“My pulse is buzzing and my stomach is a riot of butterflies and half-digested peanut butter cookies.”

“You're the bright spot in my day.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You know, I never should have let you not be my friend. It's not healthy for either of us.”

“When he speaks into my hair, it is barely a whisper. 'Willow, it's never too late. And there's always a way to begin again.”

“I'm being fair, it was the best kiss of my life- a kiss that finds all your seams and pulls them apart, stitch by detail stitch.”