Block Shot (Hoops, #2)

by Kennedy Ryan

I want to peel back her surface and study her soul.

though we can’t see each other, I look to where I know her eyes should be, and I sense her looking where mine should be. And even in the dark, I think we see each other. There’s an intimacy to the darkness. I see less of her, but I somehow feel this more deeply. Every smell, every sound, every texture becomes a clue to her pleasure.

Darwin. Maslow. Who cares. In the end, we are just animals. Primitives driven by urges we barely understand but, with the right person, find ourselves slave to.

The gulf between the truth and the lies we tell ourselves is filled with misery.

“Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you." -Viola Davis, Oscar-Winning Actress

“I don’t give a damn about odds,” she says. “Odds don’t tell me what I can’t do. Odds just tell me how hard I’ll have to work to get what I want. Don’t allow anyone to make you feel less.”

“What I’m saying is be unafraid to want it all and be disciplined enough to work hard to get it.”

I’d forgotten how he tastes, but this moment under a star-spangled sky, this moon hurls me into retrograde. Backward so many years to our first kiss when he exploded across my senses and detonated any coherent thought with one stroke of his tongue.

The heavy marble base dents the wall, and the dome shatters, an explosion of glass and liquid and snow splattering the surface. I flinch and draw in a sharp, shocked breath. I know Zo won’t hurt me, but it’s an act of violence, killing the tenderness that has existed between us for a decade.

I think we do things and we live with the consequences. We make the best decisions we can with what we have; with what we feel and know, and live through the fallout if it comes.”

He takes in all my disparate parts, synthesizes them and is pleased with the whole.

“I don't need to be so full of myself that I feel I am without flaw. I can feel beautiful and imperfect at the same time. I have a healthy relationship with my aesthetic insecurities." - -Lupita Nyong’o, Oscar-Winning Actress

There’s a pain in my chest every time I think of my mother. Some emotions are so strong, some losses so essential that the heart—not your beating heart, your feeling heart—can’t contain them, so the body absorbs the blow. That’s how I grieve my mother.