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You don’t really fall in love with a house. You fall in love with the life you could have in it.
He shook his head in mock chagrin. “How did somebody so pretty get so cynical?
People don’t want to hurt each other; it’s just sometimes they forget. That’s what community is. It reminds us we’re all connected.
One of his colleagues shook his head. “What you are, mate, is an arsehole whisperer.”
“Valuables, my arse,” she grumbled. “I’m eighty-two, I don’t have any valuables. I’ve just got a lifetime’s worth of crap.”
“But what if it goes the same way? W-what if I’m unbeable with?” She actually rolled her eyes. My deepest, most desperate late-night fear, and that was the reaction it inspired.
It’s all I’ve ever wanted, really. Someone to make tea for. To know how they like to drink it, and share some pieces of time with them at the end of long days, and short ones, good days and bad, and everything in between.
It’s hard to like someone when they care more about how they come across than making you feel comfortable.”
Adam helped himself to the last slice of bread and devoured it with gratifying enthusiasm, at one point uttering a noise that I could have sworn was a genuine nom.
Why was I blushing? He’d asked to look at ephemera, not ravish me over the bench.
People make choices, and sometimes they just leave. And, afterwards, we gather up our hearts, pick up our lives, do the best we can with them, and see what comes.”
Crouched on my ruined carpet, and cried again. Because Marius had left me. Because my house was flooding. And because the universe had dropped a wonderful man into my lap right when I felt least worthy of having him.
“You know, Edwin,” said Mrs. Chankseliani, “family is really just whoever sticks around.”
I had come, at last, in the middle of a flood, to some fresher, deeper truth that was simply this: love is stronger than grief.
smiled at him, wondering if it was acceptable practice in suburban Oxford to climb a man like rampant honeysuckle.
“Sorry,” he said. “F-for kissing me?” “God, no. But I didn’t mean to come at you like a wild man. I’ve been imagining that from pretty much the first moment I saw you, and none of my scenarios involved vigorously molesting you in a churchyard.”
I’d been wanting to touch him this way from almost the first moment I’d seen him. This beautiful man, all warmth and smiles and petal, waiting in the rain.
