I had never snuck out of my house before.

                  Reese, of course, had been a dab hand at it; several nights a week, we could’ve been found at the bedroom window, where I unscrewed and re-screwed the mechanism so it opened wide enough for her to climb through. She would drop onto the porch roof in a way so practised it had become silent, and then dash off down the driveway, at the end of which her most recent boyfriend would be waiting in a beat-up car. Most of the time, I waited up for her, sacrificing hours of sleep just to see her back into the house at three a.m., lipstick smeared and ready for a gossip session. She must’ve done it hundreds of times, and Mum had never suspected a thing.

                  I knew it like the back of my hand, and I could’ve messed with the window in my sleep. And yet at twelve that night, stood at the same window with Mitchell’s car idling at the end of the drive, I was struck by a sudden panic.

                  Retrieving the screwdriver from the drawer, I tried to stop my hands shaking long enough to work the fiddly hinge. After a few seconds of struggling, I heard it click, and the window was free.

                  I couldn’t stop trembling as I climbed up and pushed it open wider. Reese had always done it in a flash, like she hadn’t noticed the fact she’d been hanging two storeys above the ground. And yet up there for myself, I wondered how she’d ever been able to keep her heart rate under control. The porch roof, though only feet below, seemed like a lethal drop away, and that was without even considering the risk of alerting Mum.

                  Holding my breath, I lowered myself down as steadily as possible, before making the drop.

                  I had to consider it a success; there were no fatalities, and the sound of my trainers landing on the roof tiles got lost in the huge expanse of night air. For a moment, I hesitated, admiring the view of the neighbourhood from Reese’s old perspective. But I had to move quickly: Mum and Brian were sleeping just two rooms away, and on the off chance they decided to peek into my bedroom, I was screwed.

                  I shuffled toward the edge of the porch and looked down, assessing the second drop. It was a little more daunting; the fall was bigger, and I had to try to aim for the front lawn instead of the concrete path.

                  Lowering myself, I pushed off. However, a last-second hesitation saw my hand gripping onto the roof a little longer than necessary, which sent my balance off kilter. Instead of dropping straight down, I leaned sideways, falling into the line of rose bushes and unable to stifle a yelp of pain.

                  I realised my mistake instantly; clapping a hand to my mouth, I scrambled to my feet and tried not to think about how I was being scratched all over by painful thorns. I knew I was sure to emerge looking like the sufferer of some exotic skin disease, being now covered head to toe in red scratches, but that was hardly a priority. Somewhere amongst the commotion, a light had been switched on inside the house, and I was seconds away from blowing my cover.

                  Gasping for air, I snatched up my bag and sprinted down the driveway, my feet pounding on the concrete with a mind of their own. Mitchell’s car was only metres away, and yet it suddenly felt like miles, stretching tauntingly before me. As soon as I came within arms’ length of the vehicle, I yanked open the door and threw myself inside with wild abandon, earning a strange look from the driver’s seat.

                  Mitchell started to say something, but my breathless demand cut him off. “Drive!”

                  Thankfully, he seemed willing to save the questions for later; the engine roared to life and the car began to pull away from the pavement. I slumped back in my seat, nervous sweat glistening on my forehead, as my focus glazed over the road ahead.

                  I was half-expecting my phone to start ringing, finding myself faced with a livid mother on the end, demanding to know why I had made a midnight getaway from the porch roof. The thought of such anger was the stuff of nightmares, forming half the reason for my uncontrollable heart rate. But when several minutes went by, and the phone remained silent in my lap, I realised I may have got away with it.

                  We must’ve been at least two miles away from my street before Mitchell dared to break the silence that had settled over the radio’s fuzzy beat. From my right, he shot a quick glance over. “You okay?”

                  A long breath escaped me, though the aftermath of the frantic exercise had mostly subsided. “Yeah,” I said eventually, reaching back to tug my tangled red hair into a ponytail. “Just about.”

                  “Near miss back there, or…?”

                  Despite the tension of everything, an unexpected smile crept onto my face. “You could say that,” I told him. “For a minute there, I thought I was in for a face-off with my mother.”

                  “Ouch.” He quirked an eyebrow. “I’m guessing that wouldn’t have ended well?”

                  “God, no. Definitely not. Reese might have been able to talk her way out of it, but not me.”

                  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “You can be pretty good with words yourself.”

                  He was looking at me, I could tell; even with my gaze fixed forward, following the streetlights as they disappeared down the car’s side vision and beyond, I could sense the intent look. And yet even without that, I knew what he was getting at. As if I was going to be duped that easily.

                  “That’s different,” I said, like he didn’t already know.

