Lara

“Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“Nora Stephens,” he says, “I’ve racked my brain and this is the best I can come up with, so I really hope you like it.”
His gaze lifts, everything about it, about his face, about his posture, about him made up of sharp edges and jagged bits and shadows, all of it familiar, all of it perfect. Not for someone else, maybe, but for me.
“I move back to New York,” he says. “I get another editing job, or maybe take up agenting, or try writing again. You work your way up at Loggia, and we’re both busy all the time, and down in Sunshine Falls, Libby runs the local business she saved, and my parents spoil your nieces like the grandkids they so desperately want, and Brendan probably doesn’t get much better at fishing, but he gets to relax and even take paid vacations with your sister and their kids. And you and I—we go out to dinner.
“Wherever you want, whenever you want. We have a lot of fun being city people, and we’re happy. You let me love you as much as I know I can, for as long as I know I can, and you have it fucking all. That’s it. That’s the best I could come up with, and I really fucking hope you say—”
I kiss him then, like there isn’t someone reading one of the Bridgerton novels five feet away, like we’ve just found each other on a deserted island after months apart. My hands in his hair, my tongue catching on his teeth, his palms sliding around behind me and squeezing me to him in the most thoroughly public groping we’ve managed yet.
“I love you, Nora,” he says when we pull apart a few inches to breathe. “I think I love everything about you.”
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers

“And in the end, do you ever truly know for sure if you’re lovable?
What a question.
You don’t. You can’t. Of course not.
Life never hands out the answers like that.
But maybe that’s not even the right question.
Maybe love isn’t the judgment you render—but a chance you take. Maybe it’s something you choose to do—over and over.
For yourself. And everyone else.
Because love isn’t fame. It’s not something other people bestow on you. It’s not something that comes from the outside.
Love is something you do.
Love is something you generate.
And loving other people really does turn out, in the end, to be a genuine way of loving yourself,”
― Katherine Center, The Bodyguard

“The real villain is love: an unstable isotope, constantly undergoing spontaneous nuclear decay. And it will forever go unpunished.”
― Ali Hazelwood, Love on the Brain