TheCrazyWorldOfABookLover > Books: favorites‎ (163)

"Anything that ended would never be enough for a love like ours. A love like ours is only satisfied by forever.”

"Anything that ended would never be enough for a love like ours. A love like ours is only satisfied by forever.”

"Ask me in a million seconds, ask me in a billion years,
Do you love me? And I will say still.
Ask me when we toil, when we rest,
when we fuss and fight.
With the taste of anger burning my lips, I will say still."

"I will worship you.
My eyes will never stray.
My heart will never wander,
gladly leashed to you all my days.
I am fixed on you."

"And when the years have passed,
and we have watched a thousand sunsets,
and we are bent, our bodies crooked with age ask me again.
In the twilight, in the shadow of the life we have shared,
ask me if I love you, and my heart will answer before my lips can part."

"My love, my life, my heart never left your hands.
Always, evermore, even after.
Still."

“If I break your heart, I break mine.”

“If I break your heart, I break mine.”

“And you watch me.” He dips his head until he traps my eyes. “You watch me all the time. You can’t keep your eyes off me any more than I can keep my eyes off you.”

“It makes me want to set the world on fire.” His words come softly, but the truth roars in his eyes. “To think of you with them.” There haven’t been nearly as many men as he probably assumes, but I don’t reveal that. I can’t offer him any relief. “You wanna know what consoles me, though?” He looks up at me, calculation in his eyes. Before I can tell him I don’t want to know, he goes on. “For one, I know when we’re together, it’ll only take once for me to fuck their memory out of you.”

“A fiery chord bridges the distance between our bodies, and I want to pull her close enough to burn me, to hurt me, to destroy me. Sometimes I don’t think I care as long as she’s close. I just want to feel her, even if it burns me alive.”

Without breaking rhythm, I bend to her ear. “You have nothing to be afraid of.” I press her hand to my chest, over my heart. “This is yours. No one else’s.” I dip my head, slowing to nothing, but keeping her eyes.
“I’m yours. No one else’s.” I scatter kisses over her cheeks. “Even when we fight, I feel you. Your anger, your frustration. I feel your pleasure like it’s mine. Your emotions like they’re mine…

Don’t you feel how connected we are?” I ask. “If I break your heart, I break mine.”

“Her tears come even as our bodies resume a ferocious pace. We splinter into a thousand pieces in her kitchen, becoming more together than we were apart. More than we were alone. With whispered promises and words of love, we exchange hearts.”

"You don’t know this, but that woman? Even as she smiles, she’s utterly terrified. Your love is more than enough for her, but she feels pieces of it slipping away. Something inside of her is disintegrating. Her dream. She’s losing it. She came here with you, not quite realizing what you were going through. You felt invisible, and you were desperate for an audience, but where does that leave your love? Because the more people who see you, it seems, the less you see her."

"I’m playing with fire, like I don’t remember how much it hurts to get burned, but from here, where I’m standing, all I can seem to feel is the warmth."
___

I nod, looking down at my hands. “I wasn’t accusing you of cheating. I just wanted to know how long it took you to move on.”
“Oh, well, that’s an easy one,” he says. “It hasn’t happened.”

“I hate you. That’s it. There’s nothing else to say. I hate everything about you. Your voice, your face… I hate it. Why aren’t you going away?”
“Because I can’t,” I tell her, “and I’m pretty sure you don’t really want me to.”
She scoffs. “You’re upset,” I say, “but you’re lying to yourself if you think you want me gone.”
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
“Leave.”
“No.”
“Go away.”
“I’m not.” As soon as that last word leaves my lips, she’s on me, slamming into me, her lips pressing against mine. She’s kissing me, and I’m so fucking stunned that it takes me a moment to react, a moment to consider kissing her back. She moans and wraps her arms around my neck, clinging to me damn near aggressively as she kicks the door closed.

“Next time,” she says, just like that, no question about it.
“Next time,” I say.
“And soda, too,” she says.
“No soda,” Kennedy chimes in.
Madison glances at her mother before leaning even closer, damn near right up on me, whisper-shouting, “Soda.”
“I’m not so sure your mom will like that,” I say.
“It’s okay,” Madison says. “She tells Grandpa no soda, too, but he lets me have it.”
“That’s because you emotionally blackmail him,” Kennedy says.
“Nuh-uh!” Madison says, looking at her mother. “I don’t blackmail him!”
Kennedy scoffs. “How do you know? You don’t even know what that means.”
“So?” Madison says. “I don’t mail him nothing!”

