More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I take the stick, flop it onto the edge of the table, and look over my shoulder. “Isn’t now the part where you’re supposed to put your arms around me and show me how to do it?” His mouth curves. “That depends. Are you carrying any weapons?” “The sharpest thing on me is my teeth.”
Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.
Oh yeah. Free books
Unlike me, Libby does not read the last page first. She doesn’t even read the jacket copy, preferring to go in without any preconceived notions. Probably why she’s been known to throw books across the room.
Im both of these people.
“There isn’t for women either. There’s just tall women,” he says, “and the men too insecure to date them.”
Oop
Maybe this is why people take trips, for that feeling of your real life liquefying around you, like nothing you do will tug on any other strand of your carefully built world. It’s a feeling not unlike reading a really good book: all-consuming, worry-obliterating.
“Until you got here,” he rasps, “all this place had ever been was a reminder of the ways I was a disappointment, and now you’re here, and—I don’t know. I feel like I’m okay. So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.”
That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.
Sometimes, even when you start with the last page and you think you know everything, a book finds a way to surprise you.
Oh dont you just love irony
But then he catches sight of me, and his mouth splits into a full, sensual Charlie smile, and my fear blows away, like dust swept from a book jacket. He opens the door, leaning out as the first fat droplets of rain splat the cobblestones. “You ready to finish this, Stephens?” “Ready.” It’s true and a lie. Does anyone ever want to finish a good book?
a way I don’t understand, he’s mine, and I’m his. It doesn’t matter what the last page says. That’s the truth. Here, now.
Because nothing—not the beautiful and not the terrible—lasts.
The last-page ache. The deep breath in after you’ve set the book aside.
Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.
This, I think, is what it is to dream, and I finally understand why Mom could never give it up, why my authors can’t give it up, and I’m happy for them, because this wanting, it feels good, like a bruise you need to press on, a reminder that there are things in life so valuable that you must risk the pain of losing them for the joy of briefly having them.
Sometimes, I write to Charlie, the first act is the fun part, and then everything gets too complicated. Stephens, he replies, for us, it’s all the fun part. It hurts, but I let the dream go on awhile longer.
“A week ago,” I say, “I liked you so much I would have wanted to try to make this work.” I swallow a jagged, fist-sized lump, but still my voice has to scrape by to get out. “But now I think I might love you too much for that.”
You might as well just shoot me
Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like . . . like everything will be okay.
“And what about my bloodlust?” His eyes go heavy as he smiles. “That,” he says, “might be my favorite thing. Be my shark, Stephens.” “Already was,” I say. “Always have been.” “I love you,” he says again. “I love you too.”
“For anyone who wants it all,” she begins, “may you find something that is more than enough.” She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations. She doesn’t know. You never can. She turns the page anyway.
