Who are you, Hayes Campbell?”
He smiled, his hands burrowing in his pockets. “I’m your boyfriend.”
“My twenty-year-old boyfriend?”
“Your twenty-year-old boyfriend. Are you okay with that?”
I grinned. “Do I have a choice?”
“You always have a choice.” He’d appropriated my words, which I found amusing.
“Then, yes … I am very okay with that.

My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.

So there we were. Once upon a time, during the storybook version of dating we'd gone through, I'd pretended that it was possible to love her when I only mildly liked her. Now I had no desire to pretend we'd ever be in love, and I liked her madly.

'Can we try to be wise with each other for a very long time?' I asked her.

She laughed. 'You mean, can we share our fuckups and see if we can get any wisdom out of them?'

'Yeah,' I said. 'That would be nice.

I love playing strong women, even if they're nuts.

He wasn't the type for displays of affection, either verbal or not. He was disgusted by couples that made out in the hallways between classes, and got annoyed at even the slightest sappy moments in movies. But I knew he cared about me: he just conveyed it more subtly, as concise with expressing this emotion as he was with everything else. It was in the way he'd put his hand on the small of my back, for instance, or how he'd smile at me when I said something that surprised him. Once I might have wanted more, but I'd come around to his way of thinking in the time we'd been together. And we were together, all the time. So he didn't have to prove how he felt about me. Like so much else, I should just know.

Most don't deserve your tears... and the ones that do will never make you cry.