“In fact, I noticed everything about Alex. Like that his left nostril was slightly larger than his right nostril. And the way he ate a Kit Kat bar: chocolate first and then the layers of wafer separately. I could pick his one sneeze in a room full of sneezers.”

“Oh. My. God. I'd been dissed. Majorly. Because I was an ugly, disgusting ogre. Snot was probably pouring from my nostrils onto the ground.”

“I can barely breathe but I think that his lips might be better than oxygen at the moment.”

“That's it. I've had enough of this talking crap. I reach my hands up. I cup his chin and bring his mouth to mine.”

“Alex was a world. He was an entire galaxy. A universe of possibilities.”

“Then I wake up. And, it's not the purple- hued light of the house at three in the morning that has woken me, or the sound of Payton stumbling into the bathroom. It's a hand. A single hand. So innocuous. I feel it before my eyes blink open. A slight weight on my hip. A current of electricity running through me, reshaping the air that I breathe. It takes only a second for me to process what it is, to rearrange the spaces in my head around the feel of his fingers on my body.”

“He looks at you like you're the only person in the room. Like he's trapped underwater and you're an oxygen tank. Like he's in anaphylactic shock and you're an EpiPen.”