It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover

up my water bottle, feeding me medicine, tracing my jaw.
Yes, Lily. I remember that moment, even though you didn’t write
about it.
After hours of being ill, I remember waking up, or at least becoming
more aware of my surroundings. My head was pounding and my mouth
was parched and my eyelids were too heavy to open, but I felt you.
I felt your breath on my cheek. Your fingertips were on my jaw and
you traced them all the way down to my chin.
You thought I was asleep—that I couldn’t feel you touching me,
watching me, but I had never felt more than I did in that moment.
It was the exact moment I realized that I loved you. I kind of hated
realizing something that monumental in the middle of such a shitty day,
but it hit me so hard I thought I was going to cry for the first time in
years and I didn’t know what to do with that feeling.
But, man, Lily, I had gone my whole life not knowing what love felt
like. I didn’t have the love a mother and son should have, or a father
and son, or a sibling. And until you, I had never spent that kind of time
with anyone unrelated to me, especially a girl. Not long enough to truly
get to know a girl, or for them to get to know me, or for us to connect
and deepen that connection, and then for that girl to prove to be caring
and helpful and kind and worried and everything that you were to me.
I’m not even saying it was the moment I realized I was IN love with
you. It was just the first moment I realized I loved something, anything,
anyone, ever. It was the first time my heart had ever reacted. At least in
a positive way. People had done things to me in the past that made my
heart shrink, but never expand like that. When your fingers were
trickling over my chin like soft drops of rain, I thought my heart was
going to swell so big it might pop.
I pretended to slowly wake up in that moment. I put my arm over my
eyes, and you quickly pulled your hand back. I remember craning my
neck and looking at your window to see if it was light outside. It almost
was, so I started to pull myself out of your bed, pretending not to know
you were awake. You sat up and asked me if I was leaving, and I had to
swallow before I could get my voice to work. It barely did. I said
something like, “Your parents will be up soon.”
You told me you were going to skip school and come back for me in
a couple of hours. I nodded without speaking, because I was still sick,