Wanting Someone You Shouldn’t

There’s a particular kind of tension that comes from wanting something you know you shouldn’t have.

Not in a dramatic, forbidden, star-crossed way. I want to be clear about that, because that’s a different story — and a good one, but not this one. This is something quieter than that. More internal. More personal. The kind of wanting that doesn’t announce itself with grand gestures and impossible circumstances. The kind that just sits there, steady and inconvenient, in the middle of an ordinary day.

It’s the kind of wanting that comes with history.

With context.

With the full understanding of what it meant the first time, and exactly what it could cost the second.

Marc knows what Finn means to him. He has always known. That’s part of the problem — there’s no ambiguity to hide behind, no comfortable uncertainty to retreat into. No illusion. No idealised version of what this could be if only things were different. He’s not reaching for something unknown. He’s standing in front of something he already understands completely, something that has already shaped him in ways he can’t undo and, if he’s being honest with himself, wouldn’t want to.

And he still wants it.

That’s where the conflict lives. Not in whether he should feel it — he does, and that part is beyond argument. The tension is in what he does with it. In the space between feeling something and acting on it, where every decision carries the full weight of what came before.

I find this particular kind of internal conflict endlessly interesting to write. It’s not about obstacles in the traditional sense. Nobody is standing in the way. No external force is keeping these two apart. The only thing between Marc and what he wants is Marc — his understanding of the situation, his awareness of the stakes, his knowledge, bone-deep and unambiguous, of exactly why this is complicated.

Because sometimes the hardest thing isn’t wanting someone.

It’s knowing exactly why you shouldn’t — and wanting them anyway.

These two asked a lot of me. Marc especially. He is not a man who makes himself easy to know, and he is certainly not a man who makes his inner life available for inspection. Getting inside that and writing it honestly — writing the wanting without softening the conflict, writing the conflict without cheapening the wanting — was the work of this book, and I hope it shows.

I hope it feels true.

Because I think most of us have stood somewhere in the neighbourhood of where Marc stands. Maybe not in the same circumstances. But in that particular place where you understand something completely and it doesn’t help at all.