More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
you not responding to the group chat is like if you were lurking in the same room and creepily watching us have fun without you
COAL dude i love you but you text like a boomer That is quite possibly the cruelest thing you’ve ever said to me.
I don’t care how hot you are, if you don’t get out of that room in the next ten seconds, I will grab you by that tank top you think makes you look effortlessly relaxed but really makes you look like you’re trying too hard and go full Robespierre on your ass.”
oh no, my title shant be stolen from me, take my eyes before you take my disastrous reputation
need i remind you that I am your king you dishonor me, i shall have you excommunicated That’s the Pope, dumbass.
Nothing I felt towards him was gentle. So whatever that was had to have been base-ass lust. … poor choice of words. It was straight-up lust. Still a bad descriptor. It was lust, plain and simple.
“And send me that video. I’m going to put it in one of those digital photo frames and set it above my fireplace.” “Piss off.” “And I’ll engrave it to say Baby’s First Political Incident.”
“Wren.” Coal ignores me. “Can you send him the profiles for—” My phone pings. His jaw drops. “A few hundred years ago, you’d have been burned as a witch.” She makes a noise I swear to god I’ve never heard from her. It takes me a beat to realize she’s laughing. “Thank you, Nicholas. I appreciate that.”
“Was that the apology you had in mind?” I whisper up at him. “Or should I go on about how all the rainbows in Ireland point to the pot of gold in your asshole?”
“You have na yet begun to repent,” he mutters. “I agreed to apologize, not repent.” “You’re in Ireland. That’s what we got here, repentance and Guinness.”
“Fuck me,” I groan to my plate. Loch doesn’t hesitate. “Only if you say please.”
I know that his kiss tasted like all the dreams I waxed on about in the writing I don’t do anymore, the words I wove while trying to imagine Iris but all I imagined was a fantasy, an ending. He tasted like those fantasies. He felt like those endings. It’s him.
“You aren’t an awakening,” I whisper. “You’re the whole dawn. And I can’t believe I ever thought I’d seen the sun before you.”
“I don’t want a fantasy. I don’t want sweetness. For once in my life, I want to be ruined.”
“You don’t paint a whole picture at once, right? And I wouldn’t write a whole book in a single moment. So let’s take it word by word. What you just did, us, all of it. Word by word, okay?”
“I don’t know what your problem is—maybe you don’t deserve me, which is insane; but I sure as hell don’t deserve you, either. So be unworthy with me, in this moment, right now. We’re here. We have all day. I showed you part of my soul and we’re next to a bed. So kiss me, you idiot, and be with me.”
I want to know the evolution of his kisses. How today’s will be different from tomorrow or next month or five years from now, how the texture of his lips will change, how sometimes he’ll be aggressive and sometimes he’ll be this and I want to be able to track the differences like constellations. I want to know what it’s like to kiss this man at every stage of his life.
A hundred romantic, sweeping speeches rush through me. All the things I should have said in the ballroom. All the things I’ve written about for years, the fairy tale endings and romantic stories that circled my fantasies. They collide against every moment I’ve spent with him—how I’m terrified but it’s a good terror; how I’m anxious but it’s a good anxiety. In some alternate version of me, I weave such a poetic sonnet that it brings us both to our knees. But all I can say, in the dimness of this starlit reality, is “I love you.”
It should be such a mundane thing now, kissing him, but I know, god do I know, that it’ll never stop feeling new and thrilling and vital. That’s the real happy ending I always wrote about—no big, sweeping orchestral situations, no constant churn of drama and emotion. Just this. Lips and tongues and his hips against mine. Just him, over and over, unfolding into a meandering, uncertain path that ripples far off into the distance. A happy ever after that we make together.
