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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Do you know what it’s like to think someone loves you and then you find out you were nothing but meat?”
“That you loved me, because there was no faking what happened in that fucking video, and I told her that I loved you, too, and I was sorry for stealing you the
“I told her you’d be set for life,”
“and I’d make all your dreams come true. You’ll dance and no doors will be closed to you ever again.”
My chest ached so badly it hurt to breathe. There was no one in the world like her.
“I just want you here or wherever I am.”
Will and I were cut from the same cloth, both always diving too deep for our own good, he with alcohol and drugs and I with the pain I needed to inflict.
“Someone taught me a long time ago that pain releases pain,”
“The best I’ve ever felt in seven years were the nights with you,”
“I guess when you hate someone you don’t have to hate them forever.”
There’s always a reason why things are as they are.”
But then I remembered his strong arms around me. I loved the danger. The way he brought me to life.
“And I learned, really quick, that life wasn’t going to be pretty. Not until . . .” Until . . . me?
“I couldn’t talk to people. I didn’t have any friends. I was scared all the time.” His voice was thick with memory, as if it had all happened just yesterday. “I just wanted to be invisible, and if I couldn’t be invisible, then I just wanted it to end. I was going to run away, because . . .”
“Like I wasn’t alone anymore,” he finished. “So little. So quiet. But it was everything. Feeling you next to me.”
“You taught me how to survive that day,” he said. “You taught me how to be strong and how to get to the next minute. And the next and the next. I could never forget, and when you came back in high school, and I had changed into this, because I’d seen so much shit,” he went on, “and my desires had morphed into something ugly and twisted, but I’d fucking survived nonetheless and didn’t swallow the bad for anyone anymore, because you had taught me
how to get rid of the shit. I finally craved one more thing I realized had been missing when I laid eyes on you again.”
“You made the world look different,”
“It was pure, and it was a dream. I didn’t want to change you.
I just wanted to be a part of it all. Of everything beautiful you were going to do.”
“When it was time to come clean, I couldn’t,” he said, his voice growing thick. “I just wanted to stay there with you. Behind the waterfall, in the shower, in the ballroom . . . Just stay with you.”
“Nothing was a lie,” he whispered.
“You’re a good chess player,” I teased. “Politics. It’s the greatest chess game.”
“Oh, you do?” Kai replied. “I’d like to hear the plans you have for my wife.”
Nothing in my life had ever felt as good as Winter happy because of me.
I wanted her.
“You go up first,” he tells me. “In case you slip, I’ll be behind you.”
“It’s okay. I have you,” he says. “I promise.”
She said the beauty in life is what we live for, and it’s everywhere. You just have to look closer.”
“I might kiss you again when we’re older,” he says. “Just so you know.”
He hadn’t taken away the fountain. He’d replaced it.
It was a fountain maze.
Hiding me in a world within a world.
“Having Damon around was the only time I ever felt solid in my life,” he told me. “He’s powerful. But painful.”
The highs with Damon reached the sun. But our kind of fun had a price.
“As long as you’re Damon Torrance, I don’t care what you wear,” I told him.
“Because of ‘Winter’ by Walter de la Mare,” he replied softly. “Something still beautiful, even after what I did to her.”
“How, with everything going on out there,” I went on, “I feel like I’m wrapped in a blanket in here—warm, dry, and safe. And all the world living and breathing and raging outside makes where I am seem like a world within a world. Like a fountain in a maze.” I paused, musing, “Like a home.”
Everything with him was like home.
“Because I was afraid of life without the hope of you to look forward to.”
“People are a blend of external and internal influences, not all controlled variables. Sometimes, just sometimes, we are who we are. Even in the sea, a snake is a snake.”
I needed to think, she’d said. My dick was inside you four times last night. Now you needed to think? Really?
HaHAHA Damon's banter is 10/10
“Whatever is after you is failing,”
“You’re not fucked. You’re the strongest of us all, because you’ve survived the most.”
“It was like she wasn’t here. It was just you.”
“I love you,”
Out of all the colors, I liked red the best.
“Our life is a series of plans,” she finally said. “Days, weeks, months, years . . . And then, there are moments. Moments you don’t see coming and you don’t plan, but everything you need, all the things you want to feel, are in that moment.”
“People come together, and for a tiny space of time,” she went on, “it’s beautiful and raw, because you can’t think and you don’t want to. You just feel.” She paused and then continued. “The moments are what we remember.”
“Men don’t feel ashamed for enjoying sex on their terms. You shouldn’t either.”
