Magnolia Parks (Magnolia Parks Universe #1)

by Jessa Hastings

Painful things can still be beautiful things,

It happens because people are careless and callous and casual with hearts and emotions, and those people are dangerous to be involved with and so even if you love them, you shouldn’t love them because nothing is worth feeling how he made me feel, and there was no guaranteeing that what happened before wouldn’t happen again because the word of a cheater, she said, is void.

How many people will look at me like he does, not just like I’m the sun but like I’m the whole god damn universe.

What a mind fuck it is to comfort the person who just blew your whole heart open with a rifle.

It’s because I’m weak, I think. It was easier to be his friend than not to be.

Everything wonderful, everything magical, everything painful, everything beautiful and spectacular and wretched and defining that has happened to me happened with him. And I hate him for that.

“She came to the club.” I look up at them. “She told me she wasn’t going to come and then she came.” “And then you came,” Henry says, and eyeballs me playfully. “But differently.” I give him a look. “I wonder if England came?” Henry ponders, just to shit me. I peg my water bottle at him. “Fuck you! This isn’t funny!”

I think about kissing Magnolia Parks more than I think about anything else, literally in the world. It’s my go-to thought when my mind has a minute to spare.

“Do you think I’m going to cook you and eat you?” she calls after me. I look back, shake my head, smirking. “Nah, just fuck me up.”

how love can go sour like milk and then it turns to hate.

“What am I to you?”

“The oxygen mask”—I glance back at him—“that falls down from the ceiling of the planes.”

He grabs me, pulls me in towards him, holds me tight against him and I tell myself to remember this. Remember how this feels. Being in here, in his arms. Remember how it feels to be folded up inside his chest, how it feels to have his arms pressed against my back, where my legs fit between his, how he ducked his chin a little so I can live under there, remember all of it because this is the last time.

Can you die from a broken heart, do you know? And if I did and they cut me wide open, would I bleed loving him? When they lift my heart out of my chest cavity to weigh it, does it weigh the same as his top lip? Is his name carved into my third rib to the left? Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. He’s killing me. Loving him is killing me too, and I’m afraid because how many loves really, do you get in a lifetime? How many chances do you give it before you let it go? I’m letting it go.