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Let the world burn. I want you, you alone, and I would defy the gods to have you.”
I know beauty when I see it, probably because I see it in the mirror every day. @Lavineas5Ever is gorgeous, and Lavinia couldn’t ask for a better tribute.
I’m no white knight, just a man who likes a beautiful woman on his arm.
He was also undeniably beautiful. That knife-edged jawline could slice heirloom tomatoes.
It was more or less the same advice April had received for more than thirty years: If people are cruel, make yourself smaller and smaller, until you’re so inconsequential no one can target you.
Black to disappear. Extra fabric to disguise. As always, fatness was a sin, most likely mortal rather than venial.
I’d hoped you could control tonight’s narrative.
“You have to dig.” She didn’t look away, and he couldn’t. “You have to look carefully, but there’s a story waiting for you. It wants you to see the signs. It wants to be told.”
I have no interest in writing about a man who offers nothing but good looks and easy charm. But hidden depths fascinate me.”
“Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas, pater,” he’d singsonged whenever possible. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, father. Spoken in Latin for extra spite.
“Despite my years in the dirt, I have a weakness for shiny things. I’m a magpie, really.”
“I do want to hear about your swordplay. Trust me.”
But I’m not looking to be fixed. I want to be loved and liked and desired not because of my size, not despite my size, but because I’m ME.
“I’m a diamond of many facets.”
Though a half god, he is no less a man. And as such, prone to blunder full as often as any of his brethren.
Sometimes they blundered because their personal histories hadn’t taught them to be sensitive to certain issues. And sometimes they blundered because— Sometimes they blundered because they had trust issues. Major trust issues.
“I love it when you talk science-y to me.”
“But in all honesty, probably the most demanding and impressive role you’ve played isn’t any of those.”
“The vainest, dimmest actor on the planet, who’s actually neither. Seemingly shallow and shiny as a puddle, but deep as the Mariana Trench.”
This wasn’t just a fuck. I love your body. I’m not going anywhere.
“So you just followed your girlfriend home like a stray kitten and refused to leave her lap afterward?”
So much for his white-knight ambitions, they’d crow. Even such a gifted actor couldn’t pretend to want a woman like that for long.
They knew her and accepted her, exactly as she was. They wanted to support her.
No more hiding, she’d vowed in that other hotel room months ago. No more hiding.
No doubt about it. She’d definitely stopped hiding her body and her fandom.
Please tell me people who look like us can be loved. Please tell me people who look like us can be desired. Please tell me people who look like us can have happy endings.
As we’re both aware—all too aware—some scriptwriters believe death and misery and stagnation are more clever, more meaningful, and more authentic to reality than love and happiness and change. But life isn’t all misery, and finding a path through hard, hard lives to joy is tough, clever, meaningful work.
