Brooklyn Guy Quotes

I don't know if boys are intimidated by her or afraid of her or what, but I know her heart is open and ready for a special guy to walk in.

I've been thinking," Brooklyn said as I gawked at the god sitting next to me, "if you get all lovey-dovey and decide to elope to Las Vegas where Jared uses his powers to clean up at the poker tables and you guys buy a mansion in the Manzano Mountains with twenty-seven rooms and decide - because you're rich and all - to buy a new computer, can I have your iMac then?" "Um, no, you're not getting my iMac." "Dang.

The bodies went back in the doors and bars and the heads in the windows. The cops drove away and Freddy and the guys went back into the Greeks and the street was quiet, just the sound of a tug and an occasional car; and even the blood couldn't be seen from a few feet away.

Me getting in your bed was the first step, T. My presence in your bed was my way of telling you I was all in, because I knew,” his voice, long gone hoarse, cracked, “I knew you were an all-in kinda guy, so I took the leap. Jumped for you. But you ran from me.

Try to roll with the punches. Keep your chin up. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Vote Democrat in every election. Ride your bike in the park. Dream about my perfect, golden body. Take your vitamins. Drink eight glasses of water a day. Pull for the Mets. Watch a lot of movies. Don’t work too hard at your job. Take a trip to Paris with me. Come to the hospital when Rachel has her baby and hold my grandchild in your arms. Brush your teeth after every meal. Don’t cross the street on a red light. Defend the little guy. Stick up for yourself. Remember how beautiful you are. Remember how much I love you. Drink one Scotch on the rocks every day. Breathe deeply. Keep your eyes open. Stay away from fatty foods. Sleep the sleep of the just. Remember how much I love you.

... I want a guy in my life. I want a partner, and kids. I’d go gay for you, hon, but adoption is expensive. And then there’s the matter of your not having a dick.” “It’s always something with you.

The whole school was in shock when he died. Just six months earlier, another guy from school died. Everyone went on about too much tragedy. Want to know about tragedy? Come to my house. A year later, tragedy is still here. Every damn day, it's here.

Guys aren’t interested in perfect, they want character!” Brooklyn humphed. “They want tits and ass. Whatever else you provide is a plus, unless it’s intelligence.

Knowing what she did...it makes me not want to have her anywhere near them," Callum growled with a frown. "It's a little late for that. I mean, I'm sure Gav knows a guy that could dig her up, but even though I hate the woman, I don't necessarily want her swimming with the fishes," I joked in my best Brooklyn accent, pushing past the nervousness I felt with sarcasm.

Still, that didn’t stop the flare of heat from returning to Melody's chest. “You called my boss a b word.” Declan zeroed his gaze on hers. “No, I said she was being one, and she was. To you. And I didn’t like it.

Well, fuck a duck,” comes Morris’s delighted voice. I jerk in surprise, then spin around to glare at him for sneaking up on me from behind. Judging by the amusement dancing in his eyes, it’s obvious he peeked over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of the photo I’d been drooling over. “I was wondering how he’d pull that one off,” Morris remarks, still grinning like a fool. “Shouldn’t have doubted him, though. That dude is an unstoppable force of nature.” I narrow my eyes. “He told you about the picture?” “About the whole list, actually. We hung out last night—Lorris is close to taking over Brooklyn, by the way—and he was moaning and groaning about not being able to track down a red velvet couch.” Morris shrugs. “I offered to throw a red blanket on the sofa in my common room and take some pictures, but he said you’d consider that cheating and deprive him of your love.” Stifling a sigh, I shove the phone in my purse, then walk over to the mini-fridge across the room and grab a bottle of water. I twist off the cap, doing my best to ignore the sheer enjoyment Morris is getting out of this. “I wish I was gay,” he says ruefully. A snicker pops out. “Uh-huh. Go on. I’m willing to follow you down this rabbit hole and see where it leads.” “Seriously, Gretch, I love him. I have a boner for him.” Morris sighs. “If I’d known he existed, I wouldn’t have asked you out in the first place.” “Gee, thanks.” “Oh, shut up. You’re awesome, and I’d tap that in a second. But I can’t compete with this guy. He’s operating on a whole other level when it comes to you.

