Astrid

“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

“Everything died, but pieces of it remained. Dad was in the wind because he breathed the same air that I breathed. Dad was a mark in history becuase he existed. He was part of my future because I still carried on.”
― Ashley Poston, The Dead Romantics

“If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“I like no one, absolutely no one, but I liked you from the start. I liked you when I didn’t know you, and now that I do know you it’s only gotten worse. Sometimes, often, always, I think about you before falling asleep. Then I dream of you, and when I wake up my head’s still there, stuck on something funny, beautiful, filthy, intelligent that’s all about you. It’s been going on for a while, longer than you think, longer than you can imagine, and I should have told you, but I have this impression, this certainty that you’re half a second from running away, that I should give you enough reasons to stay. Is there anything I can do for you? I’ll take you grocery shopping and fill your fridge when we’re back home. Buy you a new bike and a case of decent reagent and that sludge you drink. Kill the people who made you cry. Is there something you need? Name it. It’s yours. If I have it, it’s yours.”
― Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis