Blurb:
The heart hide, but it never forgets.
THEN
At thirteen you were my first real friend. At fifteen you were my first love. At eighteen you were my everything. We were about to take on the world together, until one mistake shattered our future.
NOW
I’m about to marry a safe man who will never touch my heart, whose loss would never break me. He doesn’t really need me, and that’s how I like it. Until one day I turned around in a coffee shop and there you were. It’s been eleven years and nothing has changed. I don’t know how to forgive you and worse, I don’t know if I can resist you.
Loving you nearly destroyed me, but losing you again is unthinkable. Am I brave enough to risk it all?
Rating: 5/5 stars
Side Notes:
- Genres: Contemporary Romance, Fiction
- Highly recommend for 14 years and above
- TW: Sexual references, grief, loss and death
Book Quotes:
- “I never got to fall out of love. I just had to move on.”
- “Why can’t everyone be like you?” “I can be enough of your world that it feels like everyone is.”
- “Favorite word?” he whispers. I don’t even hesitate: “You.”
- “I’ve been waiting for you to come home for eleven years. I’ll go anywhere you go.”
- “Limerence.’ There’s no other word like it. The state of being infatuated with another person.”
- “You broke up with her last night?” He nods … “You’re the love of my life. I assumed I would get over you eventually, but seeing you yesterday?” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t go home to someone else and pretend to love her with everything I have.”
- “Don’t spoil her with toys; spoil her with books.”
- “I like your kind of quiet. Your heart isn’t quiet.”
- “Well, you’re more, too. You’re my best everything.”
- “Sometimes it feels like I think about you every minute,” he whispered.”
- “Treat your body carefully. Take care of it. Don’t let anyone abuse it, and don’t abuse it yourself. Every inch of your skin I made diligently; months I slaved over you. You are my masterpiece.”
- “Admissions make feelings intensify simply because they are given space to breathe. Admissions lead to love, and admitting love is like tying yourself to a train track.”
- “Tell her you love her. Girls need the words.”
- “I always knew that he would never fall in love again after Mom. In that way, my dad was always easy to understand. He was straightforward and quiet: he walked quietly, spoke quietly; even his anger was quiet. It was his love that was booming. His love was a roaring, vociferous bellow. And after he loved Mom with the strength of the sun, and after the cancer killed her with a gentle gasp, I figured he would be hoarse for the rest of his life and wouldn’t ever want another woman the way he’d wanted her.”
- “I’m not prepared for this,” I admit quietly. “Do you have to prepare for me?” “If there’s anyone I have to prepare for, it’s you.”
- “It never occurred to me that love could be anything other than all-consuming. Even as a child, I knew I never wanted anything less.”
- “So maybe your best everything should be your boyfriend.” I stared at him and he stared at me. I spoke without thinking. “Maybe.” “Maybe,” he agreed in a whisper.”
- “I give myself three more seconds to look at him, and it’s like another punch to the gut. He’s my person. He’s always been my person. My best friend, my confidant, probably the love of my life. And I’ve spent the last eleven years being angry and self-righteous. But at the end of the day, he tore a hole in us, and fate ripped it wide open. “I’m going to go,” I”
- “I loved you … You loved me, too, you know,” he says quietly. “It was everything.” I feel as though I’ve been shoved, and push away from the table a little, but he leans in. “Sorry. This is too intense. I’m just terrified of not getting a chance to say it.”
- “It isn’t accurate to say that my heart stops, because really I feel it’s existence intensely, a phantom limb.”
- For a long time after we returned to our slow, inefficient method of unpacking the books, I could feel him looking up and watching me, tiny flashes of stolen glances.
- “Elliot was kind of my every-friend.”
- “I’ll take anything you give me. Is that pathetic?”
- “I give myself three more seconds to look at him and it’s like another punch to the gut. He’s my person. He’s always been my person. My best friend, my confidant, probably the love of my life.”
- “I had no idea who Real-Life Elliot was. My Elliot existed only on certain days, only in the confines of our library closet.”
- “His grin is so genuinely happy, it works a creaky hinge open inside me.”
- “Relief and anguish pulse heavily in my blood. I’ve wanted to see him every day. But also, I never wanted to see him again.”
- “Dad knew I couldn’t possibly think of mom more. And he wouldn’t try to help me think of her less, either. It wouldn’t help. Just like holding your breath doesn’t change your body’s need for oxygen.”
- “I think of her everywhere. She is everywhere, in every moment, and also she’s in no one moment. She misses every single one of my moments and I’m not sure who that is harder for: me surviving here without her, or her without me, existing wherever she is.”
- “In that case, I like living alone, but would rather live with you. I like sleeping alone, but would rather have you in my bed. I like having friends over for Thanksgiving, but would rather it just be the two of us, doing our first Thanksgiving as a couple, eating turkey off the bone, cuddling on the floor together.”
- “So yeah, hard didn’t cover it. Hard was like describing a mountain as a lump, like describing the ocean as a puddle.”
- “Are you happy?” I ask him. The question is so abrupt, I expect him to balk a little, but he doesn’t. “I’ve had moments of it, yeah.” I don’t like this answer. I want him to be joyful, loved, adored, full of everything, all the time. “I’ll admit,” he adds, “I feel more of it being near you.”
- “He would wrap his arms all the way around her shoulders, press his face into her hair while his body curved over hers. His arms became a set of parentheses bracketing the sweetest secret phrase.”
- “And girls do want boys who are interesting. Girls want the shy geeks who know everything and have big hands and good teeth and say sweet things.”
- “Countries were established, went to war, and split into smaller countries in the time it took for Elliot to answer.”
- “I realized it would have been dramatic, but I wanted to storm out and make him follow me and grovel for, like, an entire day.”
- “Sean is easy, I get it. He’s a cactus and Elliot is an orchid.”
- “I haven’t been living without him. I’ve been merely surviving.”
- “It’s hard for me sometimes that we aren’t together. I never know where the lines are. I want to cross them all the time.”
- “But most of all, meu docinha, imagine how proud I am to share this with you. You’re growing up. Starting my period was the process that eventually let me get pregnant with you, when I was ready.”
- “Elliot was sexy. What boy our age used the word ripe?”
- “We were always too busy memorizing each other.”
- “Maybe a boy would kiss me in those woods someday.”
- “And because when I find that book that makes me lose myself for just one hour, maybe more, I forget. ”
- “I feel about a thousand times less lonely with you. ”
- “Most nights I was desperate to call him just before I fell asleep, so I could hear his voice.”
- “It seemed to travel with her, to sweep her aloft in the power of song, so that she was moving in glory among the stars, and for a moment she, too, felt that the words Darkness and Light had no meaning, and only this melody was real.”
- “I need a Sean in my life. I need an Elliot about as much as I need a hole in the head.”
- “A nostalgic pang resonates through me as soon as I hear his voice. It has been high and squeaky until it broke. He got endless shit about how nasal and whiny he was, and then, one day, the universe had the last laugh, giving Elliot a voice like warm, rich honey.”
- “I thought I would never touch you again.”
- “I saw Elliot Petropoulos yesterday for the time in almost exactly eleven years and I realized that I’m still in love with him and probably always will be.”
- “This throws me. As in I am a brick, and have been hurled at the glass window.”
- “…you know that I would make time any day for you. Any sliver of time I have is yours.”
- “You knew that. You had to have known that I’d be here, waiting.”