thegreatmanda's Reviews (459)

We should have made castles while we still had the chance.

"People don't want to hurt each other; it's just sometimes they forget."

Even when I was a child I hadn't been inclined to splosh about. Seen, not heard, hungry for my parents' love, and always on my best behaviour, it would simply not have occurred to me that it was the sort of thing you could take pleasure in.

Maybe loving things as they deserved to be loved just wasn't my forte.

So much for nobody to judge me. I was here, after all.

This was unending. Like I was in my own personal circle of hell: just my mother being helpful, over and over again, until I begged to be set on fire and transferred to Satan's arsehole.

We kissed like we didn't know better. Like we'd never known fear or hurt of self-destruction. Like there was nothing in the world but kissing. Not even sex. Not even tomorrow.

Can't barely scratched the surface of the nothing that had rooted itself inside me, spreading like knotweed in some once-blooming garden.

"A lot of art is created from affliction. We've covered this."
His thumb settled, warm and certain, in the centre of my palm. "Well, maybe yours isn't. Maybe you just need to let yourself be hurt right now."

The blue-grey river, still ice dappled, the soft rucking of the water, creased like sheets between a lover's fingers, to mark our passage. Behind us, transient arrows left upon the surface fading into nothing but dreams and stillness. And everything else—the promise of sky. Endless, unreachable light.

I should have been used to this too. His boldness and his candour. The way he spread his love before me like a picnic blanket—when Marius's had always been a treasure hunt, signs and signals, whispers in the dark, flickers of gold in the dust.

So many things mattered about Kim. The way his deep brown eyes lit when he smiled, the intense concentration he brought to work or to bed. How he had made undrinkably weak tea for Will just once, watched him make his own with catlike attention, and got it spoon-dissolvingly perfect ever since. There were so many tiny wisping moments of trust and truth and vulnerability that had slowly become something real and solid between them, and Will didn't want it to slip through his fingers. Not again.

"So beautiful," he whispered. "Perfect. When you give yourself up to me."
"All yours. Every bit."

"A future. You know the concept? The shape you want the rest of your life to take? I want mine with you, all of it. A future, a forever. I love you." He said it quite calmly, as if it was an established fact. "People say I love you to madness, but I love you to sanity, because loving you is the sanest thing I have ever done. You are everything to me, Will, and I cannot lose you to my miserable family and an accident of birth."

"You treated me, against all the evidence, as if I were something resembling the man I ought to be, with such pertinacious obstinacy I have all but started to believe it myself."

Maybe all he could do was be the port in Kim's storm, but that was what he'd do, for as long as it took.

Kim was a bloody twisting slippery weasel liar, and Will had to hold back a savage grin of pride.

"I didn't do anything."
"You stayed," Kim said. "You loved me. You watched me, which obliged me to behave as the man I'd like to be, rather than the less impressive one I often am. I don't like it when you're not there either, Will. I'm better with you."
"Good thing I'm not going anywhere." He grabbed Kim's hand, not caring if anyone saw. "And you are exactly the man I want you to be. You always have been. The last knight."

It was absurd that the pulsebeat of desire was as strong as ever. It was absurd that Kim was looking at him now with something raw and painful in his eyes after buggering off for two bloody months. It was absurd that Will couldn't look away.

"It wasn't over." Kim stated the words like an axiom. "Not for me. I'd have left it alone if you had the common sense to move on. Or if I had a scrap of decency, of course."

"You're so busy torturing yourself for your sins, you don't even notice how much you're hurting other people."

He wished he had words for what Kim was, the aching pain and the starlight, the beauty and the ugliness.

Kim stared at him, eyes wide, and Will didn’t even think. He just kissed him, hard, and felt Kim’s mouth responding desperately, hands clutching his shoulders, hanging on for dear life. Kissing in the open because nothing at all mattered at this moment but to know they were together. The rest could wait for later, if there was a later.

"All right, tell me about it."
"Which part?"
"All of it. Start with a shifty character walking into your bookshop last November. Not this one," he added, indicating Kim. "The other one."

Robin sat and listened to music for several hours, and was disappointed to learn that only forty minutes had passed on the clock.

"You make it so easy," Hart whispered, because his throat was closing. "How is all this so easy for you?"

"This isn't a contest," Robin said gently. "If it hurts, it hurts."

"You did what nobody has done for me in my whole life. You saw I needed defending, and you fought."

"I had no idea my life had enough room for anything so bright and warm and free as you."

“I will always come back to you. Always. Even if I have to drag myself out of the grave to do it.”

Harry holds up his hands, palms toward Rabbie, with a calm expression on his face. "I remember Lord Montagu once telling me that a cage was the safest way to transport a prisoner. Perhaps we have more in common with our French cousins than we thought."

Lives are lived and lost in “almost.”

“People who can’t change aren’t really perfect, and no matter how much we love it somewhere, that doesn’t mean it’s good for us,” said Sumi.

"This isn't my world, not really. It was hers, and she never existed anyway, and so I'm not staying here."

“People who’ve been hurt often think they have some sort of right to go around hurting other people,” said Sumi. “They think trauma’s a toy to keep handing down forever. But the fact that someone hurt you and tied you up in knots doesn’t give you the right to do it to anybody else. I’m a formerly dead girl made of gingerbread and hope, and even I can see that.”

When had anything in my life really been my choice? I wanted this to be.

When I was younger, I used to watch videos online about building, then did what the videos taught, hoping it would make my dad relate to me more.

"What? I'm shocked. I didn't expect you to be one of those guys."
"One of what guys? There are hot men on Instagram! I follow a lot of them. There are butts there, Gideon. Lots and lots of butts."

He cocked his head, then shook it. "You can't do that. If we're going to be friends, you can't try to protect me from the world. Even if I screw up or freak out, you have to give me that. I can't be friends with someone who thinks I need them to shelter me from just the possibility of an uncomfortable situation. That means you're treating me differently than you would someone else, and I don't want that. Ever."

"Good point. I was being a big baby and feeling sorry for myself, and then I came home and talked to you, and it all feels really fucking trivial."
"It might be, but that doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel it. I read a lot about people and emotions because it's so damn confusing. Even if it's not logical, feelings are valid."

"If I knew the future, if I knew Gideon would shatter my world and there was nothing I could do to change it, I would still be with him. Not because I'm a glutton for punishment, but because I don't want my life to be so carefully curated with what-ifs that I don't live. And that's tough for me. My brain, logic, tell me that's stupid, but sometimes in here wins out." I rubbed a hand over my chest. "And I want it to win with this."

I let loose another chuckle. "What am I going to do with you?"
"Love me, laugh with me, have sex with me"

Something odd crossed Price's face. He turned his gaze to the window, looking out of it a little desperately. As if through bars. As if he were caged.

He'd been apprenticed to a joiner before the war, but that felt like decades ago: all he was good at now was killing people, which was discouraged.

"What I say is, one can be as moral as one likes but one should have the courtesy to do it in private, like any other bad habit."

He looked smart and well groomed and rich, and his eyes were as raw and lonely and full of wishes as Will felt.

"You're a bit of a mess, aren't you?"
"My friend, you have no idea."

"What do you want to talk about?"
"I don't know. The football results? Politics. The pictures. Why the blazes you're called Kim when your name is Arthur."
"My name, since you raise the topic, is Arthur Aloysius Kimberley de Brabazon Secretan. What would you do in my place?"
"Leave the country," Will said wholeheartedly. "You poor bastard, you never stood a chance."