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Being in love was a private tyranny. “Rwror?” asked Cerberus. “Being in love,” Peggy explained, “is a private tyranny.”
Still be with someone who whirled her heart around like fallen leaves in autumn with their wildness and beauty?
“You look very debauched, mio principe.”
“Perhaps I am come to beg you not to ruin my sister. Take me instead.”
now I think of it, it must be that the deadly sins are my very favourites—
“Now are you quite sure you do wish to play rake and virgin with me? I perform both beautifully.”
“Oh. I would have come with you. I could have helped.” They hid what was clearly the most impish of smiles against her knee. “I was not in need of an orgy, tesoro mio.”
“It is different, though, to hold what I have earned. To know it is mine.”
“You know what else is yours?” “Mmm . . .” They considered the matter. “A severely overpriced hat I cannot recall purchasing?” “No.” “A coat of black sable gifted to me by Alexander I of Russia?” “No, but I’m going to have to see that.” “An unparalleled voice? Exquisite taste? Overwhelming beauty?” Orfeo paused, a hint of uncertainty in their manner at variance with their words. “Or perhaps you mean . . . you.” “I do mean me,” said Peggy. “How much do I owe you?” “For me? I think you’ll find I’m priceless.”
It is strange to talk of this.” “Surely it’s stranger not to?” “I begin to wonder how you’ve spent your time with your lovers.”
Peggy, who had been temporarily obliged to leave the bed, put her hands on her hips and struck a pose. “You like it?”
“You have met me, darling. I am always provocative.”
meeeee
“Sing for me.”
hot
I want you in ways I did not know it was possible to want. Fuck me, or be fucked by me, but—for the love of everything—let us fuck. Let us fuck the stars from the sky.”
They did not, in the end, fuck the stars from the sky. But—Peggy concluded—they did everything else.
“You need to stop making me want the impossible.” “I can’t help what you want.” “Then you need to make me stop believing in them.”
and then they’d talk until dawn in that foolish, nothing way that lovers did, their words as golden to each other as the first sunlight of the day.
“He’s beautiful and talented and . . . and special. And I’m a broken-down old prizefighter who thought he was too proud to take a fall and pissed away everything he ever earned.”
“Sometimes,” she told him, “loving someone is enough.”
You clearly have a talent for getting people out of prisons.”
“I have always felt fuck that is an underrated form of happiness. In fact, it might be my very favourite.”
Surreptitiously, she wiped her eyes with her beard.
incredible sentence
“Orfeo is not and could never be a sacrifice to me.”
flabbered of ghast, and smacked of gob.
politeness was at war with his politeness,
“We haven’t been to town for such a long time. I would love to disguise myself as a man and take in a dissection.”
prequel novella about peggy’s parents when?
His rage was a rotted log. Turn it over with a boot, and you’d find nothing but despair wriggling beneath.
“Do you not understand,” Valentine was asking Bonny, “that I, too, wish the world could work the way it does in books? Fiction makes sense; reality frequently doesn’t. But life cannot always be bent to the shape we would prefer it to take.”
It was probably for the best, Peggy told herself, that Bonny and Belle were growing up a little. Even if it also cost the world a little magic.
What matters is what you create, not that a rich man approves of how you create it.”
My cock is pristine and beautiful; you could eat your dinner off it.”
“I would promise you the moon and the tides, if you wanted them. I would cast aside my music with no backward glance and follow you into the underworld with nothing but joy in my heart.”
if this isn’t in my proposal speech to a partner i don’t yet have i won’t be saying yes
For her natural instinct towards caution to be treated as something to be honoured rather than something she had to be coaxed, cajoled, and chided through.
“Oh my God.” Bonny threw his arms wide in despair. “You people have no emotional stamina. You’d never survive in a novel.”
“You don’t have to stay. You just have to come back.”
“All I mean to say is, do not think too much upon Nicholas, for my life does not need a villain. It has a hero.”
Releasing Peggy’s hand, Valentine broke into a run and met Bonny halfway across the garden. They crashed into each other’s arms, like lovers united after some monumental parting, while the setting sun got in on the action by illuminating them extravagantly in shades of pink and gold.
i love them
selfish in all contexts but one.
Frankly, if I wait for your Italian, we may both be dead.
For all that the last time I beheld her, she looked like a disgruntled hedgehog. Does she still look like a disgruntled hedgehog?
