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Everyone was alive and breathing. Everyone but me. I was just pretending.
But part of me had died in that ditch that night, and what was left didn’t seem like it was worth fighting for.
“Small towns are where busy professional women get seduced by a rough-around-the-edges local business owner. Ooh! Or a sheriff. Have you met the sheriff yet?”
“Your gun is digging into me.” “That’s not my gun,” I said through clenched teeth. Her mouth curved wickedly. “I know.” “Then stop moving.”
“You know what no one tells you about standing in the middle of a pissing contest?” Cherry said to me with a toss of her blond curls. “What’s that?” I asked. “You’re the one who ends up smelling like pee.”
“Feel like I’ve been waiting for Daze and Way my entire life. I’d go to the courthouse tonight if I could talk them into it.”
“God, yes. Why do you look so happy? Are you delirious?” “I think so. Jeremiah gave me a sweat towel.” “Nash gave me his water. Are we as pathetic as I think we are?” “Oh, much worse,” Stef insisted.
I hated myself. Hated the weakness. The lack of control. Hated the thought that this was all in my head. That it could happen anywhere. I couldn’t do my job if I was curled into a fucking ball on the ground. Couldn’t protect this town if I couldn’t even protect myself from the monsters in my own fucking head.
“I moved on, but my parents didn’t. I guess there’s something about seeing your only child nearly die in front of your eyes that changes a parent. So they worry. Still. Chalk that one up in the Things We Never Got Over column.”
Whenever you’re close, everything is better. The closer you are, the easier I breathe, the less I feel like life is just a never-ending pour of lemon juice into an open wound that won’t heal. You take away the dark, the cold. And you remind me what it’s like to want to be here.”
“Well, for one thing, them cop pants looked mighty fine on that man’s ass.” Tina Witt might have been a horrible human being, but she was not wrong on that particular point.
“I just wish I woulda kept trying to look to the light instead of sinking into the dark,” he said. “A man can learn to live in that dark, but it’s no life.”
“Being vulnerable doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means you trust yourself to be strong enough to handle the hurt. It’s actually the purest form of strength.”
