Verity

by Colleen Hoover

invisible. Unimportant. Manhattan is too crowded to give a shit about me, and I love her for it.

you do when you’ve experienced the worst of the worst. You seek out people like you…people worse off than you…and you use them to make yourself

feel

better about the terrible things that have h...

I think the idea of me is better than the reality of me.

look at someone the way he looked at me—with the entirety of his past—without also imagining the future.

He closed his eyes and kissed me. The kiss was full of both desire and respect—two things a lot of men didn’t seem to know could go hand in hand.

kiss that intimate with a stranger was like saying, “I don’t know you, but I believe I would like you if I did.”

I’d had sex before, but never with more than just my body.

There was so much more of me invested in that moment than my body. My heart felt full—of what, I don’t know. But my heart had felt empty with the men who came before

amazing how different sex felt when a person used more than their body. I involved my heart and my...

It was as if I’d been standing on the edge of a cliff my whole life, and finally, after meeting Jeremy, I felt confident enough to jump. Because—for the first time in my life—I felt co...

And that’s what love at first sight is. It isn’t

really love at first sight until you’ve been with the person long enough for it to become love at first sight.

I needed to please him.

I needed to be what made him smile, breathe, wake up in the mornings. And for a while, I was. He loved me more than he loved anything or anyone. I was his sole reason for living. Until he discovered the one thing that meant more to him than I did.

Sometimes a look between two people can last so long, it shakes you. Forces you to look away.

But when a person finds someone who makes all the negativity in their life disappear, it’s hard not to feed off that person.

was starving and shriveled before I met him, but being in his presence nourished

me.

It’s very simple, really. Take care of your physical being. Feed it what it needs, not what the conscience tells you it wants. Giving in to cravings of the mind that ultimately hurt the body is like a weak parent giving in to her child. “Oh, you had a bad day? Do you want an entire box of cookies? Okay, sweetie. Eat it. And drink this soda while you’re at it.” Caring for your body is no different from caring for a child. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it sucks, sometimes you just want to give in, but if you do, you’ll pay for the consequences eighteen years down the road.