                  “Is it?”

                  “Yes.” I heard the note of insistence in my tone. Despite everything, I wasn’t about to be bullied into making a return to newspaper, not when I’d already made my mind up. “When I wrote my column, it got picked apart by you at least five thousand times before it was fit to read by anybody else. I’m not so articulate on the spot.”

                  He didn’t say anything, instead just gripping the steering wheel and looking straight ahead. After too much silence, I took it upon myself to continue. “Just so you know, that was a really bad attempt.”

                  “What do you mean?”

                  He was feigning innocence, but for once, I didn’t buy any of it. “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” I said, noticing the tiny smile that he was trying to hold back. “I’m not coming back to newspaper. I’m sure whoever takes over my column will do fine on their own.”

                  “Of course Candace is fine. She’s a brilliant writer.” He hit the indicator a few seconds short of the junction, and the car rolled to a stop. “But she’s not you. The column’s yours, and it always has been. No one’s quite the same at sniffing out the inner circle gossip. Or at least the PG stuff.”

                  “Seriously, Mitchell.” I probably should’ve looked at him, to convey some authenticity, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. “I’m sorry, but I’m not coming back. It’s just… not what I need right now. I hope you understand.”

                  Of course he didn’t. How could he, when I had yet to justify it properly to myself? I still wasn’t entirely sure where the decision had come from. Like so many other things, it had just sprouted from the grief: a stone-set belief that isolation was the way forward. Returning to newspaper was reminiscent of the months long gone. It was the way Reese would show up at the office after four, bored of waiting for me to finish late and demanding we go get coffee. Or the way she always rolled her eyes at the soundtrack of constant typing. She’d never been explicitly associated with the publication, and yet the essence of her was there anyway, smeared all over it like a stain that would never come out.

                  Part of me wondered whether it would be smart to return. Writing was still a part of my life: something I found myself doing in moments of free time I didn’t want to spend staring blankly at the ceiling. I had worked on everything: diaries, fiction, even articles that would never leave the safety of my computer. Sometimes, it felt like it was the only thing keeping me sane.

                  For most people, returning to newspaper probably seemed like the most logical step.

                  But grief wasn’t logical. Not in the slightest.

                  “Sure,” Mitchell said, pulling out into a gap between cars. “As long as you know the door’s always open for you to come back.”

                  “Like you’d ever let me forget.”

                  He smiled, just vaguely. “Of course not.”

                  It was only then that the obvious occurred to me, and I felt kind of stupid for not thinking of it before. “Hey,” I said, “where are we actually going?”

                  I watched his expression change. “Ah. About that.”

                  “You don’t know where you’re driving, do you?”

                  “Well… that may be technically true.” His short, sideways look lingered just long enough for me to catch the glint in his eye. “I was hoping if we were out long enough, we’d eventually figure something out between the two of us.”

                  “You know we’ve got six hours to kill, right?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “That’s a long time without knowing what the hell we’re doing. I thought you of all people would at least show up with some kind of plan.”

                  “Me, of all people?” he echoed, half-amused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

                  “Oh, come on. You know what you’re like.”

                  “Do I?”

                  I rolled my eyes. “Yes. A year spent on newspaper was enough time for me to get a pretty good idea. It was a rare occasion to have a conversation with you and not get set a ridiculous new deadline for something I was working on. And that calendar you put up on the wall? You wrote so much on each day that you had to get another two a few weeks later. Do you see what I’m getting at?”

                  “So I’m an organised guy,” he said, biting back a smile. “Sue me.”

                  “Oh, believe me. We were considering it.” I shook my head, acting serious, but an unexpected wave of happiness had come over me from a place I wasn’t sure of. “We needed an employees’ union, working for you. At times we were debating suing for work-related stress.”

                  “I can’t have been that bad of a boss.”

                  “Not bad,” I admitted. “You always got stuff done. Just a little bit too in love with your work.”

                  “I can’t help it. That newspaper’s like my baby, you know? I’m not about to publish crap if it has to go out with my name on it. What would everybody think of me?”

                  “Mitchell,” I said, the corner of my lip curling upward. “I think you may be vastly overestimating the readership of the school newspaper. To put it frankly, not a lot of people care. Actually, if we’re being honest, we’re among some of the only people who care.”

                  “What are you talking about?” he asked, full of sarcasm. “It’s all anybody cares about at school. Have you seen the queue in the canteen on a Friday morning to get their hands on it? Regular fights to the death for the last copy. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

                  Only then did I notice I was grinning. “You wish.”

                  He sighed, through a smile of his own. “Yeah, maybe I do.”

