I can clearly remember the first time I fell in love. It had been like plunging into a bucket of ice cold water for my 17-year-old self. It was totally different from everything that had been a part of my life before it all. I remember leaning into his tall, muscular body, feeling safe. Protected. Whispering, “Riley, I love you.” Hearing "Casen, you're my life." Feeling his fingers in mine. I could’ve stayed wrapped in his arms forever and been perfectly content with my young life. The warmth of his body made me feel protected. He had a habit of combing his fingers through my long red curls. Those fingers that took up the spaces my fingers made. Each and every time he touched my hair, shivers slowly spread from my head to my toes, causing me to lean closer to him, breath in his breathtaking scent of Axe body gel and the smell of peppermint on his breath. Everything about him was beautiful. I was totally blinded by love. But he started having faults. Faults that weren’t normal. If I didn’t look good, he made sure I knew. Sometimes physically, hitting me across the face, causing my cheek to sting, staring at the hands I used to love so much with burning hatred. He was bossy. “Do this,” he would say. “Why?” was my response. “Because you love me.” Not because he loved me. He never did anything for me out of love anymore. It was as if the sweet Riley I fell for had been replaced by this cold, vicious Riley. If I didn’t call him every single night or answer his phone calls, text messages, emails, or Facebook posts, he would hit me the next day, reducing me to tears that burned my eyes. He hit me for crying. I was truly scared for the first time in my life. I would come home with bruises, telling my family lies. The happiness and love that I had felt three months beforehand had disappeared. Slowly at first. But then it crashed, along with his car.

I remember getting the phone call.

“He’s dead,” she had choked through avalanches of tears, the woman who never cried or felt any emotion. He had been hit some ice on his way to visit his aunt. There was no guardrail. He didn’t make it. I felt numb. This combined with my new family issues, I felt no pain, no happiness, no sorrow, no love. People would look at me all the time. Some with pity, some with strange looks, thinking, “Is she mental?” My boyfriend had just died. The star senior quarterback, the straight-A student who flirted his way between classes. My dad had done something horrible, breaking my family apart. My loving dad, who had cared about his wife, daughter, and son. Or so we had thought. I lost the safeness that had always been a part of my life. So why wasn’t I in pain?

There was another boy. My best friend since…forever. Kyler. He was tall, dark, and handsome. The “bad boy”, who was truly a sweetheart who just didn’t see the point in being perfect. He hated school, therefore ditching sometimes. He drank every once in a while. He hated his family, so he got emancipated. I envied him for being so brave and acting out of instinct instead of reading from a script. Girls fell at his feet with one glance into his beautiful eyes and a look at his eye-catching smile that was the product of three years of braces and 16 years of brushing three times a day. With one toss of his glossy, shaggy, jet black hair, he could have any woman age 10 to 70 melting into a puddle of love. He had hated Riley. Everytime I saw Kyler, when he wasn’t mad at me for not listening to him, the first words out of his mouth were, “You’re still with him, aren’t you?” And my answer was always the same. Until the accident. That’s when we became even closer. He apologized for being mad. He opened my feelings back up. He wiped my tears when I cried. He hugged me when I screamed. We spent late winter nights together, stuffing ourselves with Ho-Ho’s and Twinkies in his apartment living room, falling asleep in each other’s arms on the couch, my silky hair thrown across his beautiful face.

That was the second time I fell in love. And I never wanted it to end.