This is great. But what I’m grasping at is an idea about a subtler goal. This thinking owes a lot to conversations with Manjula Waldron of Ohio State University, an engineering professor who also happens to be a hospital chaplain. This feels embarrassingly Zen-ish for me to spout, being a short, hypomanic guy with a Brooklyn accent, but here goes: Maybe the goal isn’t to maximize the contrast between a low baseline and a high level of activation. Maybe the idea is to have both simultaneously. Huh? Maybe the goal would be for your baseline to be something more than the mere absence of activation, a mere default, but to instead be an energized calm, a proactive choice. And for the ceiling to consist of some sort of equilibrium and equanimity threading through the crazed arousal. I have felt this a few times playing soccer, inept as I am at it, where there’s a moment when, successful outcome or not, every physiological system is going like mad, and my body does something that my mind didn’t even dream of, and the two seconds when that happened seemed to take a lot longer than it should have. But this business about the calm amid the arousal isn’t just another way of talking about “good stress” (a stimulating challenge, as opposed to a threat). Even when the stressor is bad and your heart is racing in crisis, the goal should be to somehow make the fraction of a second between each heartbeat into an instant that expands in time and allows you to regroup. There, I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I think there might be something important lurking there. Enough said.

he was asked by his bosses to make a little detour to Brooklyn in 1940, to prosecute the Christian Front fascists—the seventeen guys who had stockpiled bombs and ammunition and U.S. military machine guns and then trained for a violent takeover of the federal government.

Bill believed the push for Brexit—and its eventual approval by voters—showed a strong contempt for existing power structures that reflected the mood of the American electorate. You guys are underestimating the significance of Brexit, he told Brooklyn and his own advisers over and over.

Yeah, on the car! Do you guys know how many people have had sex on that car?

I want to be the guy in your corner … But I can’t do it unless you let me be that guy.

That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men—friends, coworkers, strangers—giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much—no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version—maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”) I waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. But it never happened. Instead, women across the nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard girl. Men believed she existed—she wasn’t just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren’t, then there was something wrong with you. But it’s tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try. I will accept my portion of blame. The thing is, I was crazy about him at first. I found him perversely exotic, a good ole Missouri boy. He was so damn nice to be around. He teased things out in me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hollowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool

I take in the five guys sitting at the table; four of them are attractive. I definitely wouldn’t turn them away if I accidentally discovered one of them naked in a guestroom while roaming around this place.

An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats dominated the more creative departments. As an art history major, I couldn’t escape them. “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskine pocket notebook. Beer bellies and skinny legs, zip-up hoodies, navy blue peacoats or army green parkas, New Balance sneakers, knit hats, canvas tote bags, small hands, hairy knuckles, maybe a deer head tattooed across a flabby bicep. They rolled their own cigarettes, didn’t brush their teeth enough, spent a hundred dollars a week on coffee. They would come into Ducat, the gallery I ended up working at, with their younger—usually Asian—girlfriends. “An Asian girlfriend means the guy has a small dick,” Reva once said. I’d hear them talk shit about the art. They lamented the success of others. They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn, another reason I was glad to live on the Upper East Side.

