Only Ashes Remain (Market of Monsters, #2)

by Rebecca Schaeffer

Part of her just wanted the pain to go away. She wanted to stop feeling awful all the time. She wanted to skip to the part where she was over it, where the grief was nothing but a distant memory.

“But they’re people.” Quispe shook her head ruefully. “And most people judge you the instant they meet you, if not before. I want to make sure they judge me the way I want them to.”

and if she decided she didn’t want to be social, she could ignore the messages.

Sell your souls here! We pay better than the Devil and have a faster payment plan than God.

So she just lay down beside him, curling close to his body, and rested her head on his chest. He was warm, and her body tingled softly against the heat. His arm wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her close, and the rise and fall of his chest was slightly erratic. She placed her hand over his heart to still it. Slowly, his breathing evened out. Nita let her eyes

His secrets were his to share or not. And sometimes people didn’t need to know every part of each other’s lives intimately.

“But I wonder if it isn’t better to keep the memory as is.

away. “It’s hard for me to understand sometimes. That you’re your own person, with your own desires and wants that don’t always match mine. And that’s okay. I may not be comfortable with some of your choices. I may be scared by them.”

“But I can’t pick and choose what aspects of a person I want and make a new person for myself. That’s not how it works.”

And she kissed him. His lips were soft beneath hers. His body tensed for a moment, when she first pressed against him, but then it released, and his mouth parted slightly. His arms wrapped around her back in a hug, and her thumbs stroked the tears from his cheeks.

Something inside her relaxed at that, at the knowledge that this weird, amorphous thing in her wasn’t one-sided, that he wanted her the way she wanted him.