Katherine Center

Robby had it wrong.
Because, despite everything, I loved her.
I didn’t like her, but I loved her.
And he’d underestimated me, as well. Because it’s so much harder to love someone who’s difficult than to love someone who’s easy.

I’d never have admitted it—least of all to myself—but I did have what you could describe as a perfectly normal, nonpathetic, comfortingly mild, not-at-all creepy little crush on him.

Nothing like flipping a man on his back to bolster your self-esteem.
Recommend.

“One of them attacked me.”
“Define ‘attacked.’”
“It licked me. With intention.”
Now he was suppressing a smile. “You mean, as if it might—what? Eat you?”
“Who knows what its endgame was?”
“‘Trampled by a cow’ might be a thing. ‘Eaten by a cow’ is definitely not—in any way, ever—a thing.”
“The point is, I was licked. By its green tongue. I didn’t even know cows had green tongues.”

if I just witnessed what I thought I did, it meant that in one short month, I’d lost every single one of the three most important people in my life.
Mother. Boyfriend. Best friend.
And now I was truly alone.

“Be nice to poor Jack,” Glenn finally said. “He can’t help it that he’s handsome.”

“Are you saying that even if I sleep on the floor, you’ll also sleep on the floor?”
This might be my only area of autonomy for a month. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be on the floor no matter what.”
“You’d rather sleep on cold, hard, ceramic tile than sleep next to me?”
“I bet you don’t get that a lot.”
Jack smiled like he was impressed. “Absolutely never.”

Happily married.
I mean, you hear about people like that. In theory, they exist. But I’d sure as hell never seen anything like it before.
It felt like glimpsing a unicorn.

The irony. Telling him he was laughing finally got him to stop laughing.

I’d gotten what I wanted—it just wasn’t what I wanted anymore.