Something about first love defies duplication. Before it, your heart is blank. Unwritten. After, the walls are left inscribed and graffitied. When it ends, no amount of scrubbing will purge the scrawled oaths and sketched images, but sooner or later, you find that there’s space for someone else, between the words and in the margins.

I say I don't believe in love, but that's not really true - love is just the name of an emotion. It's like on steroids. It's lust with ethics.

Really, he could have just punched me in the stomach, because my brain refused to comprehend the words he was saying. A physical assault, it might have understood.

Over the past three years, we'd become each other's habit. And though he'd broken his habit of me when he walked away, I'd not broken my habit of him.

I tilt her chin up and bend my face to hers, silently praising every woman who's had a hand in making her who she is.

She chews her lip, staring into my eyes. "Okay... Why did you kiss me in Austin?" I laugh softly and she frowns. "Sorry. That one's too easy." My gaze flicks to her mouth and back. "I'd wanted to kiss you ever since Quinton suggested playing spin the bottle, and by that night in your room, I'd run out of willpower to fight it.

I miss you Emma." I'm not sure, but it looks like her eyes tear up. "I was fine for months without you," she says, the words hushed and forlorn. "Why does it hurt now?" I'm sighing and shoving a hand through my hair, which I know from experience leaves strands of it stabbing out in numerous directions, defiant and crazy-looking. Maybe crazy is exactly how I feel. "Because now we have hope of something more.