Not My Kind of Hero

by Pippa Grant

I want her to know she’s strong enough to do hard things. But you have to do the hard things before you know you’re strong enough.

Uncle Tony’s ranch wasn’t a responsibility. It wasn’t that thing in the background taking precious time that I didn’t have to give to it in the midst of everything else. It was a safe haven when everything else was falling down around us.

Left my last school district to move back here because of it.

I don’t do relationships. But it’s fucking hard to watch you do for June what I always wanted my own mother to do for me and not have some kind of reaction to it.”

“Love sucks, okay? It sucks you dry and leaves you a husk of a human being without the will to get out of bed in the morning to take care of the kid you thought would solve all of your relationship problems and instead made it all worse, until your kid’s the one taking care of you when he’s supposed to be being a kid, until he can’t do it anymore and he breaks too.

kissing me like I’m the missing piece to her life,

“Hurt so much by the people who are supposed to care the most. Afraid to open up to anyone again. But so desperate to fit in that you’ll bend over backward giving and giving and giving until there’s nothing left for yourself.”

You know how it feels to want so desperately to belong that you’ll sacrifice everything you want for yourself to know that the people around you like you, even when you’re telling yourself you have to do all of the things because no one else will and this is where you’re needed.”

“Sometimes figuring out who you are and who you want to be involves figuring out who to trust to go on the journey with you.”

the more she tells me I’m good, the more I want to be even better.”

At the end of the day, you’re the only person you can depend on.

And sometimes, you have to feel like you’re the person meeting the needs of everyone around you to feel like you have any worth at all.

Also, you do know it’s really stupid to keep telling me I come first when you never put yourself first, don’t you? Which lesson am I supposed to learn here? Do as you say, or do as you do?”

I can’t help myself. You’re nothing that I expected you’d be and everything I’ve ever wanted but never thought I’d find. We can go slow. We should go slow. But I can’t walk away from you. I want to be on this journey with you. Ups and downs. The hard times and the easy times. I want to be the man right beside you as you keep reaching for your own stars, and I want you to be the woman holding my hand while I take a few leaps of my own. I always thought I’d be happy being alone, but that was before I knew what it was like to be with you.”