“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.”

“And there's always a way to begin with.”

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

“She grimaces. 'Yeah, maybe you were a bad friend but I'm a good friend so I understand and I'll take you back. Let's just begin again.”

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

“Here's what I think: it's one thing to know that rejection is coming, and it's an entirely different thing when it arrives.”

“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.”