Whitney

“The look he gives me makes me wonder if I’m in trouble. “I thought you were going out.”

“I wanted to come back and say I’m sorry,” I tell him, and I put my arms around his waist and hug. “You shut the door in a way that made me sad, and I wanted to tell you that I’m going to do better.”

“Do better at what? How’d I shut the door?” His other arm wraps around my shoulders. He crosses his feet behind my heels, and now his entire body is hugging me. Warm, soft, hard. I thought my mattress was heaven, but that’s before I laid myself on this person. How am I going to ever peel myself off?

I inhale his birthday-candle pheromones. I want to know what his goddamn bones smell like. Let me start down in his DNA structure and work my way back out. I speak into his muscles. “You shut the door like you’ve just accepted that I don’t come back. I’m going to start being like you. Completely, one hundred percent honest.” I hover on the precipice and decide to try. “This is the best hug of my life.”
― Sally Thorne, 99 Percent Mine

“He has the kind of density that makes me constantly guess to myself how much he’d weigh. Does muscle weigh more than fat? He’s a ton. He’s six-six, and I watched him get this tall, but it’s a surprise every time I see him. It’s the body you see on first responders. Think big-ass firemen kicking in doors, ready to save you.

“How do you cope with a skeleton that big?” I ask, and he looks down at himself, mystified. “I mean, how do you coordinate all four limbs and actually ambulate around the place?”

My eyes are back on his shoulders, following the round lines down, the flat sections, the dips and shadowed lines, the creases on the cotton. I can see his belt, which doesn’t know how lucky it is to be strapped around that, and a lush half inch of black underwear waistband, and my cheeks are burning and I can hear my heart and—

“Eyes up, DB.” He’s busted me. Not that I was very subtle. “Me and my skeleton getaround just fine.”
― Sally Thorne, 99 Percent Mine

“That's the point of it, Bryce. Of life. To live, to love, knowing that it might all vanish tomorrow. It makes everything that much more precious.”
― Sarah J. Maas, House of Earth and Blood

“Message me when you're home safe. Bryce began typing. The answer it had taken her two years, nearly to the day, to write. I'm home.”
― Sarah J. Maas, House of Earth and Blood