                  “Seriously, though.” I glanced back through the windscreen, watching the empty road stretch on before us, with all those potential miles left to go. “Where are we going? It seems like a mad waste of petrol to drive aimlessly for the next six hours.”

                  “Well, I do have an idea. How hungry are you?”

                  My mind wandered to five hours beforehand; the family dinner had consisted of lasagne, with a side order of interrogation. Mum seemed to have reached the chapter in her self-help book which explained how honesty and openness was everything; she now wanted to know all the details of my day from the moment I stepped inside the doors of the school until I made it out again.

                  Of course, the whole thing was made worse by my refusal to cooperate. I’d long since stopped wanting to share everything with my mother, but she was having difficulty accepting that. It didn’t take long for her to grow frustrated with my one-word responses, or the way I picked at my food, and I dashed off the moment it was acceptable.

                  Family life, I’d learned, was much harder without Reese to hog the limelight.

                  Thinking back to my half dinner, all those hours ago, the decision was easy. “I could eat.”

                  “Good,” Mitchell said, “because I know a great place.”

                  With this, I didn’t argue; I sat back in my seat and let him drive as we continued down the road. For the most part, I recognised the area, but Mitchell kept going until the roads got gradually less familiar. Our town was neither a gigantic city nor a tiny village, and my knowledge of the outskirts – several miles out from my neighbourhood – was patchy at best. I only hoped he knew where we were heading.

                  Ten minutes later, when the buildings lining the street had started giving way to open stretches of greenery, he began to slow the car down. We turned off the main road onto a slightly uphill route, barely wide enough for two vehicles. For a moment, I wondered if I should’ve been concerned, but a minute or so later saw the path giving way to a gravel car park illuminated by streetlights on the corner.

                  He shut off the engine, and I peered out the window, slightly confused. The car park was empty bar a couple of other beat-up vehicles, shining with scratches in the overhead lamps. Behind us sat a small building, a single storey high, its entrance headed by a sign I couldn’t quite read. “Where are we?”

                  Mitchell didn’t give much away as he climbed out of the car. “You’ll see.”

                  I followed him toward the door, quickening my natural pace to keep up with his longer strides. On the approach, the sign came into view: a clear, printed header that proclaimed the words The Writer’s Block. I went to question him, but Mitchell had already reached the door and was entering the building, leaving me with no choice but to follow.

                  Inside, I was swept over by a wave of warmth and the background buzz of muted chatter and clinking crockery. The place, I quickly realised, was a café; wooden tables were set up all over the room, each surrounded by a mismatching array of chairs. There were cushy armchairs that looked like they’d swallow you up, hard-backed diners straight out of the fifties, even a couple that looked like they’d once been theatre seats in a past life. Only three other customers were in the room, and the only thing they had in common was they were all frantically writing. Behind the bar, two workers in aprons flitted around, brewing coffee and singing to the radio with way too much enthusiasm for a night shift.

                  “What is this place?” I asked.

                  “The best place I know at this time of night,” Mitchell said, heading over to a table in the corner and gesturing for me to join him. “And the home of the best coffee for miles.”

                  When he pulled back my armchair for me, a subconscious part of my heart fluttered a little, though I quickly thought better of it. I sunk back into the soft leather, and our gazes met across the table.

                  “What’s with the name?” I asked. “Is this a secret hideaway for reclusive writers, or something?”

                  “Something like that,” he told me, with a look of amusement. “I can guarantee it’s pretty much the most productive place you’ll ever go. It’s aimed at writers, because they’ll give you a free cup of coffee for every thousand words you get through.”

                  Only then did my gaze catch on the top of the menu, which was plastered all over with the words ‘Cup per K!’. When I turned to look at the other customers, I noticed they were all clutching steaming mugs, their free hand working frantically to earn their next dose of caffeine. Then again, doing so was probably necessary at nearly one in the morning.

                  “You’re joking.”

                  “Nope. Completely serious.” And he looked it, too; I’d never seen him appear more at ease than he did in that moment, leaning back in the armchair in the corner of the café. “And they won’t let you buy it, either. You pay with words, not cash. I owe pretty much all my productivity to this place and their offering of free caffeine. I’m not sure I’d still be alive and successfully running a newspaper without it.”

                  “How come I’ve never heard of it?”

                  He shrugged. “I guess maybe you never looked.”

                  With that, he had a point. I’d never really ventured anywhere before without Reese, mostly because being the twin sister of the most outgoing girl in our year was a full-time occupation in itself. It wasn’t that I was incapable of doing my own thing, more that I’d just never had to.

