How to Love

It's a myth that boys don't like to gossip.

The hideous thing is this: I want to forgive him. Even after everything, I do. A baby before my 17th birthday and a future as lonely as the surface of the moon and still the sight of him feels like a homecoming, like a song I used to know but somehow forgot.

I think of how it felt to lose him, slow and painful and confusing, and how it felt to wonder if I'd ever really had him at all.

My eyes had been closed for a few minutes when he said it: "I love you," he muttered, so quiet, like a prayer whispered into my neck.
"Hmm?" I was nearly asleep myself, edges blurring; I was one hundred percent sure I'd misheard.
"I love you." He said it again, clearer this time, right into my ear, breath tickling. I felt like a hydrogen bomb. I tried to be very still, but I knew he could feel my entire body tensing, a runner ready to begin a race --
Get set--
Go.
I opened my mouth, shut it again.
Oh God.
I did love him, is the awfulness of it. I'd loved Sawyer since the seventh grade, when Allie and I began keeping a list of the places we spotted him. I loved his quick, blistered musician hands and the honest soul he kept hidden safe under all his bravado, and I loved how I was still, every day, learning him. I loved his silly, secret goofy side and the way he had of making me feel like I was a tall tree, just from the way he looked at my face. I loved Sawyer LeGrande so much that sometimes I couldn't sit still for the fullness of it, but when I opened up my mouth to tell him so, nothing came out.
I could do anything for him, I realized suddenly. I could give him anything. But not that. If I said that to him, I knew I could never get it back.
"Go to sleep," I whispered, and he didn't say it again.

I like him so stupidly much.

Do you miss her?
I blinked. Did I what? This was my best friend since preschool we were talking about, the girl whose snack and math homework I’d shared since before I had memorized my own phone number, who’d buried her cold, annoying little feet underneath me during a thousand different movie nights and showed me how to use a tampon. She’d grown up in my kitchen, she was my shadow- self—or I was hers— and Sawyer wanted to know if I missed her? What the hell kind of question was that?