Our texting was foreplay, and we both wanted more. We couldn’t live without knowing what it would be like to meet in person.

When I saw Logan for the first time he was shorter than I had hoped, but the way he walked was hypnotizing. I hated the shape of my thighs, the wrinkles around my eyes. I had obsessed about every detail on the plane, nearly threw up when I landed.

I was suddenly very aware that I was seven years older than him, but God, the way he smiled as he walked toward me made my thighs ache. I was unhinged, shy.

I covered my face with my hand, listened to the sound of his Converse on the sidewalk outside of the airport. "Oh my god," I said.

He grabbed my hand and pulled me up, wrapped his arms around my entire body, pulled me from the ground.

My arms found their way around his neck. His hair fanned my face and I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t let him see it. I felt like I'd known him my entire life and everything had led to this. I wavered on the soulmate debate in the past, but this felt like the nail in the coffin, the nail in my hypothesis.

I heard his voice and it coiled around me. The late-night calls, the video chats, they didn't compare to this.

He was flesh and blood and the most beautiful man I ever laid eyes on, this walking embodiment of everything I wanted, everything I needed. I felt like I had written him into existence. I had been working on my novel for years, and everything I wanted in a man, everything Connor was not giving me, I wrote into a character. I wrote out my desires. This soft voiced man, seven years younger than his love interest. This artist. This broken human. I wrote that character, then I found Logan. The embodiment of everything I thought couldn’t be real. It seemed like a dream.

His teeth were not perfect, but there was more in that smile than I could ever write about.

I'd been chasing perfection too maybe, just like Connor, but every man who matched every little check off mark on my list, they were beneath him. I wouldn't recover from this, and I knew it would be something I had to recover from.

He set me on the ground and I saw in his eyes a warming affection, but fireworks were far from blazing. I pushed the idle inspection aside and let him take my carry-on suitcase.

My friends and I dissected everything about what the first meeting would be like. They said he would take me into his arms, kiss me immediately. I said he wouldn't. My gut told me we would be too shy. I was right. I'd been in his presence for an hour and I knew I couldn't go any longer.

We were lying on his bed, on our sides, facing each other.

His room was a mess. The same kind of frat room I'd been avoiding for so many years, but his age made me forgive it, and he had just moved in.

I ran my fingers over his forearm, over the fresh ink on his arm.

"God," he said. "I feel like I've been waiting forever for this. For you to touch me."

"Sit back," I said. He pulled himself up, leaned his back against the wall. I crawled across the bed and straddled him, but I did not kiss him.

I felt in control and it was thrilling. It was the thing I always craved, the control I could normally only find with younger men.

I grazed my lips over the vein in his neck and I felt him shiver.

It was too much. How could I keep my lips from him when he sighed like that? I wanted to play the game but he won with that vulnerable sigh. I thought then, that maybe, the games would be done, finally.

This kiss, it would go down as one of the single most perfect moments of my life. He and I could not overcome what was between us. Thirty-two and twenty-five, half a country apart.

I told myself he would be in my life for just a moment because a burning like this couldn't be real.

He would be in my life for just one moment to wreck it. To show me what belief was. The cynic in me could not compete with the cynic in him.

We were too alike. The same scars, the same mental ticking, ready to implode. Every experiment needs a control group, and we were two crashing cars. I needed someone to steady me. He needed someone to steady him.

We would be a slow-burning fire, a spark that died quickly, leaving scars. I had three more days with him and I would make sure I was touching him for every moment of those days and hours.

How can you say hello and goodbye to someone all at once, with one kiss? We had shared so much, so many virtual confessions. I wanted to confess to him with my skin for as long as I could. Before my plane took off.

I didn't believe him when he said I was safe with him. He meant it, but it was a lie. Maybe he knew it, maybe he didn't, but I determined right there and then that I would give him almost every bit of my heart. I would save the smallest, most vulnerable bit. Because I did not trust him with it.

This boy had more power in his lips than others had in their entire body to wound me.

I'd rather be wounded by a man who meant to, than by a man who thought he was there to save me. Who convinced himself he was whole enough to save a drowning woman. He could never love me the way the man I had just broken could. He was too broken himself.