More often than not, these attempts at sociability ended in painful silence. His old friends, who remembered him as a brilliant student and wickedly funny conversationalist, were appalled by what had happened to him. Tom had slipped from the ranks of the anointed, and his downfall seemed to shake their confidence in themselves, to open the door onto a new pessimism about their own prospects in life. It didn't help matters that Tom had gained weight, that his former plumpness now verged on an embarrassing rotundity, but even more disturbing was the fact that he didn't seem to have any plans, that he never spoke about how he was going to undo the damage he'd done to himself and get back on his feet. Whenever he mentioned his new job, he described it in odd, almost religious terms, speculating on such questions as spiritual strength and the importance of finding one's path through patience and humility, and this confused them and made them fidget in their chairs. Tom's intelligence had not been dulled by the job, but no one wanted to hear what he had to say anymore, least of all the women he talked to, who expected young men to be full of brave ideas and clever schemes about how they were going to conquer the world. Tom put them off with his doubts and soul-searchings, his obscure disquisitions on the nature of reality, his hesitant manner. It was bad enough that he drove a taxi for a living, but a philosophical taxi driver who dressed in army-navy clothes and carried a paunch around his middle was a bit too much to ask. He was a pleasant guy, of course, and no one actively disliked him, but he wasn't a legitimate candidate?not for marriage, not even for a crazy fling.

On November 3, 2015, the day after the Trump Organization transmitted the LOI, Sater emailed Cohen suggesting that the Trump Moscow project could be used to increase candidate Trump's chances at being elected, writing: Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process. . . . Michael, Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the republican nomination. And possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in.... We will manage this process better than anyone. You and I will get Donald and Vladimir on a stage together very shortly. That the game changer.327 Later that day, Sater followed up: Donald doesn't stare down, he negotiates and understands the economic issues and Putin only want to deal with a pragmatic leader, and a successful business man is a good candidate for someone who knows how to negotiate. "Business, politics, whatever it all is the same for someone who knows how to deal" I think I can get Putin to say that at the Trump Moscow press conference. If he says it we own this election. Americas most difficult adversary agreeing that Donald is a good guy to negotiate. . . . We can own this election. Michael my next steps are very sensitive with Putins very very close people, we can pull this off. Michael lets go. 2 boys from Brooklyn getting a USA president elected. This is good really good.328

The sky was so blue. It’s only been five years. My skyline was never marked with an absence. Remember that wine school? Windows on the World? I had been underneath them, on the F train coming from Brooklyn just one hour before. I was late for high school but glued to the TV. I had taught a class there - on Rioja - on the night of September tenth. Chef made soup. So I heard something and looked out my window - you know I’m on the East Side. It was too low. But it was steady and went by almost in slow motion. The Owner set up a soup kitchen on the sidewalk. No, I haven’t been down there. The smoke. The dust. But the sky was so blue. My buddy was the somm at the restaurant - we came up at Tavern on the Green together. You guys never talk about it. I was going into a class called, I’m not joking, Meanings of Death. I always wondered: If I had been here, would I have stayed? And I thought, New York is so far away. My cousin was a firefighter, second-wave responder. Nothing on television is real. But am I safe? Because what else is there to do but make soup? But I really can’t imagine it. I was pouring milk into my cereal, I looked down for one second… I was asleep, I didn’t even feel the impact. A tide of people moving up the avenues on foot. Blackness. Sometimes it still feels too soon. It’s our shared map of the city. Then the sirens, for days. We never forget, really. A map we make by the absences. No one left the city. If you were here, you were temporarily cured of fear.

I told her about my revenge on Topper the attempted rapist and the guy at the transient's hotel in  Brooklyn, and, finally, I told her about stealing the money. "You did what?" She sat straight up in her chair, her eyes wide, her mouth open. "Shhh." Other diners were staring at us, frozen in silent tableau, some with forks or spoons halfway  to mouth. Millie was blinking her eyes rapidly. Much quieter, she said, "You robbed a bank?" "Shhh." My ears were burning. "Don't make a scene." "Don't shush me! I didn't rob a bank." Fortunately she whispered it. The waiter walked up then and took our drink order. Millie ordered a vodka martini. I asked  for a glass of white wine. I didn't know if it would help, but I figured it couldn't hurt. "A million dollars?" she said, after the waiter left. "Well, almost." "How much of it is left?" "Why?" She blushed. "Curiosity. I must look like a proper little gold digger." "About eight hundred thousand." "Dollars!" The man at the next table spilled his water. "Christ, Millie. You want me to leave you here? You're fifteen hundred miles away from  home you know.

