thegreatmanda's Reviews (459)

When you're treated badly for too long you begin to fear you aren't worth being treated any other way, that no one will see you as something to cherish. It wasn't true or right, but I'd still found it a hard notion to shake.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about what you should have done. Just do what’s right for you now.” 

"The man who cleans windows deserves a bit of pleasure in his life just as much as the man who owns them."

Ross named a price. Maud winced. Hawthorn named a much lower one. Ross called Hawthorn an inbred skinflint arsehole, pointed out that he was including the suitcase, and lowered his own price by an infinitesimal margin. Hawthorn, wearing the same expression he'd directed at the chessboard, called Ross a bloodsucking Mediterranean gutter-rat.

Violet had been neglecting her strumpetly duties when it came to Lord Albert. She had no idea how really promiscuous women kept strings of lovers all at one time. Surely one would need vast organizational skills, or a secretary.

A pause, in which the table warily weighed the question of whether Lord Hawthorn was familiar with the concept of humour.

"You have a real knack for beating people around the head with the truth like it's an umbrella, did you know that?"

"It is rather a lot to tell," she said. "But I suppose I should start with the parrot."

Thankfully, I'd emerged from the womb serving manic pixie dream queer.

"It will never be anything like you thought it would. But that's okay. And it's also okay if you decide it's not what you want."

And wasn't that a whiskey sour of an emotional cocktail? Being smug and hopeful and bitter and sad all at the same time. Which so wasn't me. I was a strawberry daiquiri boy, through and through.

"Don't worry about it. I thought it might be funny, but it just turned out stupid. Story of my life, really."

"But sometimes I get so fucking claustrophobic, like I'm in prison, except what I'm stuck inside is me."

"And," I went on, "I will always love you—"
Nik, in the fashion of most tragically heterosexual men, wasn't very good at emotions. Even when he needed them. He blushed. "So gay."
"So gay," I agreed, laughing. "Although I heard there's been some new legislation, so now the straights are allowed to have feelings too."

"And I know you say you've changed, and probably you have, but when it comes down to the colours of your dreams, and whatever makes your heart fly, and the things that really matter, you always get to choose."
"Choose what?"
"What you take with you and what you leave behind." I let out a shaky breath. "Because that's all change is."

His teeth scraped my earlobe. "I don't need to spank you to own you, Arden."

"Love isn't earned, Caspian. It's given."

It was actually shaping up to be a fairly nice evening. Not exactly warm because, y'know, England, but the sky was swirly blue and a pale silver orb was hanging in it. I'd seen pictures of such a thing on the internet and I think it was the sun.

I don't know why you have to sit so close when we work, and watch me the way you do, if you're not going to reach for me.

But there was still a kernel of him that was a desperate, lost, hungry thing, and no matter how hard he tried to starve it out, it was always there, poking its head out at a sniff of affection, howling for more, making him hopeful and vulnerable and stupid.

"I don't want goodbyes is the sort of thing Luke says, but it's not what he means."
This was the kind of thing that left Rufus, a straightforward man, hopelessly adrift. "Because he means instead—?"
"He means, I'm scared you don't care, so I'm not giving you a chance to prove it," Emily said. "He's that way, Luke. Aunt Sybil says he's hard to love but it's not true. What's hard is making him see it when you do, because he's already decided you don't."

"My Doomsday. The end of my world."

The touch of his hands, the wonder in his eyes, the astonishing sense of familiarity, as though he and Gareth had somehow slipped past one another all their lives and their meeting was long overdue.

"God, I'm sorry, Joss. You have quite enough on your plate without me piling all this on you."
"I've plenty. Only that plate's a trencher I share with my family and my people and most of the Marsh." He put a careful hand to Gareth's face. "Whereas with you, that's just for me."
Gareth's lips rounded. "I...I would like to be just for you."
That got into Joss's lungs like Marsh mist, making it oddly hard to breathe.

"I love your hair."
"I like yours. Would you wear it longer, ever?"
Gareth had kept it in an unexuberant Brutus for some years. Uncle Henry had not encouraged poetical indulgences in his clerks' appearances. "I hadn't thought of doing so. Would you like it longer?"
"It's your head. But I do like something to get hold of."
He was growing it out, Gareth decided, starting now.

His only human encounter was with Pagan d'Aumesty, one of the Earl of Oxney's more peculiar relatives, who was wandering along High Knock Channel poking vaguely at the sides of the stream with a stick.
Gareth halted. "Good morning, sir."
"Eh? Oh. You're, uh..."
"Gareth Inglis. I came to tea with the Earl in March."
"No. No, that's not it."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I'll have it in a minute. Let me see, you are—"
"Gareth Inglis," Gareth said with extreme clarity.
"Ah, I have it! You are Gareth Inglis," Pagan informed him. "Are you looking for your father? He's just around here, I believe."
"I...I'm afraid he's dead, sir."
"Just around here." Pagan gestured in the vague direction of the Isle. "I saw him—now, was it today?"
"No, because he's dead?" Somehow that had become a question. "He's dead," Gareth repeated more firmly. "He's been dead for months."
"Are you sure?"
Gareth dug his fingernails into his palm against the wholly inappropriate laugh that wanted to bubble up. "Quite sure, yes."
"Hmph. That seems very odd of him."
"I do apologise," Gareth said hopelessly.
"We had been discussing my researches. I wanted to tell him about the progress of the project. I wondered why he had not visited." There was a distinct suggestion that Sir Hugo's death was insufficient excuse. "Really, it is most inconvenient. I wished him to assist in illustrating my theory."
"What theory is that, sir?" Gareth asked, out of politeness that he was very rapidly to regret, and then stood subject to ten minutes of monologue on Romano-British Mithraic mysteries before he was forced to remember an urgent appointment.

