Almost Love the addictive story of obsessive love from the bestselling author of Asking for It

Loving someone only gave them the opportunity to break your heart.

Their friendship had always been the one thing that [she] was sure she couldn’t break, and yet she had managed to do it, anyway.

I sat up, trying to catch my breath. I breathed in and I lived. I breathed out and I lived. I thought of all the things I let him do to me.

And he still didn’t love me.

She will never recover from that. She will be selfish and stupid and she will make bad choices. She will let men take her body and use it as they please. She will roll her eyes and say she doesn’t care, but she does care. She does. She will lose him. She will realise that he was never hers to lose in the first place.

And he let me go. He let me go as if it was the easiest thing in the world.

I watched the men and women and children – people I would never know and who would never know me. I wondered if they were happy. I wondered if they knew what ‘being happy’ meant. I had a sudden urge to wave at them so they would look at me, so they’d remember my face. I wanted them to know that I existed.

And I was left waiting and waiting and waiting, morning turning into afternoon, turning into evening, my world shrinking, folding itself around the phone, willing [his] name to flash onto the screen. The less he texted, the more I seemed to want him.

[She] didn’t feel like she had enough space, the space she needed to hide the parts of herself that she was most ashamed of: her impatience, her tendency to be critical, how quick she was to snap if something annoyed her. [He] saw all of it, all of her flaws, everything she had tried to suppress for so long, and [she] hated him for being a witness to that, for realising that she wasn’t perfect after all.

[She] was consumed by the insatiable kindness of strangers wanting to be seen giving her a hug as they told her she was ‘a brave girl’. But then it went quiet. The neighbours and the relatives continued with their own lives; the girls in school got bored with her numbing sadness.

When teenage girls loved something, they loved it fiercely and without shame.

I tried not to cry out when I saw it, at how easily he had rolled water around his paintbrush. I could never capture the truth of the sea, not the way that I wanted to, and I knew then that I would die wanting to try, and I would die being too afraid to even begin.

“Smile, love,” men would shout as she passed them on the street. “You’d be so much prettier if you smiled,” as if a performance of joy was the price [she] had to pay for existing in a female body in a public space.

Being by the sea always made [her] feel small, insignificant in a way that was comforting somehow. It made her think that none of this would matter, in the end.