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You’re not that stupid anymore. You don’t fall for just anyone who smiles at you.
She sometimes wonders if she’s incapable of loving the way other people do, and if the ones closest to her can sense it.
“You’re a number one New York Times bestselling author.” She hates how quickly that actually did make her feel better.
Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.
She loves driving, but she hates parking.
For fucking reals
“If you come in here, I’m gonna fuck you on my bed until you forget your name, my name, and whatever very smart and important questions you have brewing in that beautiful head of yours because you can’t think straight from how many times I’ve made you come. So if you don’t want that, you should stay . . . put.”
Her hands pull at his hair and urge him up until she’s kissing him desperately, as desperately as he feels like he’s drowning in her.
“I love your body,” he says, between bruising kisses. “I’m so fucking lucky to be here.”
“You can tell me, you know,” she says, so quietly she feels compelled to repeat it. “You can tell me about that night. If it helps to have someone to—to remember it with.”
You can still get hurt with your eyes wide open.”
This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.
“You could keep me your dirty little secret, come to me tasting like other men, I’d still take you back every fucking time,” he says, a muscle ticking violently in his jaw. “I’d rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.”
“I don’t want to be healthy,” Grant says, and his chest is heaving as if he’s just run a marathon. “I just want you.”
But I didn’t choose this, she thinks. You decided to move to another country and start a family. You should have known that not fully understanding your own kids would come with that territory.
“You don’t have to be completely healed to be everything I want. To be mine. I love every part of you, you silly, infuriating woman. I love the parts of you I haven’t even met yet.”
She thinks of the infinitely different love stories they could have lived instead—and she decides she’ll write them all. She’ll fracture this feeling into a million shards of glass reflecting back the same, unbelievable love story so she can capture it for the days when she needs to read it back to herself and to him—when they’re sad, or tired, or annoyed, or hurting. Or happy, she reminds herself. Loving him is poetry, and she thinks she’ll try her hand at that too.
