Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

many years since I’ve held any kind of club. So many years since I’ve felt naturally good at something, good in an empirical, undeniable way that is not reliant on anyone’s opinion.

Nearly every guy I’ve dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule.

I’ve met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

He slides his fingers into my underwear but they don’t go in the right places and he has a couple of sharp fingernails.

She hadn’t liked the proposal at the time and made him do it again properly a week later by the lake with a diamond and a dozen roses, but it is the first proposal beneath the strong branches of that tree that she remembers and that moves her, years after they have divorced, at unexpected moments of the day.

I go inside and lie on my futon and wait to explode.

Being around kids means thinking a whole lot of things you can’t say.

She seems active and zestful, the way people who die young always do, as if they were given an extra dose of energy and passion for life, as if they knew they had less time to spend it.

‘What happened, on our last date? Why didn’t you kiss me?’ It feels like liquid nitrogen coming out of me. He’s surprised by the bald question but not resistant to it. Something in his body relaxes. He leans against his car, props his heels against the curb. ‘I felt like something was off that night. There’d been this ease between us, at least I thought so, and it was gone. You seemed sort of out of reach.

It’s so much easier to cry when there are arms around you.

There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose.

we pull apart and dance in front of the stage like he wrote it for all of us, about our heartbreaks and recoveries and our friendships that might just last.