many stories from a girl in love

 Things are not progressing as well as I had hoped. Coming off of this summer, I thought that everything would snap in to place easily. Now, I am left trying to figure out which parts were a personal delusion and which parts were real. Did I build him up in my head to be more than he actually is? I wish I could tell. -Laine Waters

 I’m down so bad for him.  -Laine Waters

 When the story's chapter ended, that didn't mean the story was done altogether. She cried because he gave up but knew her tears were temporary. -Laine Waters

 I wonder if there was someone that watched us every single night. I imagine that they would describe it like this: He would walk her all the way back to her front door every single night. Sometimes it was at 10 pm, sometimes it was well after midnight. They would have some kind of banter going, or they would be bickering, or she would be laughing at something he said. They would talk for a few moments, and he would abruptly end the conversation, and say goodnight to her. He always gave her these bear hugs. He would squeeze her so hard that she squealed, and then let her go. She would scan her fob, he would open the door, and then they would dap each other up. Every night, they would walk their separate ways without looking back. She would go into the building, and he would walk away.  One night, they were outside talking for a long while. As they got closer, you could hear her protesting that she could walk herself to her own building and that it wasn't his responsibility to ...

 From The Vault: It’s been ten months.  It’s been ten months since he flipped my world upside down and yet, I still can’t forget about him.  So what did I do? I booked plane tickets.  Eight more days,  Haven’t seen him since May,  And I sit and I’m hopeful  For that singular day.  -Laine Waters

We walked into a dive bar, a place that I had found through the Apple Maps suggestions of places nearby to get dinner.  The place was hardly identifiable from the outside save for a single sign in a window where the curtains were drawn, but we walked in anyway. The hostess yelled across the bar for us to seat ourselves and that she would be with us momentarily. He got a sandwich, I got chicken strips, and we just talked and ate and laughed and enjoyed the presence of the moment.  He noticed a sign on the wall that said the bar hosted trivia nights on Thursdays, which meant we would be around for the game.  He was on the scholastic bowl team growing up, and I thought I had a good-sized brain in my head, so we decided to play.  The guy on the mic for the trivia rounds kept making fun of how young we were, cracking jokes about how the questions weren't relevant because they were about events that happened before we were born.  Everyone thought we were a couple, and...

 I got off the plane and there he was. He was driving a retired firetruck that summer, and he picked me up from the airport with the lights flashing so that I couldn't miss where he was at. He welcomed me to the city, asked how I was doing, and every single second felt like a fever dream. There I was, for the first time in months, back in the passenger seat of his car where I think I belong.  It was surreal. It felt so right.  -Laine Waters

 And once upon a time, she got sick of writing from a place of sadness and resentment. This sickness, abandonment, all because she recognized two simple facts: One, she was not the same girl that she was at age 16. Two, she was in love with life and with a boy and with the world around her. Why continue writing like she wasn't? -Laine Waters