More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Life felt like hell because we expected it to feel like heaven. The quote I read years ago went something like that, but I never understood it. When you’re in the thick all your life, living in ways you eventually figure out no one else is, you learn to sleep well in heat and eat fire. Until one day it’s all you need.
People assumed I behaved strictly on impulse, when actually, it required quite a bit of strategy to be this fucked up.
“Because pain in the body quiets the pain in the head. It feels good, like a kill switch for your brain.
you’d rip out your own hair because animals do insane things when they’re caged for too long.”
I looked at the pushpin. I could sleep tonight. If I really wanted to.
screaming crying throwing up 😭😭😭😩😩😩😩😩😭😭😭😭😩😩💔💔💔💔
I hated him, and I would never forgive him, but maybe we had that one thing in common. We had to change to survive.
“You teach your daughter to hide in everyone else’s world,” I shot back, “and I’ll teach mine everyone else exists in hers. Go fuck yourself, and leave the kid alone.”
In fact, he was kind of an angel at the end. An angel with really black bat wings. Psycho.
and of any emotion that I avoided, I hated loss the most.
When we were young and already drained and rotting from the inside out, and for a few nights here and there we just wanted to touch someone who got it. Who understood.
I would’ve fucking followed him and rotted down there, close to wherever he was, because nothing I would’ve acquired after that—my inheritance or my vengeance on Winter—would’ve been worthwhile without him.
I didn’t like being fed. I needed to hunt.
“People and music and fires and beer,” he taunted. “Let’s go, Winter. The world awaits.”
🥲🥺🥲😩
“Shhh,” he soothed, his left hand resting on my hip. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”
😩😩😩
It’s okay. It’s okay. He wasn’t rushing me. He wasn’t mocking me. He wasn’t hurrying me. It was okay if I learned things a little slower. It was okay.
“My heart . . .” he said. “Shit.”
🥲🥲🥲🥲
“It is an art how quickly you can make everyone want to kill you.”
LOL
I stared at her, knowing I would never explain myself.
But I didn’t care. I wanted him to come back. I wanted him to hurt me. Just as long as he came back.
I feel you. I feel you everywhere. The cloves on his clothes, the fountain on his skin. The words on his tongue, the breath on his lips. The hand on my neck, the sharp in his silence. Down the hall. Sitting in the study. Outside in the rain. At the open bathroom door. Or right in the corner of the room. Right here. Watching me. He was always coming. Or . . . Maybe I never left. His words came back to me.
Or did he see that I was alone? That I was naked, wet, and alone for so long? So long.
But he was the only time—other than dancing—that I felt alive, too. Being with him was like dancing. Dancing with death.
And as we stripped and I thrust inside her, I knew without a doubt that this was who I would’ve been if I hadn’t become me. If I hadn’t learned to cope with pain in all the worst ways growing up in that house and denied taking any responsibility for the man I became.
I would’ve gone to school, played basketball, laughed with my friends, and snuck into my pretty little girlfriend’s house at night to make love to her, delirious, with no other need than to be good, because I wasn’t so twisted that I needed anything else to be happy. This was what I might’ve had forever if I hadn’t lied.
I darted my eyes to hers. “Don’t let me go,” I told her, breathing hard. “No matter what you hear or what they say, don’t let me go.”
moments before disaster
He threw a punch, and it was the first time in years I hadn’t been ready to fight back. I didn’t even want to. If I lost her, I didn’t even care.
I’d defiled her, like I knew I would. She would never dance like an innocent again. She’d never have the wonder on her face she had when she was on that motorcycle.
I’d changed her forever. I’d bent and twisted and broken everything that made her the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me.
