Sam

“Where was I supposed to hold all this so-called love? [...] How was I to receive it when my hands were already occupied with carrying so much shame?”
― Madeleine Roux, What If... Loki Was Worthy?

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“They had never defined what their "thing" was, exactly. Tony did whatever he wanted, and Pepper did the same, and all the while an unspoken decision to wait for each other lingered between them. Star-crossed but terminally overbooked, the threat of monogamy but not the call to it. Not yet.”
― Madeleine Roux, What If... Loki Was Worthy?

“Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. Here was peace.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God