Losing Hope (Hopeless, #2)

by Colleen Hoover

You would think a person could only die once. You would think you would only find your sister’s lifeless body once. You would think you would only have to watch your mother’s reaction once after finding out her only daughter is dead. Once is so far from accurate. It happens repeatedly.

I knew the girl who smiled in the pictures. But I didn’t know the girl that linked that smile with those tears. I have no idea why you flashed fake smiles, but cried real tears.

I’m a pussy when it comes to the fact that I have no idea what to expect after this life. What if the afterlife is worse than the life you’re running from?

If I see Grayson at school on Monday, I’ll rip his balls off and mail them to you. What’s your new address?

If I could preorder the perfect girl, I wouldn’t even come close to the version standing in front of me right now.

My attention is constantly homed in on her like I’m a compass and she’s my North.

I wonder if it’s possible for people to fall in love with a person one characteristic at a time, or if you fall for the entire person at once. Because I think I just fell in love with her wit. And her bluntness. And maybe even her mouth, but I won’t allow myself to stare at it long enough to confirm.

I can’t even explain to you how perfect this girl is. And when I say perfect, I mean imperfect, because there’s just so much wrong with her. But everything wrong with her is everything that draws me in and makes her perfect.

I don’t want her to feel nothing when I kiss her. I want her to feel everything.

I’m pretty sure it’s too soon to love her, but shit. She’s got to stop doing and saying these unexpected things that make me want to fast-forward whatever’s going on between us. Because I want to kiss her and make love to her and marry her and make her have my babies and I want it all to happen tonight.

All she did was hug me back, but little does she know she just knocked a whole lot of life back into me.

You can hold my hand, you can run your fingers through my hair, you can straddle me while I feed you spaghetti, but you are not getting kissed tonight.

Because I want your first kiss to be the best first kiss in the history of first kisses.”

Every time she speaks or smiles or, God forbid, laughs… my heart reacts like it’s been sucker-punched. I hate it and like it and somehow have become addicted to it. Every time she speaks, the sucker-punch in my chest reminds me that there’s still something there.

Whatever is left inside me has just been asleep, and she’s somehow slowly waking it up.

“You have a nice mouth,” I say, still slowly tracing it with the tips of my fingers. “I can’t stop looking at it.” “You should taste it,” she says. “It’s quite lovely.”

“Holder is not my boyfriend, but if I catch him trying to break the record for best first kiss with another girl, then he’ll soon be my not breathing nonboyfriend.”

“I call her Val because it’s short for Valium and I always tell her she needs to take that shit by the bucketful. I wasn’t lying when I said she was fucking crazy.”

I run straight to Sky’s house because she’s the only thing in the world that can help me breathe again.

“I live you, Sky,” I say against her lips. “I live you so much.” And as perfect as that word sounds, as perfectly as it describes the point we’re at, I know it’s a lie. I don’t just live her. I love her. I’ve loved her since we were kids.

I’ve loved Hope since we were kids. But tonight? Tonight I fell in love with Sky.

I don’t deserve to touch you until you know for a fact that I’m touching you because I love you and for no other reason.”

I’m not falling in love with her piece by piece anymore. I’m in love with the whole girl. Every single piece of her.

“Fuck all the firsts, Sky. The only thing that matters to me with you are the forevers.”

When I touch you, I’m touching you because I want to make you happy. When I kiss you, I’m kissing you because you have the most incredible mouth I’ve ever seen and you know I can’t not kiss it. And when I make love to you—I’m doing exactly that. I’m making love to you because I’m in love with you.

I used to think the best part of me died with Les, but the best part of me is standing right here in front of me.

“Tell me it’s okay to want to be inside you right now… because after everything we’ve been through today, it feels wrong to need you like I do.”

In order to miss someone, that means you were privileged enough to have them in your life to begin with. And while seventeen years doesn’t seem like near enough time to have spent with you over the course of a lifetime, it’s still seventeen more years than the people that never knew you at all. So if I look at it that way… I’m pretty damn lucky.