“What could be lonelier than always being by yourself?
Worse is loving someone who disappears and never knowing if they’ll come back. Because how do you move on if you’re not even sure they’re gone? The answer is—you don’t. When you spend most of your life chasing ghosts, eventually, you become one.”

"Once, there was a boy.
Once, there was a wolf.
He had sat with his back against a tree.
His bare feet were in the grass.
The boy leaned forw

"Once, there was a boy.
Once, there was a wolf.
He had sat with his back against a tree.
His bare feet were in the grass.
The boy leaned forward and kissed the wolf.
And knew then that nothing would ever be the same."

"I’d hated him then, and I hated him now. But the funny thing about hate is the razor-thin line that separates it from something else entirely. Because I loved him too, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself I didn’t. I always had. Even when I’d wanted to kill him, even when I felt the most betrayed, I couldn’t stop. It was a twisted thing, the roots buried deep in my chest, tangled and thick. I had thought it would rot and fester, become something dark that I couldn’t control, but it just stayed as it was, and I hated him for it. For making me feel this way after all he’d done to me and I’d done to him. I wanted him gone. I never wanted to see him again. I wanted him to hurt like I’d hurt. To burn. To bleed. I wanted to keep my hands on him, to feel the animal underneath. I wanted to lean forward and bite him, leaving my mark against his skin, tattooed so that he would never be without me on him, so that everyone would know I’d been there, and I’d been there first. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to fuck him. I wanted him to tear me apart."

"He turned his arm over. He gripped my wrist, thumb brushing against my pulse point. “I wasn’t your first.”
Goddamn him for knowing what I was thinking. “Damn right you weren’t.”
“And you weren’t mine.” I wanted a name. Tell me who the fuck it was. I’d find them. I’d fucking kill them. I said, “I don’t care.”
His eyes flickered orange. “But I swear I’m going to be your last. Fight me. Hit me. Fucking light me up. Hate me all you want—”
I bristled at that. “Get the fuck out of my head,” because I could hear him whispering gordo gordo gordo along that thread that stretched between us. It bounced around my skull until all I could do was hear him saying my name again and again and again. He was consuming me, and I wanted him to. I couldn’t stand the thought.
“—but it’s going to happen. You hear me? I will hunt you down if that’s what it takes. You can run from me, Gordo. But I will always find you. I let you go once. I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

“This isn’t how it ends,” I told him as he watched the empty doorway, the house filling with shadows as it shook on its foundation. “I know it feels like it, but this isn’t our ending. We find our way back to each other. No matter how long it takes, we find our way back again. It’s how we always are. It’s how we’ll always be.”

“Come to me, and I will try to love you. I will try to love you, if you but come back.”

“Come to me, and I will try to love you. I will try to love you, if you but come back.”

“You said if I came back . . . you would try to love me.”
He turned his head, caught in the familiarity of the words. “What?”
“Come to me and I will try to love you, I will try to love you, if you but come back,” she chanted softly. “I heard you . . . and I came back.”
“I lied,” he said, breathless. He made himself look at her again, so she would believe him. She was covered from head to toe, and yet he could still see her unclothed.
“Who were you lying to?” she asked.
“To you,” he whispered, lying again. He looked for his anger. Where was his bloody anger? Come to me and I will try to love you. I will try to love you, if you but come back.
She made him want to try.
She made him want to lie again.

He loved her then. He loved her now. He’d loved her from the moment she’d opened her eyes beneath a moonlit sky in Quondoon and greeted him like she’d been waiting forever.

“You are kind,” she whispered.
“I’m not kind.”
“And you are good,” she said, repeating the lines they’d exchanged once before.
“I am not good.” He felt like weeping. He was not good. He was not generous. He was not courageous or compassionate.
He simply loved her.
And love made him a better man.
That was all.

‘You didn’t know how afraid I was of you?’
‘Of me? Or of yourself?’
‘Of what was happening between us.’

‘Laurent of Vere. They say you’re frigid. They say you rebuff all your suitors, that no man has been good enough to prise your legs apa

‘Laurent of Vere. They say you’re frigid. They say you rebuff all your suitors, that no man has been good enough to prise your legs apart. I believe you thought it would be brutish and physical, and maybe a part of you even wanted it that way. But you and I both know that Damen does not make love like that. He took you slowly. He kissed you until you started to want it.’

Laurent said, ‘Don’t stop on my account.’

‘You let him undress you. You let him put his hands on you. They say you hate Akielons, but you let one into your bed. You weren’t expecting what it felt like when he touched you. You weren’t expecting the weight of his body, how it felt to have his attention, to have him want you.’

