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I won’t allow another storm to touch Auren. She has been flooded and wrung out, left to take the barrage without shelter. But so long as I’m here, I will be her shelter.
“We’ve all got a little rotten in us, and I wouldn’t change that for anything. It’s how we’ve survived.”
“You don’t have to be cruel to be strong. You don’t have to be mean to seem brave. You don’t have to look down on others in order to stand tall. Having emotions does not mean you’re weak. It means you’re smart enough to let yourself feel.”
“My tongue is so confused right now.” Lu smirks. “I’ve heard women give you that very same critique.”
I’ve always been treated like treasure, but with Slade, I’m simply treasured.
That’s the thing with trauma to the body—it shows up instantly. In breaks and bruises, in burns and in blood. But the trauma on the inside, that’s harder to see. It creeps around your mind, poisons you with disquiet. It can hit you out of nowhere, debilitating and ruinous. There are no marks visible for those. None, save the shadows in your eyes.
It’s not ragged or turbulent anymore. Instead, it’s quiet. Slow. The kind of tears your expression lets fall without fanfare. There is no choked breathing or scrunched up nose. No pulled lips or furrowed brow. This is the suffering of the silent. A hurt so deep it doesn’t show itself on a face.
Maybe none of us truly know our own strength. Not until the world has hacked away at us. But the point is, we aren’t strong because of our trauma. We were always strong to begin with. We just needed to figure it out for ourselves.
