Neither of them had kissed someone else in a while, but it didn’t much matter. Kissing’s a lot like laughing. If the joke’s funny, it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you last heard one.
It was worse to be the only person angry.
He had been younger and easier then, unfettered by anything like responsibility or wisdom.
Psychic was not so much a personality type as a skill set. A belief system. A general agreement that time, like a story, was not a line; it was an ocean. If.
The three brothers were nothing if not handsome copies of their father, although each flattered a different side of Niall. Declan had the same way of taking a room and shaking its hand. Matthew’s curls were netted with Niall’s charm and humor. And Ronan was everything that was left: molten eyes and a smile made for war.
For one second of one minute of the day, he didn’t run the probabilities and worst-case scenarios and possibilities and consequences. For one second of one minute of the day, he just let himself feel.
Adam Parrish and the Crying Club.
It is a terrible thing to see someone else scared, isn’t it?
At a certain point, the truth felt worse. Truth was a closed-casket funeral attended by its estranged living relatives, Lies, Safety, and Secrets.
His skin was a constellation of nerve endings.
Something strange and chemical was happening to the Gray Man. Once, he’d been stabbed with a screwdriver – Phillips head, bright blue handle – and falling in love with Maura Sargent was exactly the same.
It was not a lie. Just not an entire truth. It was the edge of a truth.
Gansey was deeply moved by the sound of that laugh, here of all places, here in the Barns, here in a room that was only fifty feet from where Ronan had found his father dead and his life in pieces. It was such a throwaway sound now, that laugh. An easy one that said it could be spent so easily because there were more where that one came from. The wound was healing against all odds; the victim would make it after all.
Leaving helps, sometimes. And it’s not always a for ever goodbye. There’s leaving and coming back.
I folded my hands back on my desk, and as I did, I saw Paul’s slanted handwriting standing out against my blocky, square printing on my skin. He’d managed to find room to squeeze in the words females hurt my brain on my left hand. I raised an eyebrow at him and he gave me a look like, well it’s true, isn’t it?
I know. Because we’re great. But the difference between a nice house and a nice prison is really small. We chose Fox Way. We made it, Calla and Persephone and I. But it’s only your origin story, not your final destination.
I was the one with the heart of metal. I was the one always walking away.
It’s ever surprising, the things that don’t change.
For so long, he’d wanted Gansey to see him as an equal, but it was possible that all this time, the only person who needed to see that was Adam.
They were the kind of tears that come easily because earlier tears have already smoothed the path for them.