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

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.

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.

That macho protective bullshit is just some asshat man pissing on his territory so the other dogs will stay away.

Too much quiet left me depressed and consuming condiments for meals.

His hands reached for me, gripping my hipbones and pulling me forward. he stared down at me, his voice low. "There are some things I will make time for, Jacqueline.

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.