More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Real men don’t press flowers into their books. They don’t spill their insecurities to their friends. Daniel certainly doesn’t tell me about all the things that happened to him in his past. Real men suck it up and change the subject until their hearts wither to dust inside them.
Every gesture, every question, and every laugh from her triggered old memories that I thought I’d lost. She was the flint lighting sparks in my darkness, illuminating a history that I can just barely see.
There are a million pieces of us scattered through my memory, moments tiny and insignificant to everyone else in the world except for me.
I remember that I loved you, I want to tell her. I’m in love with you. I love you still.
words finally spill out. “I don’t deserve having you in my life,” I tell her quietly. “There may always be pain and grief that follows me, even here, in all this Ross City luxury. Maybe that’s the way it goes in life. You don’t deserve to share that pain.” I take a deep breath, trying to quell my fear, the rising tide of all the darkness that still haunts me from the Republic. “But I think you do deserve to know the truth of how I feel. Because even if we can’t be together in the end, I would like you to know.” June’s eyes are glossy against the blue-gray light filtering in from the windows.
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Look at me,” he says, his eyes locking on to mine. They are fierce in the night, and in them I see the same brother who had once stood up to an entire nation. “It is not weakness to open your heart. It does not make you less of a man to ask for help. To turn to someone when you’re vulnerable. To need a shoulder to cry on. You don’t have to bear the weight of anything by yourself. Do you understand me? I know what it’s like to be forced to go it alone. I never want you to feel that way.”
I do stop, though, to glance one more time at her over my shoulder. You rarely regret the things you do, but always the things you don’t. A last glimpse of June walking away. Then she’s with her cluster of soldiers, and I keep walking.
