Page 116 of The Truth About Love

But no one really knows what happens when the doors are closed, I guess.

Doesn’t make me feel any better about it though.

“But, Sum, you might think you do, but you don’t feel that way about Auden. Not really.”

“Yeah, I do. At least if we’d never met, I wouldn’t have this permanent emptiness in my heart now, like there’s a hole that can never be filled. No, fuck that, it’s no hole. It’s a damn chasm.”

“You’d really give up everything you had when you were kids? Sum, you forget that I knew you back then. I saw with my own eyes how happy you and Auden were. And yeah, maybe everything did go to shit. But isn’t it better that you got to have that experience, that all-consuming, death-defying love, than to have never had it at all?”

I shake my head. “Mar, if I could go back to that day on the beach when he spoke to me for the first time, instead of sitting there reciting fucking poetry, I’d tell him to leave me the hell alone.”

She holds my gaze for a long moment, conveying with her eyes what she doesn’t say out loud.

That I’m a liar.

“You wish you’d never met me?”

I gasp as the hurt voice cuts through the room. Turning, I find Auden staring at me with pain in his eyes from the threshold of my office. I stare back at him in shock.

Four weeks since we last spoke and this is the moment he shows up?

“I told you to wait outside,” Mar scowls, marching over to him and poking him hard in the chest.

Auden ignores her. “You seriously wish that you’d never met me?”

“How long have you been listening?” I ask, crossing my arms defensively in front of me.

“Doesn’t matter.” He strides towards me. Long, purposeful steps that make me lean further back in my chair. “Answer the question, Summer-Raine.”

I ignore him.

He doesn’t get to choose another woman over me, no matter how gallant his reasoning, and demand answers from me.

“Answer me,” he growls through gritted teeth.

I meet his glare with a defiant one of my own.

“Yes.”

I don’t mean it though. I realise it as soon as the word leaves me mouth.

Auden visibly crumples in front of me. Like a scrunched-up piece of paper, he folds in on himself as if I’ve punched him in the gut.

Marlowe was right.

No matter the pain I’m in right now, I’d rather drown in it for a thousand life times than have never known the sheer magic of Auden’s love at all. Those handful of months that we were together,trulytogether, were a miracle most people never get to experience.

Some spend their lives chasing it, only for it to always remain out of reach.

Others are so mystified by the concept that they waste away trying to define it or explain it in words as if it can be done.

It reminds me of the poem that started it all. The one Auden and I recited on the sand in Islamorada, holding tubs of melted pistachio ice cream and looking at one another like our souls were finally home.

When it comes, will it come without warning,

Just as I’m picking my nose?

Will it knock on my door in the morning,

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