Burned (Fever #7)

by Karen Marie Moning

He, who had once been whole, was halved, without hope of ever being complete again. And when you’ve known that kind of love, to endure the creeping passage of time without it is to live a half-life where nothing ever feels real.

Sometimes when really bad things happen, you put them in a box and never look at them again because they’ll cost you the rest of your life. Some wounds never heal. You excise the savaged flesh and become the next thing.

Temptation isn’t a vice you triumph over once, completely, and then you’re free. Temptation slips into bed with you each night and helps you say prayers. It wakes you in the morning with a friendly cup of coffee, and knows just the way you take it, heavy on the sin.

Fear of the power you believe someone or something has over you is nothing but a jail cell you choose to walk into.

I feel so much more intensely alive around him than I’ve ever felt with anyone else. I’m obsessed and addicted and ripped-down-raw in love with Jericho Barrons.

I’m a moth to his flame and it frightens me how willingly I’d burn my wings off for him. Destroy the world. Follow him to Hell. It’s scary to feel like you can’t breathe without someone. That a man has so much power over you because you love him as much as, if not more than, you care for yourself.

What no one tells you is that when someone you love dies, you lose them twice. Once to death, the second time to acceptance, and you don’t walk that long, dark passage between the two alone. Grief takes every shuffling, unwilling step with you, offering a seductive bouquet of memories that can only blossom south of sanity. You can stay there, nose buried in the petals of the past. But you’re never really alive again. Spend enough time with ghosts, you become one.

So, so true

Death is the final chapter in a book you can’t unread. You keep waiting to feel like the person you were before that chapter ended. You never will.