“Finally he smiled. "You had no idea," he said, "how much I've thought about you saying that." And then he did what I hadn't had the nerve to do. He pushed his hands in my hair, and kissed me.”

“Me?" "Yeah you," he said, giving me a wry smile. "I gave you my number half expecting you would never call, and so when you did . . . why do you think I was so gung ho about driving all the way out here? I wanted to spend time with you.”

“Yeah whatever," Andrew said impatiently. "He came back to the room that night and kept talking about this girl he'd seen at the stargazing. He was shy, and so I told him if he pointed you out, I'd try to finagle a meeting." I swear, Andrew's the only person in the world who could use a word like finagle with a straight face. "But he was talking about me," I said. Andrew shrugged. "When we figured it out, we had a good laugh about it," he said defensively. "But of course you were my girlfriend. So that was that.”

“Nathan laughed with little real humor. "Maybe that's because I was," he said. "I disapproved of the way Andrew treated you. And i really disapproved of the way I felt about you. You were my roommate's high school sweetheart, and even now, when you're crying over him, I just . . ." I felt like I was standing on the precipice, and my decision to jump or not was the most important one I could make in my life. "What?" I whispered. He look at me, and his eyes were very, very serious. "I just want to kiss you," he said.”

“Because he never said it first---he would only ever say 'I love you, too.' And I would hate to think that he was talking about the band U2 the whole time, you know?”

“Even though we've been dating over a year, I still get a small thrill when i hear the words my girlfriend come out of his mouth, especially when he emphasizes the first word the way he was doing now. I had been awake for five minutes and already he had called me twice. I kind of liked this possessive thing.”

“You . . . smell like rain." Whatever I expected, that hadn't been it. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" "Good," he said. "Definitely good.”