Love, Literally

She writes love stories for a living. Living one? That's another story.

The first boy Emily ever loved was made entirely of paper.

He had messy hair, a slow smile, and a habit of saying the right thing two beats too late—perfectly timed for the last page of Chapter Ten. He lived inside her first spiral notebook, scribbled in blue ink and rose gold gel
pen. She wrote him on summer afternoons when her parents were fighting about something unmemorable, and even the cat had learned how to sulk.

He was safe, unlike real boys who called her “book freak” or asked if she ever did anything not dramatic. He listened. He lingered. He kissed like punctuation—bold but necessary.

In the story, he told her, “You don’t have to be easy to love. Just yourself.”

She wrote those words, underlined them three times.

Then she closed the notebook, pressed it to her chest, and whispered, “Please let this be how it feels someday.”

But someday didn’t come. What came instead were awkward silences, botched first dates, a poem she once recited mid-kiss that ended in the guy blocking her on Tweeter.

She kept writing anyway.

Because if she couldn’t live the story, she could at least control the ending.