In the Unlikely Event

by L.J. Shen

The first flakes of snow fall around us. On my nose. Eyelashes. Shoulders. A storm is brewing inside my snow globe.

“Don’t let your feelings get in the way of facts.”

Smooth

Our hands touch, and there’s a moment I can’t explain. It feels like more than just our flesh links us. I tell myself it’s nothing, that I’m the only one feeling it, but then I slip my hand back between my thighs and we both shudder in unison, like someone unplugged us from an electric outlet. To burn under your fingertips, I think, is to come alive.

I sit back and let Mal reach over, grab my hand, and lace his fingers through mine over the gearshift. Life is too short not to kiss the one you want.

Isn’t that the essence of love? Find someone worth killing for? Someone with the power to ruin you?”

“That was a minute ago. It’s time to move on. Don’t let the little things in life bother you, yeah?”

“For no doubt disrupting your life and tearing it apart next time I meet you. All’s fair in love and war, yeah?”

What I never got the chance to tell her is that I’m always so unbearably hot.

Hate is the closest thing to love you can squeeze out of the unattainable.

Can you please stop being so beautiful and real and alive all over my house like you own it or something? Can she?

There’s life everywhere you look. Even in objects. But there is death, too.

There’s something so deliciously sweet about seeing him in his element. It reminds me that under the bitter jerk he’s become is still a boyish, adventurous, wildly creative and witty man.

Moral of the story: clutching something desperately doesn’t mean you’re going to keep it. You might just kill it.

Oh, how I miss her like a flower misses the sun. Like the Clash missed the mark with “Cut the Crap.”

You’d know. You sent me one hell of a letter.

Oop

“Aurora Belle Jenkins,” I growl, “one day, you’ll be the death of me. But what a fecking way to go.”

Genuinely nauseous reading this fuck that bitch

“She ran. And I chased her, like I chased you just now. But with you…”

“With you, I chased harder.”

you. I still loved you too much, regardless of how you felt about me. I loved you when you hated me, I loved you when I thought you were indifferent to me, and I loved you when you were on the fence about me. But when I realized you loved me back? All bets were off. The world kept spinning. Days went by. Things changed—other than one thing, my love for you.”

“You’re a pig,” she whispers. I steal another kiss, laughing as I march to the door. “Then you’re my shit.”

“You’re the four seasons, Rory. And I promise to be your shelter in the winter. To bask in you in the summer. To crash into love with you in spring like it’s the first time we’ve met. And when you fall? I promise to always pick you up.”