Kindle Notes & Highlights
“I miss talking with Jared, but most of all…I miss the pillowtalk. So I talk to him like he’s still there next to me while I drift off to sleep. Like he never left.” She looked longingly at the urn. “But he did. Logically, I know that, and every time I’m met with silence at the other end of the conversation, it just…well, it makes me hurt all over again.”
the vibrations of his deep voice ricocheted against her heart, widened her eyes, stole her breath. She froze in his arms, taken aback by just how wonderful it was to finally, finally hear a voice on the other end of her conversations. It was a reminder that her imagination paled in comparison to the real thing—and
He was not the ghost of a touch that she was trying to remember; he was alive and breathing and tangible.
Did fate really have something to do with him moving back home, with her visiting at the same time? In that moment, he’d like to think that it did, because even with the draw of the night sky above, she, too, was choosing to look right back at him.
“I shouldn’t want you like this,” he continued, his voice coming out harsher, faster. “But I can’t stop thinking about you. I can’t stop wanting to take you in my arms. I can’t stop watching your every move, wondering about every thought that runs through your mind, waiting for another moment when I get to touch you, even if it’s something small.”
or if it had nothing to do with Jared and everything to do with Aaron and how natural it was to be around him, how comforted and safe she felt, how they could ease into light and heavy without a pause in thought. Whatever the reason, it boiled in her blood and ran electric through her nervous system that she needed—no, craved his body, his touch, his words, his lips, his mind, and everything in between.
He was wiping away so many things, replacing her heartache with a sweet joy, just as the sun erases darkness when it breaks over the horizon.
She wanted someone to hold her, touch her, to fill those pieces of her that were drowning in loneliness ever since Jared passed. She wanted to roll over and touch something warm and breathing. She wanted arms to hug her, lips to kiss her, a voice to calm her. She wanted pillowtalk, and she wanted it with Aaron.
For the first time in a long time, he didn’t picture his heart as a blackened, rotten mess. Kennedy had pulled it out, painted it a blinding red, and placed it back in his chest in the span of a single night. He could only imagine what she’d do with it in the future.
Aaron understood, on the surface, maybe, but deep down was the horrid thought that if he’d been worthy of it, she’d at least let him have the part of her heart that wasn’t Jared’s.
