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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Dove was a statue of glittering ice, beautiful and dangerous and impossible to reshape, while Andrew was more like a collection of skeleton leaves, fragile and crumbling.
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She’d be fine this senior year; she’d own it. Andrew suspected this year would beat him up in a back alley and leave him for dead.
He was theirs, and they his. The three of them had been this way since they met.
Dozens of heads turned. Only one mattered.
Once upon a time, Andrew had cut out his heart and given it to this boy, and he was very sure Thomas had no idea that Andrew would do anything for him. Protect him. Lie for him. Kill for him.
Other people existed only in Thomas’s periphery, but the Perrault twins eclipsed his entire galaxy. There was something intoxicating about meaning that much to one person. Addictive.
Sometimes he’d lie awake at night and unpack all his feelings about this boy-shaped hurricane named Thomas Rye.
People didn’t just kiss and continue on with their lives. They undid buttons and touched mouths to hot skin and lost themselves within each other.
Lana and Thomas should’ve been friends, what with the way they were all teeth and knives out. Except Lana was a cold scalpel, and Thomas was a wild machete with blazing emotions he’d never learned how to moderate properly.
He drew like this because Andrew wrote like this. They fed off each other relentlessly, their fever dreams bleeding through their eyes long after they woke.
Dove could be tossed into anything and she’d bounce. Andrew was a glass figurine. Drop him and he shattered.
“You’ll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be.”
It was strange, Andrew thought, how when something moved in the dark, everyone’s first instinct was to go inside and hide under the covers. As if monsters couldn’t open doors and crawl into bed with you.
For a vicious moment, Andrew thought about slipping his fingers into Thomas’s cut. Taking hold of his rib and breaking it. Pulling the soft crumbling bone from his chest and sewing it into his own. They’d be forever together, rib against rib, fused in gore and bone and adoration.
It felt like he’d crawl inside Andrew’s shirt if he could, sew himself inside Andrew’s skin.
“I need to be treated softly, like a delicate egg.”
There was something so raw about being known this intimately, being understood down to his darkest parts. Andrew’s heart felt swollen to twice its normal size.
He was liked by the boy who liked no one at all, and he wanted it to stay that way so much it hurt.
Everyone saw Andrew as shattered and fragile, and maybe he was to them. But when Thomas looked at Andrew’s sharp edges, he thought them dangerous and beautiful—not weak. He could cut me to bloody pieces if he wanted. Andrew hated the way he loved those words.
“Let’s get milkshakes and fries,” Thomas said. “Chips,” Andrew mumbled. “You know they’re fries and you’re wrong. Stop correcting me with your Australianisms.”
“You can’t drive,” Andrew said. “Or surf. And if you stand in the sun for five minutes, you scorch like a little tomato.” “All things I can overcome,” Thomas said in earnest. “I can duct-tape myself to a surfboard and I’ll work on my tan.”
as if Andrew didn’t exist without Thomas in the room. He
He didn’t need to be fed and monitored like a baby bird.
It hit Andrew then, how Thomas would sacrifice the world for him without even thinking.
his lips quirked, as if finding Andrew sweaty and trembling was the highlight of his day.
Wtf ew
What would it even look like, to cut their feelings out, bloody and aching and raw, and compare them? To find they didn’t match. To be left with guts vivisected and no way to sew themselves back up so they looked the same as before.
“You could cut me open and devour everything that I am,” Thomas said, ragged and thin. “I would let you. I’d ask you to. But I have no idea what it means to you. What … what I mean to you.”
Andrew alone had been suspended in time, choked on shadows and vines and forest decay, and if he told the truth, he’d sound like he’d lost his mind.
“Of course it is. Can’t have kids whining to their loaded parents that the school is creepy and, worse, boring.”
Lol
He was sick of being the broken sibling, the incapable one, the slip of north wind more likely to fade away than deserve anyone’s affections.
Felt
Thomas would—well, he would start a war and beat someone into the ground for Andrew’s honor.
His twin had been severed from him, and he hadn’t even been awake to feel it.
He could unmake Andrew if he wanted; he could destroy him with the tender shape of his mouth. But he waited.
