Problematic Summer Romance (Not in Love, #2)

by Ali Hazelwood

“He may have been one of the ones, but he wasn’t the one. You’re young, and more beautiful than you yet realize, and you’ll be the smartest person in most of the rooms you’ll enter throughout your life. You’re better off without some guy who just asked me for pointers on how to break into the crypto space.”

The world is so big, and we are just clumps of atoms. What’s a tiny little bit of heartbreak, when faced with the vastness of mankind? Does it matter that a love is unrequited, if the universe started with a hot fireball and will end the same way?

“Of course I fucking want you. You are stupidly beautiful, and too fucking smart for your own good, and I refuse to go there, Maya.”

“You okay?” I ask, cautious. “Yeah.” A deep inhale. “Yeah. I just wanted to listen to you exist.”

“It’s the way you take over the space around you. You remind me constantly, loudly, indecently, of all the little things that make you you. It’s impossible to escape, and it makes me very angry.”

“I have never wanted anything as desperately, as ungovernably, as persistently as I want you. Not a single goddamn thing. Not my dead mother back. Not revenge. Not the well-being of the people I love. Not professional success, not even my own happiness. Absolutely nothing has consumed me as mercilessly as you have.”

“Do you want me to leave?” “It would be best if—” “Not the question I—” “No, Maya. I never want you to be anywhere but with me.”

“Since the first day I met you, you have been the best thing in my life. And you weren’t even in it.”

Maya: If I had a euro for every time I fell asleep after a sexual encounter with you and then woke up to find that you’d left for another country, I’d have two euros. Maya: Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice