Like First Love, Again

Prologue

Fourteen Years Ago

“ W e’ll never see this exact sky again,” Tori said with her dark eyes trained on the summer stars and her heart lodged in her dry throat. The terracotta roof tiles digging into her back were easier to ignore when she was a little tipsy, but she wished somebody would turn down the music on the graduation party she was avoiding.

“God, I forgot how philosophical tequila makes you,” Mia joked in her raspy voice and took another swig from the bottle. She shook her shoulders while pretending to exhale fire, then dropped next to Tori.

Tori closed her eyes when Mia turned on her side and curled around her—one leg wrapped around Tori’s thigh and one arm strewn across Tori’s belly. Mia was short and curvy where Tori was long and lean, but they fit together like they’d been tailor made.

They’d lain on the roof of Mia’s mom’s pool house hundreds of times since freshman year. Hundreds of times… but this was the last. Even Mia’s usually soothing touch couldn’t break the concrete knot blocking Tori’s windpipe.

“I just can’t believe it’s the end, you know?” Tori whispered into the night, her voice half obscured by pounding music and the sound of their friends laughing and splashing in the pool below.

“It’s just high school graduation, babe. You’re not going out to find Private Ryan in the morning.”

Mia draped a smile over her words, but Tori couldn’t find the will to return it. Couldn’t do anything but try to control the pit that had been burning in her belly for months.

“You’re obsessed with that movie,” was the best response she could muster.

Mia’s laughter eroded Tori’s gloomy mood. “Blame Brother Peter for showing it to us in ninth grade. That was a very formative time, you know,” she added in a mock teacher tone.

Tori closed her eyes and tried to memorize the way Mia felt against her skin. The way her hair—dyed bright red and falling just below her chin—smelled like coconut. She wanted to remember the way the thin scar above Mia’s eyebrow felt under her thumb. An out of place divot left by a diving board.

There were so many little details. It was like grabbing at fistfuls of sand and never having enough to take with her. Not when she was leaving for college in Gainesville in a week, and Mia would be thousands of miles away in Philly.

“It’s never going to be like this again,” Tori said while Mia fidgeted with the hem of Tori’s T-shirt, fingertips grazing the sensitive skin of her abdomen every time she did. The light touch was a boot at Tori’s throat.

Rolling away from her for a beat, Mia reached for the bottle of tequila and offered it to her. “Come on. We’re going to have to drink you right out of this funk.” With the moonlight dancing in her light hazel eyes and her fair skin flushed pink, there wasn’t anything Mia couldn’t sell. Nothing Tori could deny.

Tori stared at the bottle. If she took it, it might be the sip that sent her right over the edge of buzzed and into totally drunk. It was always dangerous to be more than tipsy around Mia. The secret seared into her heart was always ramming itself against her lips, desperate to break free. If she relaxed for just a second, she couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t escape. She should stay vigilant.

“You know it doesn’t really have a worm in it,” Mia said, as if that was the reason Tori was hesitant to get wasted.

Keeping herself bound up so tight. Always cautious. Always holding back. It was exhausting. With an eye roll, Tori grabbed the bottle and took two revolting gulps that burned from the back of her throat and down to her tense stomach.

Dizzy, she crumpled onto her back again. Seconds later, Mia was in her usual spot at her side.

“We’re Bonnie and Clyde, Tori. Nothing is going to separate us,” Mia announced like she was planting her flag on the moon.

Tori laughed. Tequila and Mia’s hand slipping under her shirt warmed her from the inside out. “You do remember how that worked out for them, right?”

Mia shifted to sit up on one elbow, taking her soothing touch with her. Everywhere her skin had met Tori’s was colder in her absence.

“Fine. We’ll write our own story then. Though I think you would look amazing in pinstripes, and I would be a fantastic flapper.” Mia smirked before running her fingers through Tori’s long brown hair. The hair Tori left in loose waves because Mia loved it that way. “There’s no one on Earth like you anyway,” she added, voice barely above a whisper.

Tori felt every syllable like a lightning strike in her chest. Thousands of bright flashes landing against muscle and bone until her ribs expanded to breaking. Every rake of Mia’s fingernails against her scalp was a rush of fresh oxygen to her pounding heart.

