More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Love emanates from her being, from her every pore, where she stands in summons to me only feet away. A love so pure, so tangible, and unconditional bouncing between us. The only safe space I have ever truly known beating inside her chest as I draw closer to it, pounding over the wood planks to answer her summons and feast on a love that blankets me. A love that protects me and brings me peace while keeping me whole. A love so mine, so ours.
A love and place we made together, against all odds. Our darkness mingling and molding, pouring our foundation, and erecting the frame while we decorated the walls with the memories we made. Filling every shelf and lining every cabinet, creating our forever home within one another.
She once told me life could happen in a blink, but it’s a series of blinks that brought us together. It was life happening to us which ended with the same close of the eyes, leaving me on the other side of it without her.
Because I know the difference between living your life and life happening to you, and they are distinctly different.
Living life is making choices—what to wear, when to eat, whether or not to cut your hair. These are the easy decisions we get to make—to have some say or a hand in. Life happening to you is vastly different. It comes by way of a powerful reckoning force that cements your path for better or worse. It’s only in the wake of it that you realize the easy decisions are the only c...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
I happen to my life and the lives of others. Not the other way around. At this point, it’s up to me to remember the blinks of the days before and after I mastered it. Blinks I’m choosing to remember now. Some of them slow and meant to be savored. Many of them so fast it doesn’t feel like they’re real, but delivered by a force so powerful, it’s undeniable it exists. A force she prayed to and called God. Something I never fought her on and still don’t exactly disagree with. While her faith was unshakable, mine remains in her—in us.
“A BOY BECOMES A man when a man is needed.”
“Life is cruel, and it would do you a bit of good to learn it early.”
If you want to be a real man, apologize when you mean it, or it never will count for anyone. And don’t think you can fool them. People know when you mean it and when you don’t.”
I never understand why people are so polite about revealing the truth when it’s not pleasant. It’s as if people are hiding from real life, but some truths can never be pleasant, no matter how they’re worded or spoken.
“Since when has peace brought change? The cost of peace is being compliant to whatever our government decides without our say. That’s not peace, that’s enslavement. Alain says the same corruption stands just beneath the veil of American capitalism and is ready to join the fight to liberate them.”
The only way to defeat a man like Roman is to play sleeping giant,” he relays as an inkling charges through the air between the four of us. “Think Helen of Troy,” Dom clarifies,
“I’m going to be a third-generation Marine. It’s a given, and if there’s one thing I know how to do—it’s build an army.”
Dom covers for me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that I can get very little past Dom these days. The good part about it is that he won’t force me to address anything I don’t want to, whereas Sean believes group sharing is an entitlement.
What most people aren’t privy to is that my chosen brother lives by his feelings, primarily those of his gut. If there were a way for him to suppress or box his emotions, he wouldn’t survive it. His heart is what fuels him, though he’s an expert at masking that truth. It’s in rationalizing that about him that an idea strikes me, a notion of a possible way.
“I’m going to be the one that breaks the cycle.”
“Arrogance and soldiering do not align well, Tyler. The necessary confidence you will need only comes with education.”
The irony not lost on me that I’m seeking comfort in exchanging one alcoholic’s company for another’s.
His hurt stems from disappointment by those he has faith in, not by romantic love. Any days he had of trusting without fear are already far behind him—something that I can easily recognize.
“Maybe”—I bite the tear that lines my lips—“if I tell you one day why I hate the snow, you will talk to me about who you become when you step into the shadows at night and stare into my window.”
“True history is too often ignored, Tyler. Far more stories than those selected for history books. Tales of unsinged heroes who deserve recognition.”
you have to love the light and the dark in a human being for longevity in any relationship. All of that person, that’s what true commitment is.”
I am safe. Tyler is safe.
It’s then I start to feel it. A feeling similar to the day we stood outside the garage just after Dom signed for the key. The beginning . . . of something more. More meaningful. Our purpose.
It’s on the silent ride back to my granddad’s that I sense the last of the shift—the true end of summer. Of our lives as we once knew them. The end of our innocence.
Though people aren’t fixable, their mistakes can be camouflaged.
“The truth of what happened to me, to my husband, died with Celine and Beau in that fire, and maybe . . . I died with them because I feel like a ghost to myself now.”
But you’re worth waiting for, General. You’re worth this hellacious ache. You’re worth it.”
And your ability to master blink to black.”
Who will steady my hands when he leaves?
“I’ll never be anyone else’s soldier, and I think you just realized that.”
“Soldiers don’t stay, General,” he whispers, “but your soldier will come back to you. Every fucking time you order him to.” “Then I order you not to go.”
My whole life has imploded in blinks the last few years, but this isn’t a blink type of thing. I want to give you all of them.”
“Love may have lied to you in the past, but I’m not them, Delphine. You know I’m not. You trust me. This is just your fear talking.”
Filling our days with simple things and enjoying simple pleasures as our feelings became anything but. Years of memories between us now. Years together where we went from mentor and pupil to friends and to whatever she decides we are now.
My attraction only amplified by the darkness she camouflages, which, to me, feels like a jagged turnkey, a key that lines up perfectly with my inner lock.
“I don’t wait for men.” “Then I’ll be your first because I’m worth waiting for.”
“There will be no other women for me because there is no other woman meant for me. I’m certain there is no other woman alive who will hear these types of promises from me because you’re all I want.”
“Wait for me, and I’ll give you any life you can dream up.”
“I’m not your problem, Soldier.” “No, what you are, is my fucking reason,”
“My reason to fight and my reason to come home. You are home. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
I’m bleeding freely, and for you, I will continue to as much as you need me to. I’ll take everything you have to throw at me. Everything. I’ll eat their sins, I’ll bathe in their wrongs, I’ll pay for the way they hurt you. I’ll take it all—for you. I’ll take it all just for the chance to be with you.”
Not if this is the payoff of giving so much of yourself to another human being.
Of loving them to the point their wants overshadow your own—of loving another more than yourself.
So, as I shed their collective sins, their
burdens, I materialize a wall between myself and their fucking decisions, becoming lighter with every step. Resigned to let their burdens be their own. To let them lie in their beds, weighed down as they battle their own fucking demons, haunts, and the consequences of their missteps.
“HE WHO MAKES a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” —Samuel Johnson
And so, I live in time measured by the slow sweep of my eyes, blinking from one day to the next through any aches that arise because of the gnawing that has yet to leave me. All the while keeping my promise, no matter how bad it burns—it never happened.
In loving her, I’m already haunted enough.
It’s my heart that might not be agreeable to the distance he’s intent on keeping from his. This truth is evident as it pounds in the direction of his footfalls, following him out of the snap of the storm door and into his truck as it sparks to life, trailing him long after the rumble fades with his departure. Both pounding and aching heavily reminding me of the loss of his presence, of what that ache feels like as it has for eight unforgiving years.
