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“Every day that ends with me still breathing has ended well.”
“Boy, we all gonna die. Question is, how did you live? Did you live or just wait for death to come? Not me. I ain’t waiting for nothing.”
I believe in economy of words. Talking too much usually means saying things I didn’t want to or shouldn’t have.
And in a moment when I wasn’t looking, I’ve found exactly what I was looking for.
A face so expressive it’s like a blank canvas she paints every emotion across in vivid color, in broad strokes.
What if it was just the beginning?
Knowing this is what I was supposed to do, but sometimes unsure how to do it. Unsure of how this story, my story, would end. Only to find a beginning.
“Winston Churchill said history is written by the victors, but I would amend that to say it’s often written by liars. History is fact. You can’t change what happened, but you can edit it. People lie and leave out the truth, bend it to suit their needs. I like to tell stories that excavate the facts and expose the truth.”
I want it. I want that light. I want that heart and that vulnerability and strength. There is so much inside you, Neevah, and I’m warning you now that I want it all.”
She’s emotionally astute, which puts her in touch with not only how she feels, but how others are feeling, too.
The things that hurt you most—it’s sometimes hard to accept that those are the result of fate or a deity’s deliberation.
How can someone you’ve known for such a short time inspire this visceral response?
We are artists,’” she quotes softly, her eyes set on mine. “‘When there is no joy to be found, we have the power in our hands, the will of our souls, to make it.’”
“All the things we don’t know, are never taught. Have to dig around to find out.”
“History is so picked over, by the time you get to the tree, there’s barely any fruit left.”
The kind of gorgeous people do everything in their power to achieve, but you can’t make it. It’s from the inside.
She said, to survive, don’t use your gift for shit you hate. Work in a grocery store, pump gas, pick up trash to get by before you corrupt your art.”
“No.” He hands the menu back to her, but doesn’t look away from me. “We’ll have dessert at home.”
When she looks at me, I feel like she sees me, and I’m not sure anyone ever really has.
It wouldn’t be that way with us. We would run wild through fire. I’d be mindless, my hands everywhere and our clothes flung to far corners. I’d trap her against a wall with my body and beg her to bite me, to break the skin.
I wonder if I’m dreaming it all.” “If you are,” I tell her, my voice dropping lower with need and anticipation, “then we’re having the same dream.”
And I still want him, not just the sex. Yes, oh my, yes. I want that, but I also want the secrets behind his guarded eyes; the sentiments locked away in his heart.
I want everything I see in her eyes right now.
“I’m not afraid of coming off as too eager,
“You’re beautiful, Neevah. It wasn’t the first thing I noticed about you, and it’s not the most important, but I want you to know.”
“And every time I make you smile, I feel like I’ve conquered the world.”
I’m glass to him, he said, and he searches my eyes like he’s peering into my head, turning my soul over in his hands.
He looks at me while he does it, and it is the most intimate act I’ve ever known.
There’s no dignity to it, and I don’t give a damn. I ache for him.
There’s something primitive and possessive in the stare that sweeps my body. The way he looms over me makes me feel small and powerful in the same breath.
“Next time,” he rasps.
Trying to is like riding the wind, like swimming in a tsunami. I’m tossed high and hard, helpless, weightless. When he comes with a deep growl, one hand clawed in my hair, the other gripping my thigh, I follow with a sob and a possessive kiss that marks him as mine as surely as I’m branded his however he wants me.
I can’t remember a time in my life where I felt like this. This happy. This satisfied. This starved. This possessive. Every emotion seems to be exaggerated with Neevah.
She’s ruining me and I have no idea how to stop it. I’m not sure I want to.
it feels like he’s knocking on my heart. He can come in. As much as I’ve fought it from the moment we met, he’s probably already inside.
“In a Sentimental Mood” sighs through the speakers, Duke Ellington’s keys and John Coltrane’s collaborating notes filling the air.
He opens my floodgates, makes me want to give him everything at once, even the crappy parts.
“Yeah, because one implies that I don’t want you unconditionally, and the other implies you don’t trust me to.”
Even when I’m spent, she persists, licking at every drop like a thirsty cat. I’m her saucer, her milk, her treat.
“Can you just…” She pauses, her voice breaking on a sob. “Can you just let me be sad? Can you just let it hurt? I don’t need you to tell me why it shouldn’t, or that it will be okay. I just want to not fight for a minute. Can you be here for me, with me, while I stop fighting and let myself feel this? I promise I’ll get back up, but for just a minute, let me fall.”
Forgiving is harder than forgetting. Forgetting would be the oblivion of never knowing how you hurt me. Forgiving is accepting you hurt me, deciding that I’m going to keep loving you anyway.”
“Tomorrow,” she says from the screen, from a wheelchair precipitously close to the edge of a pier, “is the most presumptuous word in the world, because who knows if you even get that. Yesterday, spilled milk and old news. You can’t do nothing about how you messed up or fell short or didn’t do yesterday. Even when you mess up and make it right, it has to be done today.”
Better todays make better tomorrows, and if you don’t get tomorrow, at least you had today.”
“Is that why you look at me the same way no matter how my appearance changes?” He studies me for long, silent seconds. “No, baby.” He caresses my cheek with his thumb, smiling into my eyes. “That’s just love.”
All you ask, my foot. You always asking for the world, Odessa. DESSI And you the man who gives it to me.
“Mama always said waiting for sunsets was like waiting for a miracle you knew would come,” he says, his voice graveled with the emotion in his eyes. “How happy she must be to know I finally found mine.”
