Free In Real Life by Chris Killen

discover that we have loads in common and exchange phone numbers and fall in love, just like in the movies.
    500 Days of Rosemary , I think as the basket queue shuffles forwards.
    I can’t take my eyes off her.
    Her hair’s so black and shiny.
    In fact I’m so busy watching her scan her shopping through the machine, I forget it’s my turn next and the man behind me has to tap me on the shoulder and point out a machine that’s become available.
    â€˜This summer,’ a gravelly American movie trailer voice announces inside me, ‘the unexpected item in the bagging area turns out to be . . . LOVE.’
    I scan my items and bag them up and stuff my pocketfuls of change into the plastic mouth of the self-service machine as quickly as I can. Then I snatch my receipt and grab my bags and dash out through the exit.
    I look all around me, but Rosemary’s long gone.
    I’m already halfway home before I realise. I open my carrier bag and peer inside it. Sure enough, there they are staring back up at me: one large net bag of Babybels.
    Fuck’s sake.
    I can’t take them back into the flat.
    If I put them in the fridge and Carol sees them, she’ll have another go at me about wasting money. She’ll think I’m taking the piss, directly challenging her after our talk the other night.
    I could return them to the supermarket, but it seems so far away all of a sudden.
    So I tear a hole in the netting and take out a Babybel,peel off the wax coating, and stuff it whole into my mouth. As I’m chewing the first one, I peel open a second and force that in, too. By the time I reach the car park again, I’ve eaten almost half the bag. I want to throw the rest away but I think again about how much they cost. ( Two hundredths of my guitar! ) So instead I crouch by the bins, out of view of the windows to our flat, out of view of the house next door, and stuff the remaining Babybels into my mouth, one by one, until they’re finished.

PAUL
    2014
    P aul wakes up with a foggy, throbbing head and a dry, sour mouth. Last night I smoked, he thinks. And then he remembers chatting with Alison and feels even worse. And then he tongues his gum hopefully, but the lump is still there. It’s grown, too, or else he’s just made it more prominent with all the fiddling he’s been doing. Either way, it’s still there.
    He takes his phone off the bedside table, wipes his thumb across the screen, and looks at his text messages, at ‘Missing you. Can’t sleep. You still awake? xxx’ that Sarah sent him, which he’s still not replied to. ‘Sorry I didn’t reply,’ he types. ‘Had an early night. Missing you too. Love you x,’ and presses send.
    He checks his inbox.
    Three new emails. The first is from one of his undergraduate students, Craig (a shy bespectacled boy with a soft Birmingham accent), who is submitting his story for Monday’s workshop, a Word doc with the file name ‘Guardian of the Tombs.docx’, the second is a notification telling him that a person called @sexwand52 is now following him on Twitter, and the third is an email from his agent, Julian, a follow-up to his question mark of a few days ago. This time there’s a full sentence:
    Anything to show me yet?
    Why did I ever tell him it was almost finished? Paul thinks, remembering their last meeting, in that pub, The Dog and Something-or-Other in Soho.
    The truth of it was that Paul had written one-and-a-half chapters and a few scattered, semi-legible notes about the rest, and he was still in that precarious first flush of excitement, when the enthusiasm for an idea could run cold at any moment, the way it had for all Paul’s previous second novel ideas, and – oh god – he should’ve just kept his mouth shut, but instead he’d drunk one too many exotic lagers on the Conwin & Black expense account and attempted to convince Julian that he wasn’t a