Say stop, whenever you want to stop. Understand?" I nodded. "Do you want to stop now?" My head moved back and forth to the pillow. "Thank God.

The night we met-I'm not like that guy." His jaw was rigid. "I know tha-" He placed a finger over my lips, his expression softening. "So I don't want you to feel pressured. Or overpowered. But I do, absolutely, want to kiss you right now. Badly.

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.

He laughed, and the sound reduced the pain of every sore place on my body to the dullest ache.

Minus my relationship with Kennedy, I had no automatic invitation to Greek Parties or events, though Chaz and Erin could invite me to some stuff since I fell under the heading of acceptable things to bring to any party: alcohol and girls. Awesome. I'd gone from independent girlfriend to party paraphernalia.

I used to think of two people in love like that. Like puzzle pieces, fitting together. But it's not like that at all. Love pulls a part of you out, and it pulls a part of him - like taffy, stretching but not separating. The tendrils of each one wrap around the other, until they meld together. One, but not quite. Separate, but not quite.

Love is not the absence of logic but logic examined and recalculated heated and curved to fit inside the contours of the heart.