Because how could it be better? How could I ever want someone so much again?

We stripped each other slowly. Selecting each piece of clothing to remove like we were revealing a sacred shrine. Exploring each other.

This is what my skin was for. To be touched like this. To feel this. Every nerve was for this sole purpose and I didn’t even know it until now. To feel his strong hand slide up to cup my breast, his thumb circling my nipple. To feel his breath on my collarbone. I was made to experience him.

And he was right. It was magic.

I got up wrapped in a sheet to grab condoms from Maddy’s stash in her room, and when I came back and he lifted the blanket to let me under, it felt like I was coming home again. The way he pulled me into him, warm and soft and hard and the rain on the roof and the thunder in the background.

Our breathing got heavier and his kisses got harder.

He raked down my thighs as he pulled off my underwear. Biting me gently on the way down and then pulling me to his mouth, fingers slipping inside of me, sucking and teasing until my back arched and I unraveled while he watched me from between the V of my legs.

He let me catch my breath and then I drew him down on top of me. When he slid inside of me, I had never felt closer to another person in my whole life.

I knew conceptually that sex was supposed to be like this. But for me it never was. It had always been one-dimensional, like a transaction.

This wasn’t a transaction.

This wasn’t like anything I’d ever known. I wanted him to hold me after. To wake up with me in the morning and eat cereal in my bed while we watched TV. I wanted to see his pajamas on Christmas morning and find out what he looked like with birthday candles lighting his face and snow in his hair. I wanted to be tangled in him, in all his limbs and all his strings.

I never wanted us to end.

And that’s when I started crying.

He stopped immediately, pulling out of me.

“What happened?” he asked. “Did I hurt you?”

I shook my head.

I couldn’t rein it in. The crying rolled into sobbing and I had to cover my mouth with a hand.

He started to look panicked. “Emma, what did I do? We can stop—”

“I don’t want you to stop. I never want you to stop.”

He waited for me to explain, hovered over me like a concerned, protective weighted blanket.

I blinked up at him through wet lashes. “Justin, I think something is wrong with me. Like there’s something in me, in my heart, that doesn’t work right.”

He peered at me gently. “What doesn’t work right?”

I pressed my lips together trying to keep the crying under control. “It’s like there’s a part of me that’s always small,” I whispered. “And I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do about it.”

I started crying again and couldn’t hold it back. I felt full of cracks all of a sudden. Deep, long, jagged cracks. And they’d always been there. I’d just learned to live with them so long I no longer noticed them. I’d hopped over them and built little bridges and taken other routes, but I never filled them. I never fixed them. I didn’t even know how.

He put his forehead to mine and whispered and soothed me, even though he didn’t know what I was crying about. But I did.

It was about love. I was falling in love.

Every fiber of my being had been fighting against it. It went against all the survival instincts that had kept me safe for the last twenty-eight years. My defenses fought the impulse without even letting me know there was a fight, the way your immune system knocks down infections you don’t even know you’ve been exposed to. And the rest of me just went on, business as usual, planning to move to the next place like I always did because that was my normal. Normal was to keep moving, always leaving, never being anywhere long enough to give anyone or any place the chance to make me want to stay.

How many times had I done this?

How much love had I missed?

I started crying again.

“What can I do?” Justin whispered.

He brushed the hair away from my cheeks and looked at me with so much tenderness my heart ached. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

I took a shuddering breath and tried to settle down.

“Tell me,” he said.

I pulled in another deep, steadying inhale. “Justin, I like you more than I’ve ever liked anyone. And it scares me.”

His eyes roamed my face. “I like you more than I’ve ever liked anyone too.” He paused. “I like you more than like.”

We held each other’s gaze.

“I like you more than like too,” I said quietly.

His face went soft. And then he leaned down and kissed me. It felt like a promise. A vow of some sort, even though I didn’t know what it was for. I just know it made me feel safe. It made me feel calm and okay.

A few minutes later when we started to pick up where we’d left off, it was me who initiated it. I wanted his fast breath and the moan in the back of his throat and the gasp in mine. I wanted to forget. To be so lost in him I couldn’t think about what scared me, or the cracks in my heart, or the things that didn’t work right in my soul. I got lost in myself all the time. But I knew now that Justin was the only person in the world I could ever disappear into.

CHAPTER 36 JUSTIN

Someone knocked on the doorframe to Emma’s room. We were snapped instantly out of the little bubble we’d been in for the last three hours.

It was Maddy.

“What in the hand, foot, and mouth is this?” she said from the doorway, grinning in at us.

I rolled off Emma under the covers and she scooted up. Luckily we’d only been kissing at this point, but if Maddy had been half an hour earlier she would have had quite the show.

“Maddy,” Emma said, clutching the sheet to her neck. “You’re back early.”

“It’s Friday,” she said. “I’m back exactly when I’m supposed to be.” She looked at me. “Heeey, Justin.” She gave me a Cheshire Cat grin.

I waved, red-faced. “Hey.”

“How’d you get here?” Emma asked. “You didn’t call me to pick you up.”

“Neil brought me.”