Happy After All

by Maisey Yates

Spice—what online communities call sex to get around censors.

I try not to read too deeply into that, but one of my big problems is that I read too deeply into just about everything.

my emotions are never casual no matter how much I want them to be.

“Just, you know, the eternal complication of people being afraid of getting hurt.”

this is why I do think romance novels are realistic, Nathan. Things just happen in a different order. In real life we have a spate of issues, and we don’t know where they all come from. But they always show up. We date the same people who are the same kind of wrong, we fall into the same bad patterns with work, with personal habits. We fail our friends in the same ways, and we have the same fights with our significant other.

Each and every time we have to hit these mini crises, and if we want to move past them, we have to drain a little poison out of the wound. A little bit each time, and next time maybe we won’t fall as hard.”

“In romance you drain the poison out. In one big cathartic fight. One catastrophic loss. The loss of the person who showed you that you needed to heal, and...

The sad truth is, you protect the wound, and it begins to protect you. So you guard it at all costs.

We let him dictate so much of what happens. She came in and pointed out what a mess that was. She also pointed out that at a certain point, everyone is at fault for continuing to allow it.”

I had her horse for two years after she died. He was never happy afterward. I think he might’ve died of a broken heart.”

He is the flourless chocolate torte of men. Powerful, overwhelming.

It’s Never Just Sex—sex in romantic fiction works to build feelings between the main characters, whether they want it to or not.

I guess you can’t keep the bad things out no matter how hard you try sometimes.

It is a glittering pink monstrosity in the midst of all the green. I love it more than I can say.

The thing about grief is . . . it makes you so tired. It makes you way too tired to put on a facade.

I have always felt things deeply. I spent my life hiding that.

No happy ending lasts. Not really. It ends the way that his did. Eventually.

I start humming “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” It’s a song that always makes me sad. I don’t know why. There’s a melancholy to it,

This is the single most romantic moment of my life, even though the road I had to walk to get here was an awful one. Right now, it’s all beautiful.

A blank page has limitless possibilities, but at the same time, it’s nothing.

I keep thinking I’m okay, Nathan. I keep thinking that I’m done grieving. Then it hits me, in this terrible wave.

I understand grief. I know that it comes in waves that you can’t anticipate. I know that it tries to drown you sometimes.

I laugh, in that way you laugh when nothing is funny and everything hurts.

“Don’t do that. Don’t minimize this. You don’t have to. You don’t have to be fair. Who made you feel like you had to be?”

Found Family—when the protagonists create deeper bonds with their chosen community than they had with their family, and these bonds help the protagonists to heal.

“I love that I can still experience new things even at ninety-five. That’s a gift if you ask me.

I’m different, and my life is different than I planned for. Different doesn’t make it wrong, or bad, or failed. When I accepted that, I found a lot more peace.”

life is made up of pain and loss. That the happy endings happen between the unbearable. And we keep going, until we find more happiness. However it looks.

What I’m certain of, for the first time since everything fell apart, is that I’ll be happy. Truly happy. Because the lines on these women’s faces are not all from tears. They have smiled, and they still do. After loss. After hardship.

It’s letting your face smile again so it can make new lines that are forged by happiness and not just sorrow.

The thing about running is it’s not closure. It’s just leaving things behind. But if you run too fast, you leave the door open, and all kinds of shit follows you. Whether you mean it to or not. Letting shit follow you isn’t the same as working it out either.”

Time just grinds relentlessly on. And kills the grass and fades the paint. And turns your hair silver. And makes rifts widen. Makes pain turn into a dull ache.

“people say dreadful things sometimes. They don’t know they’re dreadful. They say them without thinking. They say them without considering who they might be talking to.

the loss of someone is the loss of the world. It’s also the loss of who you were before.”

“You should never be anything less than the love of someone’s life,

Plot Moppet—a small child in a romance who exists solely to drive the plot forward or cause a shift in the romance between the main characters.

There are some shards of glass still embedded in my heart that cut a little bit, but I’ve figured out how to carry them better.

“What if I can’t have everything?” “You’ll survive. You’ll keep on living. You’ll smile again. You’ll dream again. You get to be my age, and you realize that you had everything that was meant for you. So you might as well want it all, then see what comes.”

You can’t make yourself safe. Existence is risk. Caring is dangerous.”

“Life makes it really hard to hope for things.”

I’m trying to stick to the PEMDAS of emotions. Order of operations has to be observed.

I would rather die than go to a parade.”

. . could you help me figure out which agents

I’m good at doing things myself. That doesn’t mean I want to do everything by myself.

I know what it’s like to hold on to things. I know what it’s like to marinate in something for so long that it becomes an integral part of who you are.

“There really is nothing like girl dinner,”

“Having little bits of everything you might want. A great, eclectic triumph. A symphony of taste. Girl dinner is art. Sometimes it’s Ritz crackers and cheese, but it’s actually one of my very favorite things about being single. The ability to just have a meal that’s pieces of everything.”

I feel so much more okay than I expected to. It’s still weird.

Don’t we all want to learn how to write a happy ending in our own lives?

The Grand Gesture—when one protagonist does something expensive—in time, money, or pride—to show the other protagonist the depth of their feelings.