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She felt a ludicrous pang of disappointment. Firstly, that she had squeaked. Secondly, that she hadn’t seized the opportunity to say Fuck.
Being in an enclosed space with the buoyant energy contained in the skin of Maud Blyth was like standing uncomfortably close to a fire.
Violet’s heart gave another curious thud, then subsided, as if to tell her that there was no use to it reacting every time Maud Blyth did something rash.
Ross called Hawthorn an inbred skinflint arsehole, pointed out that he was including the suitcase, and lowered his own price by an infinitesimal margin. Hawthorn, wearing the same expression he’d directed at the chessboard, called Ross a bloodsucking Mediterranean gutter-rat.
Their book is gonna be SO fun
Hawthorn raised a single eyebrow. A breathless silence hung over them. “You can all go and fuck yourselves,” he said.
I love you
If Violet kissed her, she would die. If Violet didn’t kiss her, she would die.
that no single act was an agreement to any others. A kiss was a kiss alone, until the next kiss was bestowed.
“Because when you’re in a room I don’t want to look anywhere else.”
The final kiss was one that Maud had been deliberately allowed to see. Robin, laughing at something Edwin said, then crossing the room to bend down and lower the top edge of Edwin’s book—and to kiss him while smiling, with the ease that said he’d done it a hundred times before, and the confidence that said he wasn’t ashamed. There had been more emotion in the brief press of Edwin’s fingertips to Robin’s jaw, his sharp blue eyes falling closed, than in an operatic aria.
Undressing another girl when you knew that what was beneath was for you was probably the best thing in the world,
you look at the world and decide you can live with it or decide you can’t. And if you can’t, you decide what you’re prepared to do about it.”
“You’re right to worry about silence,” said Mrs. Navenby. “It’s when you don’t hear a peep out of children for an hour that you discover they’ve dug a moat in your rhododendron patch or decided to render the Bayeux Tapestry in wax crayon on the wall.”
“Maud?” Violet sounded guttural with horror. “What have you— You leave her alone. I will slit your fucking throat.”
He stalked across the room—narrowly avoiding Chapman and the furniture—and turned Maud’s face in his hands, somewhere between clinical and avuncular, frowning down at the split lip. “Maud Blyth. You are a terror and you should not be allowed to run loose in the world.”
Now you have two big brothers, Maud
I have to create myself every day, with every choice I make, then I want to make the choices I won’t regret when I look back on my life at its end.”
The person I could be with you is a person I still barely recognise. There are no layers to her, and that scares me. Even though I trust you—even though it feels like coming home, like setting down a weight—it scares me.
I’d still want to spend time with you, even if you never touched me again.” I couldn’t, Violet wanted to say. One of us would have to move across an ocean.
Nobody has ever taken me seriously the way you have, or made me feel so alive.
He looked at Edwin as though this slim, unremarkable man was everything he could imagine wanting.
