Where the Crawdads Sing

by Delia Owens

if you act like a predator, they act like prey.

But being completely alone was a feeling so vast it echoed,

She was tall, thin, giving her a fragile, lithesome look as though molded wild by the wind. Yet young, strapping muscles showed through with quiet power.

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.’”

Once sure and cocky, handsome and fit, he could no longer wear the man he had become and he’d take a swig from his poke.

The other words Tate didn’t say were his feelings for her that seemed tangled up between the sweet love for a lost sister and the fiery love for a girl.

Not waiting for the sounds of someone was a release. And a strength.

Here, the bed loomed as the centerpiece, but the room didn’t look like love.

Before, during all those almost-times, when she had stopped him, his wandering fingers had taken on a magical touch, bringing parts of her to life, causing her body to arch toward him, to long and want. But now, with permission finally granted, an urgency gripped him and he seemed to bypass her needs and push his way.

Why should the injured, the still bleeding, bear the onus of forgiveness?

Once again Tate was nudging her to care for herself, not just offering to care for her. It seemed that all her life, he had been there. Then gone.

Perhaps love is best left as a fallow field.

As she pushed off, she knew no one would ever see this sandbar again. The elements had created a brief and shifting smile of sand, angled just so. The next tide, the next current would design another sandbar, and another, but never this one. Not the one who caught her. The one who told her a thing or two.

If anyone understood loneliness, the moon would.

“I guess some things can’t be explained, only forgiven or not.

Let’s face it, a lot of times love doesn’t work out. Yet even when it fails, it connects you to others and, in the end, that is all you have, the connections.