summary
It starts with a kiss. Doesn't it always?
Being kissed by a complete stranger isn't something Aspen Matthews can say she's familiar with. Living in said stranger's house for a month isn't something Aspen can say she's particularly accustomed to, either. What she can say she's used to, however, is being stuck in her dead-end job, and feeling trapped in the town she always thought she'd have left by now.
Three years ago, Hollywood hotshot Drew Turner had his heart broken. Now, living on a self-destructive cloud of cigarette smoke and loneliness, he's not so sure he ever possessed one at all. Until one night something compels him to plant a kiss on the lips of an unsuspecting stranger, and his heart seems to restart.
Down the line, one kiss inevitably turns into many - and somehow the unsuspecting stranger goes from being his house-sitter to his friend, to much, much more.
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epigraph
"I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much."
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
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preface
When the end of the world comes, I wonder whose face I'll see.
Perhaps it'll be my mother's face: a woman with time preceding her, with time stretching out for a billion years after her, but with a mind irretrievably fixated on the finite time within herself, too.
When the end of the world came, I saw the face of a dying star.
I didn't know that stars had faces. I didn't know that their eyes could turn my organs back to stardust. I didn't know that their words could freeze my blood in my veins and my mind in time.
The end of the world has come again, and it's the face of an angel I'm holding onto.
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Author's Note:
So I fully intended never to post to wattpad again after I posted the epilogue to The Gay Delusion, but there's something about the characters of this story which I'm desperate to share with you guys. In some ways, this story is a love letter to all of the emoness I've ever felt over the years and wanted to channel into writing.
I was pretty reluctant to post this until I asked you all if you would read it. I don't know why I end up surprised by your kindness and support every time, but it still means a lot and it totally impacted my decision of whether or not to post.
Many people were really disappointed when I initially uploaded the synopsis of this story and they found out it wasn't a sequel about Drew and Nova. To those of you who plan on reading this, I just want to ask that you give the story a chance before you decide you hate Aspen simply because she's not Nova (who ends up married in the epilogue of The Gay Delusion, FYI), and that you see what a totally different character Drew has become.
This story feels completely different to what I'm used to writing - Aspen isn't overtly feisty or bold like Nova and Laina are as protagonists, but not everybody is like that. The tone and the writing style (and hopefully the quality of the writing, too, considering I wrote the first half of HYJB more than five years ago now) are so different to that of Having Your Jelly Baby, but I really hope you give me a chance to prove the worth of this story.
Please let me know what you think, I would genuinely love to know :)
P.S. I realized that I stopped including songs for every chapter while I posted TGD like I used to for HYJB, so I'm going back to doing that. #livinglifelikeit's2013
P.P.S. Expect an update at least once a week :)
(Nearly peeing myself as I click the Publish button. Help.)
