Amber Hetchler

“Look,” I began, “I get it. You don’t like me, but—”
“I don’t like you?”
He let out a low, flat laugh. One fell into the next, and it was awful—not at all him. He was half
choking on them as he turned around, shaking his head. It almost sounded like a sob, the way his
breath burst out of him.
“I don’t like you,” he repeated, his face bleak. “I don’t like you?”
“Liam—” I started, alarmed.
“I can’t—I can’t think about anything or anyone else,” he whispered. A hand drifted up, dragging
back through his hair. “I can’t think straight when you’re around. I can’t sleep. It feels like I can’t
breathe—I just—”
“Liam, please,” I begged. “You’re tired. You’re barely over being sick. Let’s just… Can we just
go back to the others?”
“I love you.” He turned toward me, that agonized expression still on his face. “I love you every
second of every day, and I don’t understand why, or how to make it stop—”
He looked wild with pain; it pinned me in place, even before what he had said registered in my
mind.
“I know it’s wrong; I know it down to my damn bones. And I feel like I’m sick. I’m trying to be a
good person, but I can’t. I can’t do it anymore.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade

“Bad men are never all bad, and good men are never all good, and it makes it hard to know up from down.”
― Rae Carson, Like a River Glorious

“I’ve come so far, but in some ways, I haven’t gone any distance. I’m still hiding from bad men. I’m still trying to figure how to make my own way, my own fortune.”
― Rae Carson, Like a River Glorious

“Scars are not shameful, not unless you let them be. If you do not wear them, they will wear you.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light