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.
Not knowing someone is no reason not to help.
You skitter and flinch and run away.” His lips twitched. “This small thing living on the fringes, never wanting to be seen.
Seong-Jae? Have you ever heard the term nice-nasty?” “I was raised by Asian parents.
Have you ever felt like a train desperate to jump the tracks? I guess that’s me. I wanted to be a train wreck.
Maybe I’m addicted to dissatisfaction and no matter how good I have it, I’ll never be happy.
Happiness is impossible,” he murmured. “We’ve just been conditioned to seek it. Pop culture and television promise it’s out there, some ideal if we just play our cards right. But it’s not real. It’s not true. Happiness isn’t something we’re genetically programmed for. We’re programmed to want – and the more we want, the farther we go.
It’s all right not to know what you want, little mouse. Some of the most interesting lives are led while trying to figure out just that.
Sometimes it feels like everything in my head is fleeting and impermanent. I change from one minute to the next. I’m a different person every other day. And maybe that person doesn’t think the same things as the person she was two days ago, but there are some things she still doesn’t want to forget.
We find beauty in poison, and we love the bitter taste.
That moment was when she realized that every woman is a broken goddess. Every last one.
I don’t like when stories end.” “Why?” “Because it means that nothing that comes after seems to matter.
Do you know how it feels to be fire wrapped in a woman’s skin, but always feel like you’re drowning?
She’d always hated that. People who thought they knew her, who loved to tell her who she was and what she wanted, who swore they knew better than her own inner heart when she said No. No, that’s not me at all.
Complexities only happen when we are indecisive, dear child.
Maybe she wasn’t on a path toward anything so dramatic as self-destruction, but hers was still a slow wasting, fading day by day, becoming more of a ghost with every breath she expelled and didn’t draw in again. Ghosts only haunted people, powerless to do anything. She’d made herself powerless, and didn’t know how to feel about that.
Nearly everyone I loved was taken from me in an instant, young Master Ashton. Is it so strange that what I should want most in the world is to keep the people I care for comfortable and safe?
He needed a story to go with her wildness, her coldness, her hollowness. The real story was that she’d had everything and hadn’t deserved it, when she’d still wanted something else to sate a broken twisting emptiness that couldn’t be filled.
All because he knew how to use her in just the right way to make her feel loved.
Sometimes those dark eyes were as black and forbidding as ebon blades – but sometimes they were the darkness and warmth of a deep and quiet night, looking out over the expanse of the heavens and a vast blackness full of mysteries and stars. Those stars in Seong-Jae’s eyes drew Malcolm to him, now, beckoning him with glimmering hints of emotion and sweetness and breathless unspoken things.
Break me... and put me back together bright.