Ever After Always (Bergman Brothers, #3)

by Chloe Liese

Because I’m a feeler, and music is a language of emotion.

10000000%

Even when all I want to do sometimes is indulge in a teary explosion of hugging my condiment-named cats while cry-singing along to my nineties emo playlist.

Anxiety isn’t always debilitating, and for me, more often than not, it doesn’t spiral into depression, because my meds seem to help with that aspect. But anxiety doesn’t leave, fully. It’s never out of the building. It lurks. It reminds you it’s there. Biding its time. At least, for me it does.

“In the words of the inimitable Lisa Kleypas, ‘Marriage isn’t the end of the story, it’s the beginning. And it demands the effort of both partners to make a success of it.’”

The truth is that we change and grow significantly in our adult years, and to stay close with a committed partner, we have to keep learning them, examining if our growth is compatible or divergent.

“Intimacy isn’t intuition. It isn’t even familiarity. Intimacy is work. Sometimes it’s happy work, like picking sun-ripened apples that drop effortlessly from the tree, and other times, it’s like foraging for truffle mushrooms—down on your knees, messy, inefficient; it takes digging up dirt and perhaps coming up empty on your first attempt, before you find the mother lode.”

“About that word, fair…the idea of ‘fair’ in a marriage, any relationship, I mean it’s impossible. No marriage is fair. It’s complementary. The idea of ‘fair’ is absurd at best, ableist at worst.”

“That having a baby is no small feat,” I admit, before the words can be stopped. “That raising a child in one of the most expensive cities in America with our kind of student loan debt is not insignificant, that it’s going to take more than I’ve been doing. I got a little fixated on working to prepare us for that, and somehow it gets turned into rejecting her, wanting her body but not her heart?”

But you can’t change it. You can just move forward as best you can and tell yourself you’ll give your kid better.”

She told Ryder to go ahead but he said—” Viggo drops his voice and tries for sounding like his brother, “‘No way. I don’t come until you come.’ Which is generally a very good principle for a relationship,”

“Romance is about the centrality of loving relationships, and it reminds us that human connection is vital to existence, rather than glorifying egoism or violence or greed. So excuse my genre for not being perfect, but let’s back the fuck up from hypocritically critiquing books that have done a lot more for humanity than slashers and circle-jerk, five-hundred-page, nihilistic tomes.”

“Somewhere along the way, you forgot the day you became Freya’s, you became ours, too.”

I love these Bergmans.

I hate that I haven’t shown you what you mean to me, Freya. I’ve been trying, but in my way, I realized, not yours. All my work has been for us, but it came at the cost of doing what makes you feel loved. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get that. I want to fix it, to do better.”

He’s shown me strength lies in how openly you bare your heart, not how deeply you guard it. I just never thought that I could do it, that I was capable of such vulnerability.

Love’s true test, the measure of its strength, is its bravery to be honest, its willingness to face the hardest moments and say, Even though there’s nothing to be done, at least I have you.

There are men who go down on a woman because they know it gets her off. Then there are men who use their mouth like it’s worship, like every single moment that their face is buried between her thighs is their idea of heaven. Aiden is like that, and he’s always made me feel like a goddess when he does this.