Things We Hide from the Light (Knockemout, #2)

by Lucy Score

Everyone was alive and breathing. Everyone but me. I was just pretending.

“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?”

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.”

“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.”

Something that was as essential to me as oxygen. Honesty.

“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.”

I’d spent my entire adult life proving I was invincible, capable, independent.

“Nobody is good at it at first. No one has a natural talent for being in a relationship. Everyone has to learn how to be good at it. It takes a lot of practice and forgiveness and vulnerability.”

you have to find a relationship where you can be yourself and make sure your needs are met.”

Be ready at 7. Wear something that makes it hard for me to stop thinking about what you’ve got on underneath.

The real good shit doesn’t start until those bricks come down and you invite someone in. If you’re not scared shitless, you’re doin’ it wrong.”

You don’t let everyone in. Only the ones who matter. The ones you want to trust. The ones you want to let you in. That vulnerability shit is just like respect. It’s earned.”

Everything I thought I wanted was just me trying to protect myself from really living. Like pushing people away,”

I loved her. I wasn’t using her as some crutch to avoid the world. She was reintroducing it to me one experience at a time.

My heart belonged to this woman and I was going to go buy her the biggest fucking ring I could find.