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I figured there were plenty of things in the world that weren’t easily explained, but it didn’t make them any less real.
“I will gorge on your organs and sip the marrow from your bones, human trash!” Ouch. That was almost scary and hurtful. Almost.
“Are you a forest princess?”
“My dad says you don’t have to be the biggest to be the scariest.”
An enchanted forest, a green swamp thing, a couple of satyrs, a werewolf the size of Falkor, and a cyclops. Where exactly had Matti brought us?
He was special, and I’d known it from the moment I met him, which had been about a heartbeat before I’d fallen in love with him.
Sometimes you learned real quick how you could love something more than you loved yourself.
Life couldn’t be too good all the time. And like that saying warned, nothing good comes easy. Everything I valued in my life required work. This was just one of those things. My best friends and I had to put in effort to make our friendship still thrive after so many years. If things between us had only been one-sided, we never would have made it to this point.
The thicker the thighs, the better the prize—andddd that was nothing I needed to focus on.
I was the attractive equivalent of brussels sprouts: some people were about it, and other people would rather starve.
“There’s nothing about either of you that could make me uncomfortable.”
There was fear and there was respect, and there was a gray area in between.
life was 10 percent of the things that happened in it, and 90 percent how you handled those things.
Ani’s laugh made me smile. It was loud and free, and I liked it. You could tell a lot about a person based on their laugh, and the freedom in hers said a whole lot.
I’d wanted to hurt him because he’d hurt me, and maybe that made me as much of a mean person as it made him. My soul wilted at the idea. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. Not really hurt them at least.
Some people were assholes just because they could be, but most people had deep, deep reasons why they behaved the way they did. You never knew what someone else was going through or what they’d gone through to make them that way.
Change was good. Good change was great.
When you stayed away from people, you didn’t give them the opportunity to push you away.
There was no asking; he was telling me to. There was a clear difference between the two.
Being needed could be such a crippling thing, but it could also give you more purpose than you could ever imagine. It could make the crappiest day brighter.
“No matter how good a liar someone thinks they are, they’re never good enough.”
She was a tough cookie, but that was all right. Tough cookies didn’t crumble as easily.
“Don’t be weird, all right?” I warned him. “I’m never weird.”
New normals weren’t supposed to be easy, and one day, I would look back on this period in our life and be grateful
“The people who are the hardest to love are usually the ones who need it the most. Funny how that works, huh?”
I wanted people to like me. I wanted to fit in. But at what cost?
“I’m glad you didn’t back down.” “You are?” I squinted. “Why?” This sounded too good to be true, or maybe I was that paranoid. “Because now everyone is going to know the truth.” “That I’m stubborn sometimes?” The muscles at his cheeks tightened. “That you shouldn’t be fucked with,” he explained.
“I don’t need to know what you are, because I’m seeing it, and I’m not worried about you, Cricket.” The chest that had stood as a barrier between me and that asshole minutes ago, rose and fell. “There’s nothing scary about you at all,” Henri Blackrock claimed. “Got it?”
I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do for someone else’s broken heart.”
blinked at Henri being right beside me, so close. Was he…? “Whatcha doing?” I asked. Had he been sniffing my hair? There was another nudge. “Marking you.”
His expression didn’t change, but his touch said what his mouth didn’t—he was there for me—and that touched me so much I had to fight the urge to throw my arms around him.
what was love if it wasn’t a freely given gift?
there was something almost terrifying about feeling helpless,
“I don’t know what it is about you, Fluff, but you make me feel safe.”
I was such a sucker for Protective Henri. That was an undisputed fact.
She had told me more than once that people were a lot like plants, and that life in general was very similar to gardening. Some people were thorny, and other people had very weak stems. As she would remind me in this situation, some plants took a whole lot of water to grow, some plants were cacti that needed just a little to thrive and flourish.
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” he told me.
“So sometimes… dads don’t want to be dads?” My tear ducts activated. It took me a second to say, in a voice I thought was pretty even considering I was real close to weeping, “Sometimes, Agnes. I wish I could tell you why, but I have no idea.” I touched her hair. “But like with my parents that weren’t a part of my life, it wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t anything I did for them to not be with me. I didn’t do anything wrong. I try not to let it hurt my feelings.” I swallowed. “Sometimes it does though. But I was lucky like you are; I had people who loved me and wanted to be in my life. They’re the
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“Some people are so important to you that nothing, not time, not being far, not life or… death, will ever take them away. I don’t see my best friends all the time either, but I still love them so much, and they love me, and they’re always going to be there for me.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Nina.”
“You, of all people, should know,” he glared at me hard, and I mean hard, “without life, there can’t be death, Nina.”
Henri had winked at me.
Loyalty wasn’t just a word you used to describe standing by someone during big, important moments. Loyalty was staying true to people even when they said dumb crap. You just waited until the right moment to tell them they’d lost their minds. That was loyalty.
that high voice that was young and old at the same time, “Why’d you do that, Nina?” I slowed down until she was beside me. “Do what?” I asked her. “Save them. They’re not yours.”
“They’re all mine, Agnes.”
“Me too?” came out of her mouth.
“Of course you too, Mini Wolf.”
It felt like I was accepting something. All the parts of me I hadn’t known what to do with, maybe? The parts I had struggled with for half of my life.
We could defy the paths that choices others made set up for us.
