The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (Feminine Pursuits, #1)

by Olivia Waite

Their hands held sure and steady while the groom slipped the wedding band onto his bride’s finger. It was Lucy Muchelney, in the front pew, whose hands were shaking.

Pris put a hand on her husband’s elbow as they walked up the stairs, and for a moment Lucy felt a phantom pressure on her own arm. She turned her back on all such ghosts and trudged home.

It was a feeble hope, but even the smallest candle looked bright at midnight.

His brilliance had been a kind of refinement, of taking the ore other scholars dug up and forging it into instruments learned men could use to test the world.

The family tree was almost entirely trunk.

You couldn’t reason with ambition. All you could do was moderate the damage it did. Try to get ahead of it, imagine problems before they started, smooth out the road for the impractical person with their gaze on the heavens.

She’d felt like a book pulled down from the shelf, splayed open by a determined reader, and held firmly in place until she gave up all her secrets.

Only love could make the name drip from Miss Muchelney’s mouth in those honeyed tones. Even a love in mourning still had sparks in it.

Lucy’s eyes were star-bright. Her lips parted on a breath that was far too soft for a sigh. Catherine’s whole body went tight and liquid—how easy would it be to just lean forward, and press her mouth to Lucy’s, and taste that sound on her own tongue?

It was as though someone had taken the case off the universe, and let the reader peer at the naked machinery that powered the stars.

a kiss that tasted lush as wine and scorched like fire. Catherine drank pleasure from Lucy’s ready mouth,

“How can we agree on universal truths, when between the English and the French, we can’t even agree on what time was was! No wonder humans have had so many wars.”

She paused. “How much of your innocence can I ruin in the course of one evening?” “I’m already reasonably ruined,” Lucy said. “You can tell me.”

Lucy wondered if the pearls were still cool, or if they had already borrowed some of the warmth of Catherine’s skin. She wanted to slide her lips over them, feeling the contrast between smooth gems and soft flesh.

“I don’t paint for the judges. If they like it, that’s terrific, we’ll hang it up and sell copies and let everyone ooh and ahh all they want. But they could tell me it’s not worth the trouble to spit on it, and I’d still choose to paint it—because there’s nothing else I can do and still feel like myself.”

“Art is only art because people call it so. Art is an illusion: a reflection of something, meant to communicate a thought or a feeling or the sense of a scene. There’s no possible way to be concretely, completely, objectively correct about it. Is the painting a sunrise or a sunset? And if it’s a sunrise, what does that mean? Six people fought about it for half an hour and no solid consensus was reached. Because no consensus could be reached.”

“I am tired of twisting myself into painful shapes for mere scraps of respect or consideration. Tired of bending this way and that in search of approval that will only ever be half granted.”

“This letter does not contain an apology,” she said, her consonants as crisp as corporal punishment.

The sun felt more concentrated here, almost tangible, a heaviness that slowed the limbs and dazzled the eye.

Lucy let her lips spread in a smile of such poisonous sweetness that by rights Mr. Hawley should have perished on the spot.

Lucy’s smile was all arsenic, a metallic, bitter curve of lips

Loving someone shouldn’t be the end of anything. It should be a beginning.”

“And belladonna?” “Italian for lovely lady—but it also stands for silence.” “Because it’s poisonous.” Catherine bit her lip. “Because a love silenced is something like death.”

Behind them, the endless sea roared approval.

It seemed like the only place we could really love each other was in this frozen space between the past and the present. There was nothing truly vital in it, nothing nourishing to the heart or the mind or the soul.

maybe being an artist is also really about the work. It’s not about standing up and trumpeting one’s own genius to a throng of adoring inferiors, agog with admiration. Maybe an artist is simply one who does an artist’s work, over and over. A process, not a paragon.”

What’s worse, you had to trust them to choose you. It was horribly frightening—as though you started every day by reminding your heart to keep beating.

a kiss like a moth, a nighttime creature, trembling and sad and not destined to live long.

a hard, harsh kiss, born of fear and flame, and it seared into ash everything that had come between them.

Her anxiety had crystallized overnight into something hard and clear and seemingly calm, but that smooth facade was a thin and brittle shell overlying a universe of panic.

“I am asking you to stay with me for the rest of our lives. I am asking you to join me in making this world a better place, insofar as we are able. We cannot stand up in a church and make vows—but we can stand up, publicly, and declare that we are important. Together.”