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Tití Luz could out-stubborn even the tuberculosis that was killing her, and would have kept breathing just to guilt me.
Titi luz a baddie
Farty Walsh
Farty?????
No one called Marty Walsh “Farty” but me, the only reason being that anyone who talked out of his ass as much as he did deserved a name to match.
Ahhh now that makes sense
“To give you my name is to give you the last of myself, and humanity has taken enough from me. My name is my own. You may not have it.”
“How ’bout ‘Río’?” “Río.” He mimicked my rolled R like a native boricua. “Why that name?” A river can be both devastating and beautiful. I shrugged. “It suits you.”
“To Ekaterina, I was devoted husband,” he said. “Not giant.”
He tilted his head thoughtfully and, in English, said, “So, your name suits you too, Boy Named Kind.”
🥺🥺🥺🥺
A new ache dwells in my spirit tonight I dare not examine, and yet, what else can I do in this cage with so costly a gift as Benigno’s song except place it in my heart beside the moon? Would that he had sung for me until the dawn.
“Safe,” I repeated, looking down at his conviction with envy. “In my whole dumb life, I’ve never felt as safe anywhere as I feel sitting on a metal grate twenty feet above the ground with you.”
Perhaps the Currents brought us here because they knew we would meet.” My face flushed. “Why do you say that?” He looked pityingly up at me through the iron bars. “Because we are both caged.”
Despite the wisdom of my harmony, despite everything I believed possible, my heart is cultivating a pearl. For a human. And the more I learn about Benigno, the more he teaches me to swim.
Part of me—the part he’d woken from a decades-long sleep—was desperate to say he’d leveled the fortress around my heart the moment I first locked eyes with him in the East River.
“’Cause the prettiest girl in Brooklyn wants me, but my heart wants someone else. Someone who knows me better than any human alive—including me. And I don’t even know his name.” Tears were forcing their way into my eyes again. “All I know is that he misses the moon. If I could, I’d ride a roller coaster to the sky just to steal it for him.”
“Your emotions are not madness. Nor are you broken. Everyone else—the cowards who taught you that keeping your heart safe meant caging it—they are broken.”
“What if nobody taught me how to keep my heart safe”—my eyes drifted to the dark ribbon of his mouth—“from you?” “Your heart in my keeping,” he whispered, “would always be safe.”
“Río,” I whispered, out of breath, and not from wheezing. “You make me feel like I’m kissing the tides.” “Benigno,” he whispered back. “You make me feel like I am holding the moon.”
“Benigno, surely you know,” he breathed. “You are my heartsong.”
Only it hadn’t. Though I’d had Río right as the person fate had bonded me to, I’d had everything else wrong. All this time. I’d thought I was bringing him home.
Son of Neptune, I answer. I am your harmony.
