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“Ay. Homophobia and racism, no wonder you were voted president.”
Her rage is glorious. As pretty as the pain that’s shredding me.
Exhaustion is the enemy of progress.
Guilt and terrible fear drag at my bones. They eat me alive, and suck at my marrow.
Rescue or vengeance. That’s his plan.
My nightmare is real, waking or asleep.
These men don’t deserve my life. In fact, they owe me theirs.
He fights like a cornered street rat.
“I suggest you let that be enough, else my friend here loses the last tenuous thread on his temper.”
Like the witches from those dark tales, my hair is a wild mess of dirt and twigs . . . and I’m full of thrumming, suffocating hate.
Survival tip #21 Kill every fucker who threatens what’s yours.
I don’t do well with women screaming. Never have.
I see fear flash into her eyes, and it feels good. It feels so good not to be the victim. Let someone be afraid of me for once.
She’s so fucking pretty. And . . . mine. Apparently.
“I like him,” Ava says, laughing. “He’s a terrible fucking sport about everything.”
I don’t know when I started becoming this person, but I don’t think I like her. I don’t think I like her at all.
“It feels like my head and my heart are at war, and I don’t know how to reconcile them,”
My lust may be depraved—but my love is only pure.
Just get over it? Fucking. How?
It’s probably arrogant to assume they’re talking about me. I still think it’s me they’re talking about though.
“Do not compare my methods to Jaykob’s. You might as well compare a butcher’s yard to an operating table.”
“You’re the luckiest degenerate in the world,” I mutter. “I do hope you know that.”
She should be chained to my fucking side and happy to be there.
She comes like a freight train for me. There’s no way he can fuck her better than I can. Girl is primal as shit. She needs what I give her.
Fourteen-year-olds are assholes.
How am I meant to show him all the ugly parts of myself, when I want so desperately for him to see me as beautiful too?
“Behave, my girl. You don’t want my brand of pain.”
I’m afraid all of the time. And that makes me angry,
I give him a friendly little wave. He flicks his pocketknife open. The cutie.
He reaches up toward my hair, pausing until I nod permission, then sweeps it over my shoulders.
You win. I’m yours. I hope it hurts.”
He and I didn’t learn how to love safely. Love came turbulent and unpredictable—always with the threat of it being snatched away. It still does.
For all that we have almost nothing else in common, we share that. Blood and pain and beatings in the mud.
Whatever the doc did to “fix” the water line should be used in engineering manuals—How to Be Totally Fucking Inept: A Step-by-Step Guide to Shitting on Jaykob’s Day.
I know I’m no prince, but I ain’t blind—Miss Manners likes that. She likes me, and who the fuck am I to say she shouldn’t? I want to keep her.
I’m obsessed with how she talks, and fights, and how she listens with her whole attention—like what I’m saying matters, and she doesn’t care I don’t say it fancy.
My rough-ass hands have no business being near her, but she wants to hold them. She wants them on her, in her.
I know she’s not here. My body isn’t prickling with that charged awareness she always zaps me with without even trying. I could find her in a room, blind and deaf, by the feel of the fucking air. The air is flat. Dead.