He pushed his face into Joss's hair. "I feel right here. I feel right with you."

"What's happened to you?"
"You," Joss said simply, and kissed him.

He couldn't describe the heart-stopping magic of it. The man he'd just met, the one he hadn't known he'd been looking for, right there in front of him.

"It's stupid how I love you. Baronet, for mercy's sake. I've got no business loving you, and I can't seem to do a blessed thing else."

"I won't lie," Joss went on inaccurately.

"I said I wouldn't leave you," Joss said. "I won't. Not till you make me, and you'll have to try middling hard on that."

1. Therapy. He can easily afford it. He literally threatens to drag his sister to therapy by her hair at one point. There's no excuse for his shit.
2. To educate himself about BDSM and its central tenets of SSC (Safe, Sane, Consensual) and RACK (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) and let go of his ridiculous shame about his very, very normal preferences.
3. To get over himself. Does he think he’s the only person who’s ever been through whatever this dark stuff is that he’s been through? Can he grow some listening skills and stop assuming Arden is just saying what he wants to hear?

I shoved through the front door of Hart & Associates—which didn't go as well as I might have hoped because it was revolving, and I had a hard enough time getting through those things when I was completely compos mentis—and then went plunging across the foyer.

"That's all ambition is. A fire that burns in empty places."

My living arrangements in Oxford had been highly prestigious in student terms, and guests had often come by to point and gasp at our genuinely nice sofa, but they'd still amounted to three rooms and a kitchenette I was sharing with another guy.

Robin felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire, which was crackling away within a deep tiled recess. Edwin's wry, professorial humour was something that Robin didn't think many people were allowed to see.

Robin felt foolish enough that he contemplated upsetting the teapot as a diversion.

You look like a Turner painting and I want to learn your textures with my fingertips. You are the most fascinating thing in this beautiful house. I'd like to introduce my fists to whoever taught you to stop talking about the things that interest you.

A chauffeur was not needed. Robin referred vaguely to friends of his who owned motorcars and had taught him the knack of it in Hyde Park—"Though the speed limit's only ten miles to the hour, in the Park. And it's twice that in the country! This should be a lark."
Edwin, who wished Robin had betrayed this boyish and limb-threatening enthusiasm before they'd pulled out onto the road proper, pulled his hat more firmly down onto his head and fiddled with his cradling string, trying to remember if he'd ever read anything about how to unbreak a broken skull.

Robin held Edwin in the cradle of his fingers like a spell that would snap into nothing unless handled with care.

It was the way he felt watching Edwin read; it was the feeling he had every time his eyes sought Edwin in a room and landed on any angle of the man's face, any movement of those delicate fingers:  There you are. I've been waiting for you.

Robin said, very quiet, "Tell me to stay, stay for you, and I will."

Always, with Edwin, that surprise. The wariness. The vivid expectation of abandonment; the bone-deep resignation to the fact that he would lose the things he wanted, or else never deserved them in the first place.

Robin wanted to make a leather-bound book of his belief and hand it to Edwin, make him read it over and over until Edwin could look in a mirror and see something of what Robin saw.

In the jubilant flare of the candlelight he was the loveliest thing Robin had ever seen.

We've been talking for less than five minutes and I already want to stick his pencil up his nose.

I step forward like a deer stepping in front of another deer in the mistaken belief it's immune to being hit by cars.

Jonathan recoils slightly. "That is..." Being nice doesn't come easy to Jonathan Forest, but being nice about Gollum doesn't come easy to anybody. "an interesting-looking pet," he finishes.

Jonathan's face is absolutely thunderous. It's like he wants to fire everyone in the room but can't because they're his family and that's not how it works.

I find him in pets looking at cat treats. And when he spots me, he gets this expression on his face like I caught him with porn.

"I know you're being sarcastic, but I do. I do see you."
He folds his arms, leaning slightly away from me. "And what is it you think you see?"
"I see someone driven and ambitious who's been told those are bad things when they're not. I see someone who cares but doesn't know how to show it. I see someone who thinks he's got to be alone, so he pretends it's a choice." I stand up before he can object or reply or anything. "Also, you're surprisingly good with cats."

"You've come into my life like a beam of very annoying sunshine. You talk so much that I miss it when you're not. You try to fix things I didn't even realise were broken. You have a dreadful sense of humour to which I've somehow become habituated. You care about people so effortlessly it makes me able to put up with them. And then you kissed me and now I..." He lets his head slip further down into his hands. "...I don't know how I'm supposed to go the rest of my life without being kissed by you again."

"I don't want it if I can't have it with you."

"Yeah."
"Good."
We both continue to be shit at telephones.
"So, I suppose..." he tries.
We both continue to be extremely shit at telephones.

"How tiny?"
I put my fingers about half a centimetre apart.
"I'm not sure that's medically useful."
I inch them slightly further apart.
"Still not."
Giving up the fingers method as a bad job, I explain using my mouth words.