Saving Rain

by Kelsey Kingsley

And that was when I realized that it didn’t always matter what tree the apple fell from. Sometimes, it was just rotten.

“Good people deserve good things, Soldier, and it’s about time someone showed you that.”

“I know what to do with pain, Ray,” I said, keeping my tone barely above a whisper. “Give yours to me. Let me carry it, so you don’t have to anymore.”

Life always did have a way of taking away the good things the very moment I’d gotten a taste.

Nobody had ever been sorry before. Nobody ever was for the villain.

Being surrounded by books is my happy place.”

My tumble down the Hogwarts rabbit hole was swift and welcome, and a love for reading had been born.

I couldn’t begin to imagine what my life would be like without books. Where would I be now had I not had those fictional friends to hold my hand and imagination captive? What would I have done differently if I’d always been fully submerged in the tumultuous, awful reality of my life?

they could take the same twenty-six letters and turn them into something completely different from what was already out there. Like, at this point, I don’t believe anything is one hundred percent original, but even still, no two books will be exactly the same. That’s just amazing to me. It’s like magic.”

“But, baby, don’t you think it’s possible that, after losing so much and so often, it’s about time you won? Because I do.” I laid my hand over hers, pressing her fingertips over my frantic heart. “It’s about fucking time I won, Ray, and if I get to win, then you do too. Okay?”

“I think love is when someone is more important in your heart than you are,”

“I think you’re a little kid in a big man’s body, who just found out his mom was murdered, and you wanna help us figure out who might be responsible.”

But at thirty-one, I realized that the difference between Billy and me was that he’d believed there was nothing in his life worth living for. Leaving this life and taking that step into whatever came next had come so easily for him because, hell, whatever it was had to be better than what he had been doing here, right?

“We’re all protecting someone, Soldier. But some of us don’t get to win.”