Because when something happens, she's the person I want to tell. The most basic indicator of love.

If you tell me, I will leave you alone," I said. "And if you don't tell me, I am going to grab the nearest ghostwritten James Patterson romance novel and I am going to follow you through this store reading it out loud until you relent. Would you prefer me to read from Daphne's Three Tender Months with Harold or Cindy and John's House of Everlasting Love? I guarantee, your sanity and your indie street cred won't last a chapter. And they are very, very short chapters." Now I could see the fright beneath the defiance.

Now when I have to remember a date, all I have to do is consult my rap sheet.

I want my own books to have their own shelves," you said, and that's how I knew it would be okay to live together.

why won't they leave me alone? don't they realize I have a tinder heart and a paper body and that any spark will turn me straight to ash?

A year. A thousand kisses. And now a thousand one, a thousand two. There are so many other place we could have ended up, but I have to believe none of them would have felt this right. "All I want is you" is not entirely true. I want so much more, and with you I think I can get it.

I had forgotten this about love: how the simple things- the turn away, the turn towards- could be so complicated, and how the complicated things- the stolen night, the right words- could be so simple.