You Keep Breaking Us by Carrie Aarons

We were the ultimate example of that couple who can’t live with each other, but can’t seem to function without each other. The minute I met Callum Strass at fifteen, I was a goner. We were the golden couple of our high school. The king and queen of prom, the sweethearts voted most likely to get married and have babies, and the absolute idiots who decided to attend the same college.

Because that’s when it all fell apart. The naïve, puppy love versions of ourselves couldn’t see the obvious cracks we’d had back in our hometown. But they sure revealed themselves when we started living in an off-campus house together with four of our other friends. Within a semester, blow-out fights, jealousy, every-other-week breakups, and my abandonment issues had him bowing out. Not just on me, but on the house, too. Until our senior year, when his parents refuse to keep paying rent on two places.

So he moves back in, and I’m forced to live with my ex. The one who has ruined all other men for me. The one I still cry myself to sleep at night thinking about. The one who confesses, during a run-in in a dark hallway, that he hates how much he still loves me. And when he starts dating again, he might as well plunge a knife straight through my heart. Despite our breakup, I’m on the verge of losing him for real this time, and possibly forever. The only option is to seek help for my deep-seated trauma, the thing that Callum always encouraged me to see someone about. The thing that eventually pushed him away.

Put two of the most driven, headstrong, and passionate people in any relationship and it’s bound to combust. We’ve always had that twin flame kind of love. So, together we might burn. But we also might heal.