“I wasn’t sure what was required for home schooling, but I’d take ten hours a day, seven days a week, with no bathroom or lunch breaks if it meant never returning to this cesspool of suck again.”

“This type of guy was every type of wrong on the surface, but there was something more there, something I’d seen in that flash of vulnerability that sucked me in.”

“You may very well be the death of me one day. But what a way to go.”

“The first day of kindergarten when the little boy in a blue polo shirt had sat next to me and told me he’d be my friend when I couldn’t stop crying after my dad had dropped me off. The boy who’d brought me a tray of brownies, a stack of movies, and sat with me on the couch all week after I broke my leg in fifth grade. The boy who’d blushed whenever I talked to him or looked his way when we became teenagers. The same boy who made it his business to make sure all the other boys treated me right.”

“It wasn’t like a first kiss because we knew each other too intimately for that. And it wasn’t like a last kiss because we’d only just begun. It was the kiss you spend your whole life waiting for. The kiss you wish would swallow you whole so you’d always be living it. This was the kiss of a lifetime, shared with a woman I’d spent a few lifetimes waiting for.”

“I’ll be here, each day and every day on, as long as you want me to be”

“I curse the day starvation became a commonly accepted diet for women.”