Conventionally Yours (True Colors, #1)

by Annabeth Albert

I’d been aware of guys in that way as long as I could remember—at first seeing it as a curse of sorts, then later working hard to view it as simply how I was wired. But accepting that about myself didn’t mean I was going to embrace my body suddenly turning traitor and noticing Alden.

But I loved space stuff. I had this amazing fourth-grade teacher who let me write a whole essay on why Pluto should be reclassified as a planet again.”

Well now I feel old

Conrad was going to kiss me, and I was going to let him. Wait. Let was the wrong word. I wanted this, had wanted it far, far longer than I was willing to admit, even to him. Even to myself for that matter. I wanted this, and I wasn’t going to let the moment slip away, not this time. Instead, I met him halfway, our lips colliding—a little artlessly at first, nothing lining up evenly, our noses bumping. But then he shifted, pulling me closer, and I forgot to worry about what lined up where. For the first time maybe ever, logistics were less important to me than feelings. The margins of our mouths and angles of our noses became fleeting concerns, replaced by sensation. The feel of his lips, soft and satiny. The slight rasp of his cheek. The tremble in his hand. The strength in his fingers. The hitch in my heartbeat at the slightest increase in the pressure of his mouth. The sigh in my soul, a knee-melting feeling of absolute, utter rightness. Right as I started to sink into that feeling, though, he pulled back, resting his forehead against mine for a second. Probably longer than the actual kiss, but my lips still tingled with awareness of where his had been.

Now that’s… a good kiss

She was proud of me, but where had she been when I’d needed her most? Their love had been conditional, and that was no love at all. Holy wow. I let that thought ping around my head, knocking over long-held pillars of assumptions. Maybe it wasn’t love that hurt. It wasn’t love that screwed me over. Real love didn’t have conditions and limitations. People had failed me, let me down, hurt me. But not everyone was like that. Hadn’t Alden shown me compassion over and over? Was what we felt for each other the real deal?

But then, I worried about a lot of things more than he did. Which was okay, and part of how we balanced each other out. I was slow and cautious, and he was already floating around the deep end. I made sure we didn’t drown, and he made sure we actually got in the water and had fun.