Waiting for the Flood (Spires, #2)

by Alexis Hall

I wanted (and this is straying perilously close to analysing my own work so please take this with a mine full of salt) to explore the idea that love sometimes doesn’t work out, but that this is okay and that the time you have with somebody you move away from isn’t wasted or lost, nor does it lessen or diminish the time you have with others after them.

You don’t really fall in love with a house. You fall in love with the life you could have in it.

There was an interesting typo for a while: power outrages.

Life is so full of rough edges—small tasks and expectations that scratch you bloody and remind you that you’re naked and alone.

And I get why you think game theory is weird and abstract, but it doesn’t have to be. It basically just comes down to what people care about.”

This is the story of my life: standing on the edges of things and worrying, when I’m supposed to just walk through them.

“What you are, mate, is an arsehole whisperer.”

“Why were you spying on me?” I asked. “There was nothing on the telly.”

“Cribbage is cutthroat.”

I don’t know where love ends and habit begins.”

The truth is, the English live for mildly extreme weather conditions. We are, after all, a nation who will call an inch of snow a snowpocalypse. And no matter how much you love what you do, there’s something irresistible about stolen days.

It’s a pleasure hearing people talk about what’s important to them.”

“He…f-fell out of love with me. Or didn’t love me enough. Or had never been in love with me. Or something. S-so it was over.”

“It’s just a bit of a shock,” I said at last. “W-waking up one morning to discover you’ve been living a totally different life from the one you thought.”

I th-thought we were happy. How is that different from being happy?”

“Feelings only exist in your head. Thoughts only exist in your head. I’m not sure how you draw the line between thinking about feelings, and feeling about feelings, or even just having feelings.” He shrugged. “Basically: if you think you’re happy, you’re happy. Problem was, you thought both of you were happy, and it turned out he thought he wasn’

“People take their successes with them, which is absolutely the way it should be. But it does tend to leave you with the bad stuff.

“You know, Edwin,” said Mrs. Chankseliani, “family is really just whoever sticks around.”

I smiled at him, wondering if it was acceptable practice in suburban Oxford to climb a man like rampant honeysuckle.

“Everyone’s mysterious before you know them.”

There was still love in them, maybe. Except it was lost love, stale love, the love of once but not always.

I didn’t want to be someone his words fled from.

He stood and went to rummage in a drawer, offering a bewildering glimpse into the reality of a man who did not treat his mobile as a part of his body.

“Or a prince from a European country invented by a streaming service.”

Risk Aware Consensual Kink.

In a medium-sized narrowboat, silence had a way of filling the space until it felt like you could drown in it.

“But you don’t travel by narrowboat because you’re in a hurry. You travel by narrowboat because you aren’t.”

The problem with being with someone for such a long time was that you got attuned to them…spatially, if nothing else. And the awareness lingered, a habit of feeling for them in a room, of your eyes finding their eyes, even when you didn’t want to.

“You can’t make up for hurting others by hurting yourself worse.”

Their freezer was probably as bristling with Tupperware as my mum’s: an ever-building legacy of shared meals and prepared-for tomorrows.

“That I’ll love you until the day I fucking die.”60 He let out a soft oh like something long trapped finally released. “And when my body is worms,” I told him, “they’ll love you too.”

“I guess,” I said, “that depends on what you think love is.” “What do you mean?” “If it’s the journey or the homecoming.”

“That still doesn’t make you a villain.” His eyes, just then, were excruciatingly kind. “It just makes you s-someone who left.”

“You don’t have to abuse someone to be a bad father or a bad grandmother. You don’t have to abuse someone to hurt them.”

Slightly concerned that opening Marius’s book with him being a dick to Edwin is sort of like DS9 opening with Sisko being a dick to Picard.