I'm sorry I stayed.

CHAPTER ONE (teaser)

Our time is up. It feels surreal, our entire relationship. I've always known that we had an expiry date. I don't mean to say that I never cared about her or that I never wanted a future with her. There was just a certain threshold in our relationship that we were never able to break past. We both acknowledged it and chose to ignore it. No, I chose to ignore it. She probably hasn't noticed that things have changed, that I have changed.

I still remember the first time I saw his face. It was on the first day of school ,accounting was our first lesson, and he was the new kid. He had a rather sour expression on his face as if he had been piqued a moment before stepping into the classroom. His late entrance did steer my attention to him. I stared as he bolted to grab a seat at the back of the classroom. After the forty minutes spent in the lesson, I never saw him again. To be honest, I forgot about his existence for the rest of that day. However, the next week, when we were at our tenth grade orientation camp, his presence was as palpable as Mariah Carey's shade towards JLo in that one interview. I didn't realise it then, but I became infatuated with his existence. Anything he had to say, I listened. Any minute mannerism he displayed, I memorised. Anytime anything caught his eye, I looked in the same direction.

As time went on, I became aware of my crush on him, and of course, I did what any sixteen year old girl with a crush does, I told my friends. For months, I subjected my friends to what felt like endless ramblings about any acute action he did. I loved admiring him. It gave me something to do. There was nothing about him that was conventionally interesting, I get why my friends never understood my obsession with him. He was handsome, that they understood. His face resembled that of Keith Powers. His eyes are a beguiling brown that invariably put me in a trance inadvertently. His cheeks and the bridge of his nose are covered in tiny brown freckles that complement the light caramel canvas that is his face. Don't get me started on his taper fade. The way the sun would hit the side of his face as he sat by the window in our accounting class, it created an outline of light around his 4c curls that invariably put a bashful smile on my face. Then, on one afternoon, my crush on him had been exposed. [...]

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