Daisy looks up at me, whines, and shakes her head, as if to say: “You fucking pussy. Not to be a drama queen, but you’re letting your one chance at real love slip away because you’re afraid she doesn’t want you as much as you want her. If you weren’t the guy who feeds me, I’d just pee on you.

He’s still the same guy,” Colton says, turning down the music. “I like him, and I’ve never seen him do anything but dote on Brooklyn.

Two gay guys cuddling in the heart of Brooklyn shouldn't feel this revolutionary, but suddenly, it does.

The guys are all fucking enraptured, just like me. Inexplicably drawn to the beautiful, chaotic disaster that is Brooklyn West and her crazy goddamn head.

Directed dabbling is what led me to Bre Pettis, a former art teacher from Seattle who started NYC Resistor, a Brooklyn maker space, and also launched the 3-D printing company MakerBot next door. I had been tracking Bre as part of our digital development effort. I e-mailed Bre to ask if I could simply hang out and watch what he was doing: “I want to understand the new wave of micro-manufacturing, and especially what you are doing with 3-D printing.” Resistor was a higgledy-piggledy series of rooms on the fourth floor of a run-down factory. There Bre introduced me to his “makers” as we walked between workbenches covered with bits of sheet metal and wires and boxes of odds and ends. I saw people making a miniature wind turbine and a portable water purification system. That is, GE kinds of things. One guy was building his own miniature gas turbine, because, well, he could. “Why not?” he said. “People want to live off the grid.” “We could use this ingenuity inside GE,” I said out loud. After NYC Resistor and MakerBot, I met with Shapeways, in Queens, an advanced contract manufacturer where people submitted designs to be 3-D printed for a fee. As we toured the space and talked about the jewelry they made, I

I will keep this family together, one way or another. If Brooklyn wants to screw with my guys, then there isn’t going to be any special treatment. We’re a fucking family, and families share.

AM: My father had arrived in New York all alone, from the middle of Poland, before his seventh birthday… He arrived in New York, his parents were too busy to pick him up at Castle Garden and sent his next eldest brother Abe, going on 10, to find him, get him through immigration and bring him home to Stanton Street and the tenement where in two rooms the eight of them lived and worked, sewing the great long, many-buttoned cloaks that were the fashion then. They sent him to school for about six months, figuring he had enough. He never learned how to spell, he never learned how to figure. Then he went right back into the shop. By the time he was 12 he was employing two other boys to sew sleeves on coats alongside him in some basement workshop. KM: He went on the road when he was about 16 I think… selling clothes at a wholesale level. AM: He ended up being the support of the entire family because he started the business in 1921 or something. The Miltex Coat Company, which turned out to be one of the largest manufacturers in this country. See we lived in Manhattan then, on 110th Street facing the Park. It was beautiful apartment up on the sixth floor. KM: We had a chauffeur driven car. The family was wealthy. AM: It was the twenties and I remember our mother and father going to a show every weekend. And coming back Sunday morning and she would be playing the sheet music of the musicals. JM: It was an arranged marriage. But a woman of her ability to be married off to a man who couldn’t read or write… I think Gussie taught him how to read and to sign his name. AM: She knew she was being wasted, I think. But she respected him a lot. And that made up for a little. Until he really crashed, economically. And then she got angry with him. First the chauffeur was let go, then the summer bungalow was discarded, the last of her jewellery had to be pawned or sold. And then another step down - the move to Brooklyn. Not just in the case of my father but every boy I knew. I used to pal around with half a dozen guys and all their fathers were simply blown out of the water. I could not avoid awareness of my mother’s anger at this waning of his powers. A certain sneering contempt for him that filtered through her voice. RM: So how did the way you saw your father change when he lost his money? AM: Terrible… pity for him. Because so much of his authority sprang from the fact that he was a very successful businessman. And he always knew what he as doing. And suddenly: nothin’. He didn’t know where he was. It was absolutely not his fault, it was the Great Crash of the ‘29, ‘30, ‘31 period. So from that I always, I think, contracted the idea that we’re very deeply immersed in political and economic life of the country, of the world. And that these forces end up in the bedroom and they end up in the father and son and father and daughter arrangements. In Death of a Salesman what I was interested in there was what his world and what his life had left him with. What that had done to him? Y’know a guy can’t make a living, he loses his dignity. He loses his male force. And so you tend to make up for it by telling him he's OK anyway. Or else you turn your back on him and leave. All of which helps create integrated plays, incidentally. Where you begin to look: well, its a personality here but what part is being played by impersonal forces?

