TheCrazyWorldOfABookLover > Books: mind-fucking-blown‎ (14)

"Once, there was a boy.
Once, there was a wolf.
He had sat with his back against a tree.
His bare feet were in the grass.
The boy leaned forw

"Once, there was a boy.
Once, there was a wolf.
He had sat with his back against a tree.
His bare feet were in the grass.
The boy leaned forward and kissed the wolf.
And knew then that nothing would ever be the same."

"I’d hated him then, and I hated him now. But the funny thing about hate is the razor-thin line that separates it from something else entirely. Because I loved him too, no matter how hard I tried to convince myself I didn’t. I always had. Even when I’d wanted to kill him, even when I felt the most betrayed, I couldn’t stop. It was a twisted thing, the roots buried deep in my chest, tangled and thick. I had thought it would rot and fester, become something dark that I couldn’t control, but it just stayed as it was, and I hated him for it. For making me feel this way after all he’d done to me and I’d done to him. I wanted him gone. I never wanted to see him again. I wanted him to hurt like I’d hurt. To burn. To bleed. I wanted to keep my hands on him, to feel the animal underneath. I wanted to lean forward and bite him, leaving my mark against his skin, tattooed so that he would never be without me on him, so that everyone would know I’d been there, and I’d been there first. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to fuck him. I wanted him to tear me apart."

"He turned his arm over. He gripped my wrist, thumb brushing against my pulse point. “I wasn’t your first.”
Goddamn him for knowing what I was thinking. “Damn right you weren’t.”
“And you weren’t mine.” I wanted a name. Tell me who the fuck it was. I’d find them. I’d fucking kill them. I said, “I don’t care.”
His eyes flickered orange. “But I swear I’m going to be your last. Fight me. Hit me. Fucking light me up. Hate me all you want—”
I bristled at that. “Get the fuck out of my head,” because I could hear him whispering gordo gordo gordo along that thread that stretched between us. It bounced around my skull until all I could do was hear him saying my name again and again and again. He was consuming me, and I wanted him to. I couldn’t stand the thought.
“—but it’s going to happen. You hear me? I will hunt you down if that’s what it takes. You can run from me, Gordo. But I will always find you. I let you go once. I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

“This isn’t how it ends,” I told him as he watched the empty doorway, the house filling with shadows as it shook on its foundation. “I know it feels like it, but this isn’t our ending. We find our way back to each other. No matter how long it takes, we find our way back again. It’s how we always are. It’s how we’ll always be.”

‘Laurent of Vere. They say you’re frigid. They say you rebuff all your suitors, that no man has been good enough to prise your legs apa

‘Laurent of Vere. They say you’re frigid. They say you rebuff all your suitors, that no man has been good enough to prise your legs apart. I believe you thought it would be brutish and physical, and maybe a part of you even wanted it that way. But you and I both know that Damen does not make love like that. He took you slowly. He kissed you until you started to want it.’

Laurent said, ‘Don’t stop on my account.’

‘You let him undress you. You let him put his hands on you. They say you hate Akielons, but you let one into your bed. You weren’t expecting what it felt like when he touched you. You weren’t expecting the weight of his body, how it felt to have his attention, to have him want you.’

‘You left out the part near the end, when it was so good I let myself forget what he’d done.’

He said, into the stillness, ‘I think if I gave you my heart, you would treat it tenderly.'

‘When you make love to me like that, I can’t think.’
‘Don’t think,’ said Damen. Damen saw the flickering change, the tension, as the words provoked an internal battle. Damen said, ‘Don’t think.’
‘Don’t,’ said Laurent, ‘toy with me. I—have not the means to—defend against this.’
‘I don’t toy with you.’
‘I—’
‘Don’t think,’ said Damen.
‘Kiss me,’ said Laurent. And then flushed, a rich colour. Don’t think, Damen had said, but Laurent couldn’t do that. Even to sit there after what he had said, he was fighting a battle in his head. The words hung awkwardly, a blurt, but Laurent didn’t take them back, he just waited, his body singing with tension. Instead of leaning in, Damen took Laurent’s hand, brought it towards himself, and kissed his palm, once.

After a moment, Laurent said, ‘He would have liked you.’
‘Even after I started courting his little brother?’ said Damen carefully.

‘I would court you,’ said Damen, ‘with all the grace and courtesy that you deserve.’

“It felt, in all the lies between them, as if this was the only true thing.”

“It felt, in all the lies between them, as if this was the only true thing.”

From the severe, straight-backed posture to the impersonal grace of his cupped yellow head; from his detached blue eyes to the arrogance of his cheekbones, Laurent was complicated and contradictory, and Damen could look nowhere else.

The warm, sweet kiss had been broken in a moment of promise: the first slight parting of lips, the hint that Laurent had been on the cusp of allowing the kiss to deepen, though his body had been singing with tension. When he closed his eyes, he felt how it might have happened: slowly, Laurent’s mouth opening, Laurent’s hands lifting hesitantly to touch his body. He would have been careful, so careful.

‘You want to take me, as a man takes a boy.’
‘As a man takes a man,’ said Damen. ‘I want to take pleasure in you, and to please your body with mine.’
He said it with soft honesty. ‘I want to come inside you.’ The words rose, like this feeling within him. ‘I want you to come in my arms.’
‘You make it sound simple.’
‘It is simple.’

Stirring drowsily, Laurent shifted a fraction closer and made a soft, unthinking sound of pleasure that Damen was going to remember for the rest of his life.

"And some broken men are just too broken to be put back together."

"And some broken men are just too broken to be put back together."

"Being a killer is hard. It’s hard not just because of the obvious, but because in living this kind of life, you don’t just kill criminals and enemies and targets…you also kill everything and everyone you love."