                  Before I could say anything else, I realised one of the apron-clad girls had approached our table, already brandishing a flip pad and retrieving a pencil from behind her studded ear. Short, black hair was pulled into a very messy ponytail, and I noticed a small black tattoo on her wrist, though it was too small for me to get a proper glimpse.

                  “Mitchell, hey.” Her energy once again seemed out of place, considering the time of night. “I wasn’t expecting you in here today. And you brought a friend!”

                  “It was kind of an impromptu trip,” he explained. “Kent, this is Callie. Callie, Kent.”

                  “Nice to meet you.” She smiled at me, which I returned, dwelling only for a moment on her unusual name. With one like Callie, I wasn’t exactly in a position to comment. “Glad to see Mitchell’s finally found some company whilst turning insomniac.”

                  “Not insomniac,” he corrected. “Just a writer.”

                  “Aren’t we all?” Kent flipped to a fresh page on her notepad, looking expectantly at the pair of us. “So, what can I get you? Other than the endless rounds of coffee I’ll be delivering once the laptop comes out, of course.”

                  “What do you fancy?” Mitchell asked, and I realised a beat late he was looking at me.

                  Having not had a chance to examine the menu, I found myself put on the spot. “Uh…” A moment’s pause, and I decided to go for the safest option. “Whatever you’re having sounds good to me.”

                  “Wise decision,” Kent chipped in, with a sideways look, like we already had an inside joke to share. “He’s in here so often, he could probably whip up anything off the menu himself. Although thankfully he’s got enough sense to leave it to the professionals.”

                  “We’ll take two orders of the cheesy chips, then,” he told her. “As long as there’s no scrimping on the cheese.”

                  “Do we ever?” Kent asked, tucking the pencil back behind her ear, so it rested above a glinting silver stud in her cartilage. “Coming right up.”

                  When she returned to her spot behind the bar, a safe distance away, my gaze left her and wandered back to the guy seated opposite. His scruffy hair had yet again fallen in front of his face, and he seemed to realise about the same time I did, shaking his head to resettle it.

                  Our gazes locked, and I spoke just as the quiet seemed to stretch too long. “So… you spend a lot of nights here?”

                  “More than I probably should.” His expression was caught somewhere between sheepishness and pride, and I couldn’t quite work out where in the middle. “She’s got a point with the insomniac thing. It’s become a habit, you know? This time of night is when I do my best writing, so I figure I shouldn’t waste those hours sleeping.”

                  “I’m not sure you could call a basic survival need a waste of time,” I pointed out.

                  He grinned, a little too toothily, in a way that let on he’d gone through a geeky brace phase at some point in his life. “That’s true,” he said, “but sometimes it gets to the point where writing falls under that category, too. You know what I mean?”

                  For a moment, I stayed quiet, just thinking. Writing had been part of my life for as long as I could remember; there wasn’t a point in my life I could recall when I hadn’t sometimes been struck by the urge to put pen to paper. My creativity wasn’t fussy. I tended to jump to and from all genres, fiction or otherwise. There was something liberating about switching off and letting the words flow freely, like it was all coming from another part of my consciousness. Sometimes, it even felt like something other than Callie was writing the words.

                  Maybe, if I shut off enough, it even had the potential to be Reese.

                  “Yeah,” I said eventually, hyper-aware of the way Mitchell’s gaze had grown more intent, sweeping over my expression with something that went further than curiosity. “I do.”

                  The chips arrived shortly afterward: two plates brimming with golden wedges, covered in a sticky web of melted cheese that looked both delicious and heart attack inducing. Still, the latter didn’t stop either of us making a grab for the ketchup and digging in; my decision to follow Mitchell’s lead on the ordering certainly hadn’t let me down. I had to hand it to him: he had good taste.

                  “So,” he began, in between swallowing a large mouthful and reaching for his next, “I have a proposition.”

                  My own mouth full, I let my eyes wander from the plate to his face. It was kind of hard to concentrate on anything when the chips tasted a bit like liquid gold, but I had to make some attempt. “What’s that?”

                  “We’re going to be here for a long while yet,” he pointed out, glancing at his watch. I realised then this was another odd thing about Mitchell; he had to be the only teenage guy around who still felt the need to wear one, even though he was permanently with a phone in his jeans pocket. “And we’re both going to need the caffeine. So you need to chip in and earn your keep.”

                  “What?”

                  “The writing,” he said. “You want coffee? I’m not going to let you sit here and watch me earn you a cup. You’ve got to be in this as well.”

                  All of a sudden, I saw what he was getting at. “Oh, no,” I began, already shaking my head. “I know exactly what you’re doing. If this is some ploy to get me back into newspaper without realising it, it’s not going to work. I’ve already told you.”

