Sofie

“Rachel and I take seats and I hand the Walcott to Frederick. From the way he holds it this time, I’m almost certain it’s his, but he tells us, sadly, that it’s not. Even when the shop’s gone, I’ll keep looking, I tell him. He thanks me, and accepts the offer.

‘I think perhaps,’ he says, ‘it’s the looking that keeps her alive.”
― Cath Crowley

“I thought, this is the most incredible thing I have ever seen, and I had better keep it a safe distance away from me. I thought, if someone like that ever loved me, it would set me on fire.
And then I was a careless fool, and I fell in love with you anyway. When you rang me at truly shocking hours of the night, I loved you. When you kissed me in disgusting public toilets and pouted in hotel bars and made me happy in ways in which it had never even occurred to me that a mangled-up, locked-up person like me could be happy, I loved you.
And then, inexplicably, you had the absolute audacity to love me back. Can you believe it?
Sometimes, even now, I still can't.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“He changed us both." She seemed to struggle for words. "I think of you, all that you lost, who you were, what you were forced to be, and might have been, and I—I have become this, this person, unable to—"

She shut her mouth.

"Kestrel," he said softly, "I love this person.”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Kiss

“But Arin saw Kestrel as she had been last night before the ball. How her hair had been a spill of low light over his palms. He had threaded desire into the braids, had wanted her to sense it even as he dreaded that she would. He had met her eyes in the mirror and didn’t know, couldn’t tell, her feelings. He only knew the fire of his own.”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Curse