Status Updates From Kissing Comfort

He smiled his guarded, secretive smile and touched it to Comfort’s hair again. It was her smile anyway, the one she owned because she knew how to ease it out of him.

He’s always at his most sincere when he’s lying through his teeth.

We’ve got so many rooms that if I don’t visit them once a month, I forget they’re there.

And yes, Comfort confirmed she was 16 at her coming out party. So they are 7 years apart in age.

Romantic. The collision of passion and recklessness.

Pinkerton men don’t settle disputes; we often enforce the settlement.

The crew is fearful the mechanics of the steam plant will fail them. When nature denies them good wind or calm seas, they might curse the heavens, but they accept it. When a fly wheel fails to turn or a boiler ruptures, they want to find the inventor and flay him alive.

Ridiculous ideas can always be put to the side, but not entertaining them is reckless. Sometimes they’re the genesis of a better idea.

It’s only difficult if you decide it is. Decide that it’s not.

The seven years’ difference in their ages …

(So I did calculate correctly before …)

(Previously, I thought Bode was 5 years older than Comfort. He was 23 during her coming out party … which I thought would have been at 18. But come-outs are at 16? So a sweet 16?)

It wasn’t worth her time lamenting what couldn’t be changed when every consideration needed to be given to what could.

Now you’re saying we’re flowers. If I had my druthers, I druther be a biscuit.

men had every advantage and women had every consequence

That’s Bram’s smile. The one he uses when he knows he’s been naughty and is about to be forgiven anyway.

It was my smile before it was Bram’s …

… misdirection is easier to see when you’re not the one being misdirected.

The contraption that kept Bram’s leg raised off the bed reminded Sam of a ship’s windlass, and he supposed the comparison was close enough. Bram’s splintered leg hung in the air as still and heavy as an anchor hoisted up from the sea.

It was not as easy to know about the matter of self-deception. What did anyone ever discover by peeling back the layers of that onion except more tears and more onion?

Never thought much of your carpentry skills, but you hit that nail square.

… tried to remember she was no longer five, but twenty-five. The need not to disappoint them, though, was still the same.

Outside of his brother’s hearing, Bram did not often miss an opportunity to pronounce Bode the devil incarnate.

Newt and Tuck like Terra firma, they would say. They have long since recognized the contrariness of making San Francisco home, but they … prefer shifting land to shifting seas.

Comfort learned the difference between the moans they made when they lay with a man and the moans they made when a man laid them out.

Newt Prescott and Tucker Jones came to banking the way a bear comes to be trapped in a pit. They fell into it on their way to somewhere else. Unlike the bear, they didn’t try to get out. Once they understood their good fortune, they worked hard to make certain they’d earned it.

Spindrift: sea spray; fine wind-borne snow or sand

Bode: Are you always so forthright?

Comfort: no. No one is any one thing always.

~~~~~

Bode: You’ll be careful?

Comfort: I always am.

Bode: No one is any one thing always.

Comfort: I’ve heard that also.

I review the city papers … so I can follow up on the important stories. News out of the legislature and governor’s office, for instance. Railroad expansion. Who is getting federal land grants. All of the things that influence interest rates and investments.

Agreements to be settled with a handshake. Or with the turn of a card.

That really happens?

Sometimes. It’s San Francisco.

Then it’s true what they say about you?

Enlighten me.

You sleep on a bed of nails.

I eat them, too. And spit rust.

Bode started to rise, clenching his jaw when his back began to spasm.

“Stay where you are, Mr. DeLong. I told your butler that you and I don’t stand on ceremony.”

“He doesn’t stand at all,” muttered Travers.