‘You left out the part near the end, when it was so good I let myself forget what he’d done.’

He said, into the stillness, ‘I think if I gave you my heart, you would treat it tenderly.'

‘When you make love to me like that, I can’t think.’
‘Don’t think,’ said Damen. Damen saw the flickering change, the tension, as the words provoked an internal battle. Damen said, ‘Don’t think.’
‘Don’t,’ said Laurent, ‘toy with me. I—have not the means to—defend against this.’
‘I don’t toy with you.’
‘I—’
‘Don’t think,’ said Damen.
‘Kiss me,’ said Laurent. And then flushed, a rich colour. Don’t think, Damen had said, but Laurent couldn’t do that. Even to sit there after what he had said, he was fighting a battle in his head. The words hung awkwardly, a blurt, but Laurent didn’t take them back, he just waited, his body singing with tension. Instead of leaning in, Damen took Laurent’s hand, brought it towards himself, and kissed his palm, once.

After a moment, Laurent said, ‘He would have liked you.’
‘Even after I started courting his little brother?’ said Damen carefully.

‘I would court you,’ said Damen, ‘with all the grace and courtesy that you deserve.’

“It felt, in all the lies between them, as if this was the only true thing.”

“It felt, in all the lies between them, as if this was the only true thing.”

From the severe, straight-backed posture to the impersonal grace of his cupped yellow head; from his detached blue eyes to the arrogance of his cheekbones, Laurent was complicated and contradictory, and Damen could look nowhere else.

The warm, sweet kiss had been broken in a moment of promise: the first slight parting of lips, the hint that Laurent had been on the cusp of allowing the kiss to deepen, though his body had been singing with tension. When he closed his eyes, he felt how it might have happened: slowly, Laurent’s mouth opening, Laurent’s hands lifting hesitantly to touch his body. He would have been careful, so careful.

‘You want to take me, as a man takes a boy.’
‘As a man takes a man,’ said Damen. ‘I want to take pleasure in you, and to please your body with mine.’
He said it with soft honesty. ‘I want to come inside you.’ The words rose, like this feeling within him. ‘I want you to come in my arms.’
‘You make it sound simple.’
‘It is simple.’

Stirring drowsily, Laurent shifted a fraction closer and made a soft, unthinking sound of pleasure that Damen was going to remember for the rest of his life.

"Whenever I close my eyes, I see her. Scarlet.
I see her smiling. I see her crying. I hear her laughter flowing through me, sending chills down my spine. The sound of her moaning creeps through my bloodstream, the face she makes in the throes of passion, the pulse that spurs it on. Whatever it is I'm feeling, I want it to stop. I want it to go away. I want to stop fucking seeing her every time I blink. I want to stop fucking thinking about her every time I pause to take a deep breath. She's like an infection that's settling into my chest. I would rip out my own organs if I thought it might purge her from my system."

"My wicked little belladonna, beautiful, deadly, so tempting to keep tasting but so goddman toxic every touch is just too much."

“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil pressed their hands to their hearts and started the apocalypse.”

“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil pressed their hands to their hearts and started the apocalypse.”

“It’s all I want, to be beside you, helping you. If it takes forever, all the better, if it’s forever with you.”

“A kiss must end for another to begin, and it did, and did again.”

“But I’ve never been very good at doing what I’m told. It’s a problem. Or a reflex. If they say left, I go right. If they say sit, I jump. If they say behave, I get drunk and spend the weekend screwing all three of the Archbishop’s triplet nieces. They were nice girls. I wonder what they’re doing this Friday?”

“And what about you? Is there any wild in you, Teet-bottom?”
My cheeks go up in flames. “Not even a little. I’m the boring one. The good one.”
His teeth scrape his lower lip and it looks . . . naughty. “Corrupting the good ones is my favorite pastime.” Oh yes, definitely a Willoughby. I hug my book to my chest. “I’m not corruptible.”
His smile broadens. “Good. I like a challenge.”

“I could show her what dirty really looks like.”

But now . . . now it makes sense. Because I would give up a crown for her. I would give up my name, my title—I would trade my country, forfeit my birthright, lie, kill, cheat, and steal, for this. For her.

When he reaches the bed, he wraps his hand around my ankle and jerks me down to the edge. “I’ve been thinking about this all day.”
It’s only when I speak that I realize I’m breathless. “About what?”
And the man who will be my king sinks to his knees before me. “About tasting you. I’m going to lick you until my tongue gives out. Any objections?”
Oh God . . . His lips slide into an adorably crooked half-smile.
“Speechless, love? Was it something I said?”