Rebecca Paula

“Beau never stays within the lines. He’s not just my roommate, he moves through Portland as if it’s his city, as though all the people at this party are his best friends, as if he invented beer pong, even. He’s that drop of water that runs and seeps into the paper, smearing the other watercolors until they’ve run wild as well.”
― Rebecca Paula, Between Everything and Us

“Water seems so harmless until you’re about to drown—in that moment, it’s made of fire.

When the rapids slowed and I dragged myself to shore, I wasn’t laughing anymore. I laid back on the earthy bank, the pine needles pricking my body as I stared up at the sky. I waited for answers, but nothing happened. Nothing much except feeling overtaken by the infinite blue above, the truth that I was small, the fact that some things are too good to waste.

I fell for Mati the same way—wading in to learn her depths, to navigate her pull over me. I knew it was trouble. I knew once I was in, I was all in.”
― Rebecca Paula, Between Everything and Us

“Her ability to think vanished. Her ability to stand crumbled. Her adherence to etiquette burned under the devil’s wicked charms.”
― Rebecca Paula, Etiquette with the Devil

“Bly was a body set in constant motion, a force that knew no barrier, and he inevitably left the world changed in his wake. Even when he sat, he tapped his foot, scratched at his face, or puffed on a cigar like a locomotive. He paced insistently and ruffled his fingers through his hair habitually.

Then there were the laugh lines around the outer corners of his eyes and lips, caused by years of jest, not necessarily from happiness. Bly always seemed to be making a mockery of the world and its subsequent opinion of his person. He dared everything in his path to challenge him. That was how he lived his life—charging after it with an undying fierceness as if the flame within him would never extinguish.”
― Rebecca Paula, Etiquette with the Devil