The Ex Vows

by Jessica Joyce

I wondered a lot, alone in our bed while he pulled another all-nighter, when he stopped being hungry for me.

OUCH

It’s a gift to know someone when you’re in love with them, and a curse when you’re out of it.

i can't keep doing this to myself

I just know that when Eli wraps his arms around my waist following a brief hesitation, it feels like coming home after the longest time away.

I have a bias toward peaches.” “Me, too,” Eli says with a brilliant smile.

“You and I are going to have a reckoning, Georgia. It doesn’t have to be this week, but it’s going to happen.”

“Fuck, the way I’ve wanted you,” he breathes against my mouth. “I don’t know how anyone can look at me and not see it.”

“I don’t want to wreck that, so why are you pushing this so hard? Why does it matter?”

“It matters,” he says, his voice breaking, “because I’m in love with you.”

Everything stops. Me. Time. Earth, probably.

“I’m in love with you,” he repeats, calmer now.

“I’m in love with you.”

“Again?”

“Still.”

“When I say I’m still in love with you,” he says quietly, “I mean today and yesterday and this entire week. I mean at Nick and Miriam’s wedding and I mean for the past five years.” If possible, he gets even quieter, but now he’s closer so I get every word. “When I say I’m still in love with you, I mean the first time I saw you and right now. I mean every second in between.”

SOBBING RN

You don’t need to send me anything to make me miss you, Georgia. I already do.

“I really have loved you for a long time.”

“Because I’ve loved you for a long time, too.”

always felt like saying ‘I love you’ never really touched how much I was feeling. If I gave you a list that showed all of the times I loved you, cumulatively, maybe you’d see, since that’s your language. I had…” He huffs out a breath, rubbing a hand along his jaw. His stubble purrs against his skin, a sound I feel everywhere. “Plans like this for it, I guess, but me showing you, not a glass of wine doing the grand reveal.”