Bailee

“No way. I can’t stare at the walls of my crappy apartment for another day.”
― Melinda Leigh, Cross Her Heart

“I’ll be your family now,” he says.
“I love you,” I say.
I said that once, before I went to Erudite headquarters, but he was asleep then. I don’t know why I didn’t say it when he could hear it. Maybe I was afraid to trust him with something so personal as my devotion. Or afraid that I did not know what it was to love someone. But now I think the scary thing was not saying it before it was almost too late. Not saying it before it was almost too late for me.
I am his, and he is mine, and it has been that way all along.
He stares at me. I wait with my hands clutching his arms for stability as he considers his response.
He frowns at me. “Say it again.”
“Tobias,” I say, “I love you.”
His skin is slippery with water and he smells like sweat and my shirt sticks to his arms when he slides them around me. He presses his face to my neck and kisses me right above the collarbone, kisses my cheek, kisses my lips.
“I love you, too,” he says.”
― Veronica Roth, Insurgent

“And my parents made me want i am. So what? We get stuff from our parents, but we also get stuff from the world around us. From people around us. And at the end of the day, we're us.”
― Barry Lyga, I Hunt Killers

“He pushed my back against the stall door, kissing me. Edward had tried kissing me, but I'd been so shocked I'd barely had time to explore how it felt. Lucy had told me stories of shady corners and sweaty palms. But this was passionate. Wild. Something I'd never known.
"Have you kissed a girl before?" I whispered. He ran his thumb over my cheek. His eyes lingered on my lips.
"Yes," he said. I thought of Alice, her pretty blonde hair, the split lip that made her so vulnerable. But it wasn't her name he said.
"A woman at the docks in Brisbane. She didn't mean anything. I was lonely. It wasn't love." A prostitute, he meant.”
― Megan Shepherd, The Madman's Daughter