Twice in a Blue Moon

by Christina Lauren

“I like him but—I don’t want to get my hopes up and start talking about what-ifs.” “Why not?” she asked. “It’s not like you won’t be disappointed regardless if nothing happens. I don’t know why people think permanent denial is better than temporary disappointment.”

I was a tiny fish; he had me hooked.

“Do you want to live in the sun?” he asked quietly. “Or do you want to go back in the shadows?”

I think the fact that I never got to fall out of love with him—that I just had to keep moving forward, stumbling into something new and totally different—means that my brain and heart don’t know the protocol here.

I’m fighting the fear that I’m no more than a stepping-stone to every man who has ever meant anything to me.

“That the worst thing I ever did was for the best reason I ever had?”

For the first time in my life I get it: home isn’t always a space; it can be a person.