Undulate (Alchemy, #2)

by Elodie Hart

I miss hearing her screech tunelessly from the shower that I’m her fire, her desire.

it’s Mr Pearl Clutcher in the corner.

This guy could definitely be a spankier version of Captain von Trapp.

Lucky Maria. That’s all I can say.

Nobody gets to tell you what to believe. Nobody gets to own your mind, your heart or your body. You own them. You get to decide. The power those words gave me, really, was the courage to be my own steward. To choose my own moral path over the empty, dogmatic rhetoric I was fed.

You going to hold my hand?’

But that is a bridge I cannot cross tonight. A sin too far. A temptation from which I’ll never recover.

Oh, the air is clear up here at the summit of Mount Moral Superiority.

Bless your little cotton socks.

‘Spreadsheet.’

who’s happy and fulfilled and loved. Not someone crippled by grief. No one, and I mean no one, would deny your right to happiness.’

What I don’t say is how life-affirming, how right, it feels to have Zach needing me—or, more accurately, to feel like I’m helping him.

‘Because nobody else makes me feel as good as you do.’

‘Mark my words, darling, you don’t want to be the Maria to his Captain Von Trapp,’ she tells me. ‘He’ll go full you brought music back to my life on you.’

a healthy relationship is one where both parties are also healthy, that their wells are full enough for them to give their partner what they need.

I’ve done a lot of therapy over the past year, and one thing my therapist has rammed home, over and over, is that I need to look after myself and the girls, and I can’t bear the responsibility for everyone else’s grief. I know what you’re getting at, and yeah, there might be some pearl-clutching as well as some genuine upset from parties whose own grief makes it hard for them to see me move on. But I have to work on my own timeline, Mads. If I don’t seize my own happiness when it seeks me out then I’ll be no use to anyone.’

I’m not stupid. I know how it looks from the outside. So does Zach. But we both know how it feels from the inside. And they don’t. So there.

Equally horrifying is that my ability to serve her up a suitably vicious retort has completely abandoned me right now. I know I’ll think of something truly excellent to say to her later, when I’m standing in front of my bathroom mirror, but right now I’ve got nothing. I hate it when that happens.

I cling to him like a baby koala with abandonment issues,