I let Rince enfold me in his arms, and for a moment I relax against that familiar chest, breathing him in. But he smells different now. He’s not the boy who shifted from friend to something else on the day I turned sixteen, when he persuaded me to show him my breasts. He’s not the boy who put his fingers in me at seventeen, or who took my virginity on my eighteenth birthday. He’s not the boy whose body I learned and enjoyed for the next few years, until he left me. He doesn’t smell like resin and rain-washed earth anymore. He smells like tobak smoke, paste from his artwork, and an unfamiliar
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