Drunk on Mia, Tori’s world shrank to a single, unbearable truth: Nothing mattered except for her. Nothing except the way Mia’s bottom lip slipped between her teeth. The flush creeping up her throat, blooming over her cheeks. The rise and fall of her chest, uneven, matching Tori’s own struggle to breathe.

Her eyes locked onto Tori’s. A secret on the verge of breaking. Mia looked at Tori like she wanted to kiss her too. Like she’d thought about it before. Dreamed about it. Just like Tori had.

All Tori wanted was a moment. A single beat in the symphony of her life to know what Mia’s lips tasted like. To know, after four years of wanting, if Mia felt the same way she did.

“Don’t you know you’re never getting rid of me?” Mia’s lopsided smile was barely visible. It was an ember that landed in a flammable pile of brittle leaves.

Tori was a wildfire breaking her containment. Entire body trembling with the terror that she was wrong about Mia’s feelings—that she might set fire to the wrong thing if she made a move—Tori reached up and touched the tips of Mia’s hair where it nearly brushed her collarbones.

If Mia leaned in—if she obliterated the inches between them while hovering over her—Tori would die. Die with Mia branded on her lips and consider it the greatest honor of her eighteen years on earth.

“You’re going to forget me as soon as you lose your flip-flop tan.” Tori breathed her fear to life. It sounded so much smaller in a whisper than it felt thrashing against her ribs.

“Oh, please.” Mia’s smile was slow and devastating. “Like I could ever live without you.” Her fingertips lingered over Tori’s temple, her touch featherlight.

“Babe!” a guy called from the ground below.

Disoriented, it took Tori several seconds to recognize the voice. To picture Mia’s boyfriend and his dumbass face. Her stomach soured at the sound, her gut recognizing him before her hazy brain did.

Instead of responding to him, Mia dropped onto Tori’s chest and groaned. “I guess we’ve been up here a while,” she said, tone unreadable. “Listen, nothing is going to change, okay?” She hooked her leg around Tori’s thigh and nuzzled into her neck. “We’re going to graduate from college and I’m going to med school wherever the hell I can get in, and you’re going to be the GM of a WNBA team. When I move back, we’ll be millionaires living in connected townhouses by the beach. Together, we’ll have a bunch of babies and live happily ever after.”

Well and truly drunk, Tori’s adrenaline dump felt like falling down a black hole. She laughed to help the overload leave her body. “I don’t know that I want a single baby, let alone a litter.” One of the few things Tori couldn’t tell her best friend was that she wasn’t sure she wanted to marry a dude. That she liked the part of Mia’s fantasy where they spent every day together, but not the part where they married twin brothers so that their kids could be as close as siblings.

“Mia!” he called again. “Are you up there?”

This time, Tori didn’t have the benefit of being lost in thoughts of kissing Mia. The sound of Mia’s boyfriend’s voice made her stiffen. She didn’t want to be jealous, but it was a reflex. A hard-wired chemical reaction she couldn’t stop.

“Don’t be mad,” Mia whispered along the column of her neck before kissing her cheek. “I love you and you’re still sleeping over, right? I just have to spend a little time with him so he doesn’t get all mopey.”

When Mia sat up, Tori resisted the urge to pull her back down. To tell her that she didn’t have to jump when he called like a freaking trained Pomeranian.

Tori didn’t say a word. She never gave Mia any relationship advice, even though she knew Mia could do better than a mouth-breathing water polo douche. She couldn’t know for sure that it wasn’t just her jealousy talking, and she never wanted to lead Mia astray. Never wanted to betray her trust.

“I bet Justin’s here already.” Mia wiggled her brows. “Susie told me he’s definitely going to have the balls to ask you out tonight.”

Tori didn’t move. She was too drunk to climb down from the pool house roof without breaking her neck. “His balls are none of my business,” she joked, deciding to stay on the perch she might not see again.

Mia laughed, the sound like fireworks in Tori’s churning stomach. And then she was gone. Tori was left looking up at the stars—the ones that had just looked so bright—and watched them blur.