Carolien Westerveld

“You put in expired contacts?” He sounded personally offended
“Just a little expired.”
“What’s ‘a little’?”
“I don’t know. A few years?”
“What?” His consonants were sharp and precise. Crisp. Pleasant.
“Only a couple, I think.”
“Just a couple of years?”
“It’s okay. Expiration dates are for the weak.”
A sharp sound - some kind of snort. “Expiration dates are so I don’t find you weeping in the corner of my bathroom.”
Unless this dude was Mr. Stanford himself, he really needed to stop calling it his bathroom.”
― Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis

“if academia ever makes you feel like you’re not good or smart enough . . . it’s not you, it’s academia.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain

“I know what she smells like. This little freckle on her neck when she pulls up her hair. Her upper lip is a little plumper than the lower. The curve of her wrist, when she holds a pen. It’s wrong, really wrong, but I know the shape of her. I go to sleep thinking about it, and then I wake up, go to work, and she is there, and it’s impossible. I tell her stuff I know she’ll agree to, just to hear her hum back at me. It’s like hot water down my fucking spine. She’s married. She’s brilliant. She trusts me, and all I think about is taking her to my office, stripping her, doing unspeakable things to her. And I want to tell her. I want to tell her that she’s luminous, she’s so bright in my mind, sometimes I can’t focus. Sometimes I forget why I came into the room. I’m distracted. I want to push her against a wall, and I want her to push back. I want to go back in time and punch her stupid husband on the day I met him and then travel back to the future and punch him again. I want to buy her flowers, food, books. I want to hold her hand, and I want to lock her in my bedroom. She’s everything I ever wanted and I want to inject her into my veins and also to never see her again. There’s nothing like her and these feelings, they are fucking intolerable. They were half-asleep while she was gone, but now she’s here and my body thinks it’s a fucking teenager and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. There is nothing I can do, so I’ll just . . . not.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain