Some memories don’t fade. They linger like fingerprints on glass—faint, but impossible to erase. For Joey Lynch, you were that memory.

The first kiss, clumsy and electric, still burned on his lips. The summer air had smelled of rain on warm pavement, your hair damp against his cheek as you laughed. He remembered the way your hand fit in his, too perfectly for it to be chance and how your voice could steady him in ways nothing else ever had.

You were his first love. His beginning. And though he walked away when he went to rehab, though he told himself he was doing the right thing by letting you go, the truth was it hollowed him out. Because losing you wasn’t clean. It was jagged, messy—like a song cut off mid-verse.

Now, every thought of you was equal parts ache and warmth. A smile that came with a sting. A ghost he couldn’t let go of, even when he tried. He wondered, in quiet moments, if you still thought of him too—or if he was the only one cursed with replaying the past like an old record, scratches and all.

Joey pressed the heel of his hand to his chest, as if he could ease the weight there. If only he’d been stronger, braver… different.

But instead, all he had were memories of skin against skin, the sound of your laugh, the taste of summer, and the ache of a love that would never leave him.