I don’t think either of us wants to sleep alone, so we pull our mattresses onto the floor, sitting them side by side, covering them with a sheet from the wall. Everything is still left up, but I’ll deal with that tomorrow.

Right now, I just want Wyatt.

Clothes are shed, lips meet again, and our hands explore each other, touches light like we’re afraid the other will break.

But we won’t.

I know it.

As we lie down next to each other, out of breath, I stare at Wyatt on the bed next to me, and they turn on their side so they can look at me as well.

“What are you thinking?” I ask them, brushing the hair away from their face.

“That I feel good,” they say.

But that can’t be all.

“What else?”

“What do you mean?”

“You bit your lip,” I say, my finger tracing their chapped lips. I’m going to have to get them a moisturizer if kissing is going to become a more regular thing.

“I don’t want to say it.”

“Say it,” I tell them. “You’re not going to scare me away.”

“Are you sure?”

I nod.

“I … I love you.”

I can’t stop myself from smiling at them, at how nervous they look, how their entire face is flushed red, looking even darker in the faint orange glow of the lights. I laugh because I don’t know what else to do, because they make me so happy that I think I’m overfilled with joy, that it needs some way to get out of me.

“What?”

“Nothing.” I lean in, kissing them again. “I love you too.”

Acknowledgments

This book almost never existed. After I wrote I Wish You All the Best but before I decided that the next book I needed to write was The Ghosts We Keep, there was The Feeling of Falling in Love. (I know that’s a weird timeline, stick with me here.)

For years on end I struggled with Neil and Wyatt’s story, the two of them staying the same, but the circumstances of their love changing. Neil was cheated on and sought revenge; the week in California was a road trip from Boston to Florida; the book was dual point-of-view; the title was a lot longer and a lot worse. I wrote draft after draft of this book. When I say there are hundreds of thousands of words I wrote sitting in various folders and writing programs across four or five different computers, it’s no exaggeration.

It feels like it’s nothing short of a miracle that I managed to write this book, that I finally cracked Neil’s story, that I finally found the right words to express all the feelings and emotions that come with falling in love.