We are told to never judge books by their covers, but what if I blushed for your dust jacket and stayed for your script? I read you until your binding was just as beautiful as the coat she hard-cover slipped around your spine.

I hardly read the novel's acknowledgments, but I should've figured there was a reason her name emerged twice in the dedications. I forgot that your seemingly perfect pages had been red ink-stained by her fingertips, she was your editor and I was simply a girl marveling at your words.

All of your punctuation was carefully orchestrated, and I wondered if she excised the spaces in your dialogues, crossed out your fumblings, your stuttering, her thumb and forefinger leaving spit prints like stamps as she flipped through your raw material.
I’ve only read the finished product.

Did she weep over your pages? The water damage left rippling scars on your paper. So when I’m leafing through the whole of you, all I can see are the ever-aching remnants of her touch.

She left eraser crumbs in your gutters, and you didn’t mind that her fingers excavated your contents, removed your run-on sentences until you spoke in the soliloquies every lover wants to hear. Sometimes I wonder which words are yours, and which ones she fixed.

I know just the kind of girl she is, dog-earing pages because beauties don't bother with bookmarks, and she knows that when she forgets you another girl will see the creases and recognize that someone else got there first. I just never knew the dangers of buying used books.

I realize I was never the love story, simply wedged between chapter ends and chapter titles that reeked of her perfume. I try not to plex on the resemblances between our descriptions, because something about her made her the heroine of your story, while I’ll be over by chapter two. And to think it was you that wore the newness off my pages.

You didn’t come with a receipt yet I knew exactly where to return you.
And I was left at half price.