                  “I’m not saying you have to write for newspaper. You just have to write.”

                  “Why?”

                  “Other than the fact we have five more hours to kill, and nobody’s got enough conversation to fill that gap?” He raised an eyebrow. “Because you look like you need it, Callie. And I’m just saying that as a fellow writer.”

                  I didn’t really know what to say, mostly because there was more truth in his words than I wanted to admit. Instead, I shoveled another few chips into my mouth, instantly regretting it when the melted cheese dripped down my chin. As I scrambled to wipe it off, Mitchell looked on, watching with an expression that was difficult to face.

                  “What do you say?” he asked eventually, seeming to sense I had come up short on the reply front.

                  I swallowed. “I’m saying I don’t have my laptop,” I settled for eventually, deciding it was probably among the safest options. No unnecessary commitment, but not outright rejection either. The comfy middle ground, in which I always tried to settle.

                  “Neither do I,” he told me. But he reached down to the bag at his feet, pulling out something and placing it on the table between us. It took a few seconds to register that there were two notebooks, his personal post-its and additional sheets spilling right out from between the pages. “Instead, I thought we could do this the old fashioned way. Both of us.”

                  For a moment, all I could do was stare, a little skeptically. My gaze trailed from the notebooks back up to his face, which had settled on me sometime beforehand. “You’re really not joking right now, are you?”

                  “No.” The corner of his lip twitched, threatening to turn into a smile, but not quite making it all the way. “I thought you’d worked out by now that I say what I think.”

                  “Brutally honest,” I said.

                  “Yeah.” All at once, it got there: the smile that lit up the rest of his face. “That’s me.”

                  I wasn’t sure what compelled me to do it; one moment, I was still debating, caught between my two options with no lean towards either. And yet in the next, something changed. It was like a fuse had finally been lit somewhere inside my head, a sudden realisation that told me not to hold back. Maybe it was the fact that I was usually asleep by this time, and the change in body clock was throwing everything else off. Maybe it was still the rippling effects of grief, which could never really be timed correctly. Or maybe, just maybe, it was something else.

                  Either way, something forced the words out of my mouth. “Give it here, then. I want some coffee.”

                  And though it was strange to admit, it felt almost worth it to see the genuine – almost brutally honest – smile that widened across Mitchell’s features.

                  When we left the café and headed back to his car, several hours later, we had managed eight cups of coffee between us. It was the most productive night he’d ever had, he later admitted, and I had never come close to anything of the sort. It wasn’t just the quantity of words, but also the ease with which they came out of me, like they’d been building up for months. Waiting to pour right out.

                  There was a definite sense of accomplishment in the air when his car pulled up at the foot of my driveway past six in the morning, and it wasn’t just from the writing. When I pulled out the bucket list from my pocket, Mitchell rooted around for a pen in the glove box, and we scribbled out number six together.

                  With the promise of seeing each other at school in a couple of hours, I slipped back into the house, overcome by an upbeat feeling that seemed out of place within such sleep deprivation. An impending smile tugged at my lips as I climbed the stairs, heading for the door to my bedroom.

                  But when I pushed through it, emerging in the mirror room once again, I froze instantly in my tracks. The smile, first stuck to my face like some creepy painted doll, began to seep away.

                  Reese was smirking, an expression that was entirely her, as she stood in the middle of the room. With her arms folded, and her vibrantly messy hair falling in tangled waves down her back, she shattered my previous assumptions as if they were a sheet of glass.

                  As my sanity felt like it was draining away, my sister spoke.

                  “Congratulations, Cal,” she said, her voice ringing out across the empty space. “You know, you’re getting pretty good at this.”

                  A second’s pause. Then, I screamed.

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Hi, guys! Here I am with another chapter. I really feel like I'm getting into the swing of the story now, and I can't quite believe I'm already 30,000 words in.

I've had a crazy few weeks! I'm now home from university for Christmas, and just three days ago I went to Wattpad London Con, which was great fun. I got to be a speaker on a Q&A panel about finding inspiration, met some big Wattpad names and even some fans! I also signed my first autograph, which was insane. Hopefully being at home will give me some more time for writing, though I can't make any promises (I've just been called back into my old work to help out for 2 weeks over Christmas, and then I have exams to revise for). I'll just have to see how it goes, and try to fit in writing whenever possible!

Thanks so much for your continued support on this story. I realise it's a pretty unusual genre for Wattpad, and not the most popular, so if any of you are reading outside your comfort zone, thank you. It's new for me, too. I love you all, and until next time :)