Just for the Summer (Part of Your World, #3)

by Abby Jimenez

The moment Emma came into view, my entire world slipped into slow motion. My brain took a screenshot. I felt the moment freeze and save. She was beautiful.

Sometimes the best way to show love or be kind to someone is to meet them where they are.”

I could feel myself getting small. Shrinking into myself the way I always did when something stressful or awful happened. Retreating into my own brain. When I got like this, I didn’t want to see anyone or talk to anyone. I could shut down for days. Turn off my phone, call out of work, abandon my social media. Not answer the door for anyone or anything, cut off everyone until I felt safe enough to start to let them in again a little at a time.

I feel this so deeply it hurts

“Unhealed trauma is a crack. And all the little hard things that trickle into it that would have rolled off someone else, settle. Then when life gets cold, that crack gets bigger, longer, deeper. It makes new breaks. You don’t know how broken she was or what she was trying to do to fill those cracks. Being broken is not an excuse for bad behavior, you still have to make good choices and do the right thing. But it can be the reason. And sometimes understanding the reason can be what helps you heal.”

You can still love someone that you’ve decided not to speak to anymore. You can still wish them well and hope for the best for them. Choosing a life without them doesn’t mean you stop caring about them. It just means that you can’t allow them to harm you anymore.

“I know you said you never know when you’re getting your breaks, so I figured I’d just drop it off. I made one for you too, Maddy. Vegetarian. You don’t eat meat, right?”

Not everything that comes out of crisis is bad. Sometimes your traumas are the reason you know how to help.

I didn’t know why it was so hard to say what I was feeling. Maybe because it felt hard to feel what I was feeling.

I was made to experience him.

I felt full of cracks all of a sudden. Deep, long, jagged cracks. And they’d always been there. I’d just learned to live with them so long I no longer noticed them. I’d hopped over them and built little bridges and taken other routes, but I never filled them. I never fixed them. I didn’t even know how.

“Yes. They hear us laughing.” He paused for a moment before cracking up. “Well, you do make me ridiculously happy. I can’t help it.” He rubbed his nose to mine. Justin’s heart was pressed to my heart.

“Sometimes I feel like the seasons could come and go and come and go, a hundred years could pass, a thousand, the ground could collapse under us, this house could crumble and go back to the earth, and we would still be standing here frozen in time, because every second I’m with you is eternal. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

This book...this man makes my heart hurt in the most beautiful way possible

It was Stuffie.

“You’re not asking too much,” he said. “You were just asking the wrong person. Ask me instead.”

“He’s going to put a down payment on an apartment for her if she wants.

Wow Neil really turned into a saint after Alexis

“I knew you’d leave me, but you’d never leave your bags.”

This breaks my heart

Maddy was like a first responder for my soul.

“Somewhere you always should have been.”

Stop it right now shes taking her to Wakan

I felt like my soul was being split down the middle and someone was about to leave with one half of it forever.

If you had asked me yesterday, I would have said it was her. Instead she’d end up being the one who got away. Not a soulmate, just the love of my life. And unfortunately they’re not the same thing.

Crying que loml by taylor swift

A minute later Maddy came back down the hall and Doug took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders before they walked out.

This is so freaking cute

Justin was right. Home wasn’t a place, it was a person. For me it was a whole family.

But I also remembered what it was like to get my first period without a mother to help me.

this alone makes me want to bawl

The last thing I wanted was for you to feel abandoned. I know what that’s like.” “I didn’t feel abandoned,” she said, looking me in the eye. “’Cause I knew if I ever called you, you’d come.” She said it so matter-of-factly. And it was funny, because the second she said it, I realized she was right. I would have. Anytime over the last six months, I would have been there if she’d reached out. I wasn’t like Amber. Even small, I was better than she was. And then she did call and I did come. I’d passed a test I didn’t even know I’d been taking.

Im so happy for her to finally hear this

All of this was because of Emma. And I didn’t blame her for one ounce of it. If you can choose anger or empathy, always choose empathy. And I did.

God bless this man he deserves the world and so doees emma

And there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t feel her absence like a void in my soul. I missed her like I missed the sun in the winter.

The best kind of love doesn’t happen on moonlit walks and romantic vacations. It happens in between the folds of everyday life. It’s not grand gestures that show how you feel, it’s all the little secret things you do to make her life better that you never tell her about.

It isn’t glamorous, it isn’t all butterflies and stars in your eyes. It’s real. This is the kind of love that forever is made of. Because if it’s this good when life is draining and mundane and hard, think of how wonderful it will be when the love songs are playing and the moon is out.

nothing and nobody else would ever compare. With anyone else, it’s just folding socks on a sofa.

I had to clutch a hand over my chest because it felt like it was going to split open. Not a second had passed. It hadn’t been six months since I’d seen her, it was a heartbeat. A flicker. This is the thing nobody tells you about The One. How they’re timeless. How the moment they pop up again you’re right back in it, right where you left off. I was darted through the heart, hit by the truck, my brain taking the screenshot.

“Please,” he begged. “I would stay forever if you asked me,” I whispered. “Then stay.”

que say dont go by taylor swift

I would do it all. I would move in here and raise these kids with him and be still and big and present. I knew how to now.

Update: I did it. She loved it. She said yes.