Elliot pulls me to the side, pressing against me. I’ve never seen him make this expression before. It’s more than a smile; it’s relieved delight.

“Hey,” he says, and rests his smile on mine.

I stretch for another kiss when he pulls away. “Hey. You good?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” He looks around the room as if to say, Look at this awesome place. “We just moved in together.”

“Finally, right?” I bite my lip, feeling the urge to scream, I’m so happy.

I’ve never felt this way before.

Tonight we’re going to fall asleep together, in our apartment, in our bed. When everyone is gone, we’ll forget about the boxes we still have to unpack. He’ll follow me under the covers with that hungry tension in his eyes, his bare skin sliding over mine until we’re a breathless, sweaty tumble. We’ll fall asleep, entangled, without even realizing it.

And I’ll wake up before it’s light out, and want him again.

In the morning, he’ll be here. His clothes will be here, and his books, and his toothbrush. I’ll pour cereal while he showers. Maybe he’ll come find me in the kitchen holding a cup of coffee and I won’t know he’s there until I feel the press of his lips to the top of my head. The anticipation I feel for this everyday life of moving around him is so enormous, it fills me with a heavy, shimmering heat.

We aren’t even really dancing; we’re just swaying in place again, like we did at the wedding. But tonight, we have no secrets remaining, and no scary conversations looming. The past decade seems like a foggy blur, like we took a long road trip from one point of the earth and back again, traveling in a wide circle, destined to end up here.

Elliot’s hands slide lower on my back, his head bends close to mine. George cracks a joke about us needing to get a room. Andreas cracks back that George is the one with the knocked-up wife. And then Miss Dina is off on a tear in the kitchen about babies, and maybe more weddings, and I watch Elliot struggle to block it all out. He winces, shifting his glasses up his nose, and studies me the way he always did, as if he could read my mind one blink at a time.

Maybe he could.

“Favorite word?” he whispers.

I don’t even hesitate: “You.”

Coming next from Christina Lauren:

Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating

and

My Favorite Half-Night Stand

Hilarious, sexy romances for modern life

acknowledgments

Some of our books have little pieces of our history, some have pieces of people we know, and some have little pieces of us. And then there are books like Love and Other Words that have big pieces of all three.

I (Lauren) was raised in Northern California and spent most of my weekends from age seven onward on the Russian River with my family, in one of three funky little cabins we owned throughout the years. They weren’t fancy, they weren’t fussy—they were small, occasionally damp, shaded by trees, and surrounded by the babbling of the Russian River, or a little creek outside. Much like Duncan did for Macy, my parents got a weekend retreat as a way to get us out of the stress of our lives for a couple days each week, and at a time when buying a modest home in a small town wasn’t prohibitively expensive for a middle-income family.