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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brit Benson
Read between
January 24 - January 25, 2025
His blue eyes are fire on my skin,
“I was hoping you’d come,”
“It’s for you,” I confess, and she stills. “Because I was homesick for you. Because the only decision I’ve ever made in this life that I’m sure of was being selfish for you.”
“I’m an addict, Astraea. I don’t know how to do anything small. I feel intensely. I want intensely. I crave intensely. For me, if it’s not a healthy obsession, it’s not love.” There’s that word again. Love.
With the other, I rest my palm on her thigh, right over the small, raised scars.
Im crying
“What are these, Astraea?”
I skip a shower. I don’t want to wash her off of me just yet.
“I just found out that you’re the reason I was sent to England early.” Macon freezes.
“that day, when I was sobbing and calling for you, begging to say goodbye, you were upstairs the whole time.”
“I was pregnant, Macon.”
“No,” I whisper. “That decision was taken from me, too.”
I spent the last half drowning in grief so thick, I didn’t recognize it until years later.
Astraea.
“He put it in your suitcase,” Claire says. “I...I took it out. I was going to give it back when you came home after the summer. I never read it. I just—”
up, I start to cry all over again. It’s a sketch of me.
you’re an ocean away from me.
That memory is going to fuel my recovery, Astraea,
Don’t give up on me, Astraea.
Out loud. Forever. I love you,
his hair pulled back by a pink butterfly clip.
The fucking clip
Me and Lennon, for real and out loud.
“I’m in love with your daughter, Trent.”
“And because no one will ever love Lennon the way I do. I love all of her. Even the parts that she doesn’t show the world.”
She was pregnant. With our baby.
begged her for answers. I was so desperate.”
I’ve accomplished, has been tainted by this bone-deep need to recover from being betrayed
I’m tired of pretending it hasn’t always been you.”
“It’s not your fault,”
“It’s no one’s fault,”
“What is this feeling? I feel like I’m drowning. Like I’m suffocating and you’re my oxygen.”
think it’s love.” I feel him smirk. “You get used to it.” Love. I think it’s love. “I love you, Macon Davis.”
“I’ve loved you since I was seventeen. I never stopped.”
The Virgo constellation and the clock with the paintbrush hands just over his heart.
Astraea,”
think I need to draw you like this.
when Macon and I get married—because we will—you’ll be invited only so you can sit in the audience and watch a love that you tried so hard to kill thrive, and I hope you feel insignificant. I hope you feel like a failure. You tried to hurt me, Claire, but in the end, all you did was hurt yourself.”
She’s my Lennon, again. My Astraea.
My left side wasn’t unlucky. It was just waiting for Lennon. She heals my hurts. She strengthens me. I’m so stupidly in love with her.
“You’re my home, Astraea.”
the next life
“This life. The next life. Every life after that. I will love you in all of them, Lennon Capri. It doesn’t matter who you become or how you change. My soul will always belong to yours.”
in this life and all the rest of them.
