I think part of him actually wants to be hated. He only ever shows you what he wants you to see. He’s so closed off-it made me feel like he’d never tell.
One little joke involving hemorrhagic fever and they brand you ’unstable.
The bed is filled with all the things we haven’t said to each other.
Hard luck, mate.
An aural fingerprint, distinctly her own, distinctly Mara.
I don’t know how our story will end, but I know how it will start.
His voice was low and rough and I wanted to swallow it.
Apparently she judged the souls of the dead by weighing their hearts against a feather; if she deemed a soul unworthy, it was sent to the underworld to be consumed – by this bizarre crocodile-lion-hippopotamus creature, it seems.
We are responsible for everything we do and do not do.
When I was a child, I read everything I found, anywhere I found it. The only thing that felt beautiful about my life was the way books helped me escape it.
The villain is the hero of her own story. No one thinks they’re a bad person. Everyone has reasons for doing what they do. Jude and I are not as different as you think.
That was what I would miss the most, I realized. Just being able to tell him things. There was still so much to say.
Who is she? Who is this girl who would allow me to do this, here, now? And how am I allowed to have her?
I kiss the inside of each knee and up, farther, the roughness of my cheek raising redness on her skin.
The smell of cold, damp earth and wet layers of leaves hooks onto childhood memories and tries reeling them to the surface of my mind.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this were a postcoital smoke, the object of his brief affection tucking himself back into his pants or her shirt in some corridor.
When I don’t see her, her ghost wanders in my veins.
When you love someone, you’re saying you trust them. You’re handing them your heart and trusting them to protect it. To keep it safe.
Mara’s hand is in my hair as I lean my head back against the cracked leather seat, eyes closed, mind ruminating.
Next to her, my grandfather softly droops under the grand dome above us, painted by some hideously famous artist centuries ago, as this is quite literally our ancestral home, built in the fifteen hundreds by Henry the Somethingth.