It could have been a hundred different things.


It could have been the way the stadium lights glistened off his white blond hair, or how his skin, flushed with the cold, made his eyes shine with a cool blue-green fire.



The way his left eyebrow raised ever so slightly and his lips would pull back into that blinding smile whenever I said something he thought was funny, or how we both laughed while we sang along to the Taylor Swift song pouring out of the speakers at halftime.



It may have happened when he pulled more of our blanket over me because he was worried when I started shivering, or when he confessed his fear of the ocean, but made me promise to take him sailing anyways.


Maybe it was the way he gave me his undivided attention, making me feel like I was the only person in a crowded high school football stadium, or the way I couldn’t feel the freezing rain that drove sideways into the bleachers because the heat radiating from our touching shoulders was too intense.


Whatever it was, whenever it was, as I stood in my doorway watching the taillights of his Chevy disappear around the corner I realized I had fallen for Taylor Bradley. Hard.

I looked down at the CD case he had thrust into my hands before driving away. I raced upstairs and wrenched it open. A slip of paper fluttered to the ground. I bent, picking it up, as I inserted the CD into my stereo. Song lyrics, the same ones whispering through my speakers, were scrawled onto the ripped paper in his slanted capital letters.


“That night was sparkling, don’t you let it go. I was wonderstruck, blushing all the way home, so this is me praying that this was the very first page, not where the storyline ends. My thoughts will echo your name until I see you again. These are the words I held back as I was leaving too soon: I was enchanted to meet you.”


It was the song we had sang along to at the football game, I realized as I pressed repeat for the sixth time.