Someone else’s personal fantasy may well be your personal nightmare.
He was a single captured moment, a stillness amidst the chaos and noise, a dark ghost in the world of the living. Monochrome in his paleness and dark clothing, standing poised as if the crow would take flight – or the spirit would fade away, as dead as the boy lying blank and empty on the pavement.
It’d been a long time since she’d met a guy who could bring her down to earth – or follow her into the stars.
All around us are complex people trying to live simple lives,” she said. “Wanting simple things with tangled hearts.
I’ve always had a thing for men with large hadron colliders.
Do you want to die, Gabriel?” “No.” His hand fell to cover hers, heated and rough. “I just want that moment when the choice to live or die isn’t my responsibility. Not my life, or anyone else’s.” Pale eyes fixed on her. “More than anything, I want a reason to keep living.
Maybe we are lost, and some of us just don’t want to be found.
You think you’ve forgotten how to dream,” he said, “but really... you’re just waiting for the right dream.
Life is just a series of new beginnings, my dear. Sometimes to move on, we have to be willing to let go.
He was in so many ways a stranger to Imre now; the boy he had been, that child who’d followed Imre everywhere, wasn’t in this young man who moved as though his body were made of music and laughter, who carried his hurts inside as if they were jewels to be hoarded, small and shining things that belonged to him and only him.
But she looked for the emotions and they weren’t there; just scraps and tatters, clinging to the empty place where they belonged. She had no feeling left, hollowed out and lost and wondering how she’d ended up.
She was a lioness, fierce in her roar.
Letting go of the ring felt like letting go of that. Of that little girl’s daydream, one that had turned less into a nightmare and more into one long and dreamless night.
When looking across the horizon the world had a way of expanding, broadening beyond the tight narrow confines of the little boxes of pain humans tended to wall themselves into.
We’re all one form of addict or another.
As long as Imre was here with him, he was home.
We only define others by the value they have to us, and once they no longer provide that value, we let them go.
I wanted to be the hero of my own story. Not the damsel. Heroically lost, heroically found.
He does not know me. He does not know my background, or what culture or privilege I have experienced, or my tastes, or my education. That he judges based on my occupation and clothing is his problem, not mine.
There was something in Ashton. A quiet and aching need, a wordless plea that seemed to have gone unanswered for years. A question, searching in those dark blue eyes, and raising a buried and hungry thing inside Brand that whispered an answer.