I want to thank you all for your reviews and favorites from the last chapter. I'm on a roll (it is also the weekend!) and I was able to update again super soon. Can't promise I will be like this always.

I especially want to thank SeleneJade for her very personal review and hani-licious for such an insightful one differentiating between emotional and physical/sexual infidelity. Thank you also to 4evaSeddie, alitre, fanfic08, TropicalRemix, and Leslie wjack for reviewing the last chapter, and xoxdreamrrxox, Music Hybrids, Here'sToTheNight, ImmortalPrincessx, and lifezeros for the favorites and follows.

Also want to note that I removed Rei as Mamoru's cousin. I realized it didn't make sense.


Three

She isn't sure when exactly she fell for him. There were so many moments that made her heart swell with some unidentifiable emotion. So many moments where one look at him and she was smiling like an idiot. He made her feel like a little girl with a school girl crush on the boy who threw rocks at her. He was playful and sweet and irritating as hell. She adored him.

Granted, they'd met many times before, fallen in love many times before – they just never remembered it.

In this life, this time, it was in college. Little Usagi made it to college, with a lot of help from Ami. It's funny how in every life, Usagi and her friends and soul mate always find each other again. It's funny how in every life, everything ends tragically, with her ultimately sacrificing her own life for the planet she loves, the people she loves.

She remembers when her downfall was, when he was suddenly all she ever thought about. She was with someone else, and she surprisingly felt no guilt or remorse that she had an enormous crush on the boy who lived above her in the dorms, the boy with the dark hair and ocean eyes, and ever infuriating smirk. The boy who she began to spend all her time with, who helped her for hours on homework for classes he wasn't even taking. The boy who waited outside her door to have lunch and dinner with her, who literally threw ice cream at her for dessert. The boy who left post-it's on her desk with stick figure drawings and obnoxious, pig-headed comments. The boy who bought her caramel apples because she mentioned weeks before she loved them, bought her her favorite cereal when he went to the grocery store as a surprise. He memorized everything about her. Maybe it was then that she fell in love. Everyone knew before she did anyway.

Seiya, on the other hand, wasn't very attentive, always flaked on her, saw her maybe once a week even though he lived 5 minutes away. Mamoru hated it, her roommates told her. Mamoru hated how Seiya treated her, and was adamant on how he could treat her better, would treat her better.

They were drinking one night, a Thursday in October seven years ago. Thirsty Thursdays. They were in someone's room playing drinking games with their friends and roommates. It might have even been Mamoru's.

At some point they ended up in her room, on her bed. Ann, her roommate was there too. Mamoru was kind of pursuing both of them (and that is an entirely different story), but the entire dorm, Ann included, knew he only had eyes for Usagi. It's one of the reasons why Ann never confided in her that she indeed liked Mamoru too. Ann knew that if she told her, Usagi would have stepped away and let her have him. And she couldn't let that happen. Mamoru had told Ann, what while he liked her, she was the kind of girl he would date and have fun with, but Usagi, she was the girl he would marry. He told everyone that.

Mamoru was sandwiched between the two girls, the three of them laying around in a drunken stupor. Ann suddenly sat up and announced she was going to the bathroom. As soon as she was gone, Mamoru propped himself up with an elbow and looked down at Usagi, her eyes half closed, silver blonde hair fanned out around her head.

"Hey. Tell Seiya I'm sorry," he said.

Usagi opened her eyes lazily, heart starting to hammer in her chest. Suddenly she felt light-headed and dizzy, warm. She tried to play cool, "What? You didn't even do anything." She closed her eyes again.

"Tell Seiya I'm sorry," he insisted. "Tell him I'm sorry, will you? Tell him I'm sorry."

He was so persistent, and continued to go on and on that she finally snapped at him, heart beat back to normal, "God, fine, I will tell him you're sorry. You didn't even do anything though, Mamo-chan."

And then he kissed her.

She was stunned and pleased; mostly stunned. Her heart leapt out of her chest and fireworks exploded in her ears and behind her eyes. Her body hummed and she felt things she had never felt before in a single kiss, in her heart, in her body. She was on fire. He pulled away and looked into her eyes before pressing his lips to hers again.


The kiss was probably only a minute or two, but the memory of it is seared into her mind.

When she thinks about it, it's like she's falling in love all over again.


Thank you again for reading! All feedback, as always, is welcome :)