Unloved (The Undone, #2)

by Peyton Corinne

Look, sweetheart, see how strong I am? I can toss you around so easily. I’m gentle, though, but I’ll be aggressive, if you want. I’ll be whatever you want me to be.

“I think it’s hard for people to like me. And I try really hard.” Tears well up in her eyes for a moment and my throat closes a little at the sight. At the sentiment, too, because I understand it deeply.

I think you’d be really easy to love.

“If you were my girlfriend, Rosalie,” he says, his voice deep and rough. My full name is like warm honey dripping from his lips. “You wouldn’t have to do anything to convince me. Just a fucking smile and I’d be a goner, okay?”

Matt Fredderic has been a thousand different things in my head. After meeting him freshman year, I romanticized him endlessly. In my dreams, he was the cool, popular boy who took off my metaphorical glasses and fell in love with me. A knight come to save me in my tall ivory tower. The gentle lover who took my virginity with quiets whispers of “is this okay?” or “you’re so perfect,” and then confessed his devotion to me in an epic, movie-worthy “It’s you. It’s always been you” moment.

So many of my pieces, the things that make me me, are gone, chipped away so that I don’t know who I am anymore. I feel lost. Floating without a tether.

“To be loved is to be seen—and she’s the first person to really see him. That’s why they fall in love.”

I think I’m in love with her—not even romantically, but on some soul level. I feel devoted to her.

With or without the sex. With or without the hockey. She thinks I’m smart and kind and a good person. And, as hard as it is to admit, she’s the first one to really see me like that.

This book is, at its core, about grief and love—isn’t it kinda beautiful how gently hand in hand these two things go?

CRYING