, requiring several rounds of massage before they're in any sort of