Beach Read

by Emily Henry

“You’re so beautiful, January,” he whispered, kissing me more tenderly. “You’re so fucking beautiful, you’re like the sun.”

He never looked away from any of it. Maybe he thought someone had to bear witness to the dark, or maybe he hoped that if he stared into the pitch-black long enough, his eyes would adjust and he’d see answers hiding in it.

Every single person on the planet had to take turns hurting. Sometimes all you could do was hold on to each other tight until the dark spat you back out.

Bad things don’t dig down through your life until the pit’s so deep that nothing good will ever be big enough to make you happy again.

Love, after all, was often made not of shiny things but practical ones. Ones that grew old and rusted only to be repaired and polished.

But January, sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes it demands so much of you that you start losing pieces of yourself as you stretch out to give what the world wants to take.

If you think the story has a sad ending, it’s because it’s not over yet.

She had a habit of falling in love with people who had no interest in falling in love.

“Falling’s the part that takes your breath away. It’s the part when you can’t believe the person standing in front of you both exists and happened to wander into your path. It’s supposed to make you feel lucky to be alive, exactly when and where you are.”

He fell silent, and the whine of the wind stretched out like an ellipsis begging to add more.

and I still felt lucky even as I felt miserable.

She learned to let it out, bit by bit, and that sometimes, it was okay to let a little ugliness into your story. That it would never rob you of all the beauty.