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.

That’s what faith is, right?’ he says. ‘Believing in what can’t be known? Fall into my arms, Dori. I’ll catch you, every time, and I won’t let go.

I watched him pull his t-shirt over his head. I could put hin on replay doing that and watch it all day.

Ugh! Erin. You have a one-track mind." She smiled deviously. "I prefer to think of it as target-driven.

The getting is easy; the keeping is the important part.

I had to stop linking every single thing that happened to me with Kennedy. Realization dawned then, that he was still my default. 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 was still tethering him to my present, to my future. The truth was, he now belonged only to my past, and it was time I began to accept it, as much as it hurt to do so.

Stay here tonight, Jacqueline. I need to keep you here, at least tonight. Please.