Hey, Ma. There’s this cute nerdy guy who rents a room from me. He’s cool. He’s an orphan, was in the service, is a former sniper, currently a bounty hunter, and is hunting your friend Reznik. Oh, and he totally shot me with a sedative the first night we met and lied his way into becoming my roommate.

How much space does a guy need?” “Bigger is always better. You never got the memo?” “So we’re talking apartment size… and ego size, Yeah?

Holy shit, this guy is a sex god.

Jesus, who the hell is this guy who has turned me inside out and upside down?

God, I hate him. He’s so fucking twisted. How could I have ever thought there was more to this guy?

Why the hell does it feel like I’ve tripped into some alternate reality where the guy I’ve secretly been pining for looks like he wants to bury a machete in my chest for no apparent reason?

That guy just asked for my number! His name is Mason! But let’s get pizza! I am starving! Because, well, I just puked. But I’m good, I’m good. A well-timed puke can make the night, you know?

He’s too cocky, too confident. Clearly a player. A cockmonkey fuckpuppet bastard, the kind of guy I should avoid at all costs. But God, he’s hot. The

My grandma told me you guys were all extinct.” The duende makes a sour face. He keeps that long, craggy finger pointed in my direction. “Most of my kind was sent here by El Terroz, Lord of the Earth and its Treasures. He is our father and protector. I am charged with passage across the Luxaria, or as common witches call it—Lover’s Lament.” “Lover’s Lament?” I look at the hole in my shoe. “Why do they call it that?” Oros

nothing put Hillary over the edge quite like the “Humor and Heart” story. Donors and top Democrats called her campaign to complain. Jen and Robby took most of Hillary’s wrath, but The Guys got it, too, for letting me into Brooklyn in the first place. The fall, when Hillary was supposed to restart, instead became what some Democrats called the “Spontaneity is EMBARGOED until 4:00 p.m.” phase of the campaign.

Urgh. Why do I only ever see cute guys when I look like an armpit? Anyway,

David had an encyclopedic knowledge of baseball that Kramer admired, and an unusual dedication to the Yankees for a guy that grew up in Brooklyn, which was Dodgers territory.

The organic produce guy, a young man who'd left Brooklyn in order to minimize his carbon footprint and consume only things he could make or grow himself. This had come to involve...going toilet-paper free the year before, and making his wife use discarded athletic socks for her monthly cycle.'That poor girl!' said Sylvie, privately resolving to figure out where the young woman was living and anonymously deliver some tampons, the really bad kind, with non biodegradable plastic applicators.

Meanwhile, I feel like almost every guy I meet here plays in some terrible band, reads Rilke, drinks Brooklyn microbrews, and has a bad beard. Yet I still manage to convince myself I really like them! Lack of good option does this to you.

P.S.2. During the day, they are drilling us on passwords we will need in the jungle in case we run into a Japanese spy dressed like a USMC. One of them was "Who lost game 4 of the 1941 W. Series?" Half the guys said "Brooklyn" and the other half said "Mickey Owen" and the third half said "Tommy Henrich". Then some fist fights happened so they scrapped the question. But I told you so.

I was silent for a bit, absorbing that. Clancy and I had a distant, polite association. We saw each other quite a bit because he was responsible for getting me to and from my Krav Maga classes in Brooklyn. But I’d never really thought about him having any sort of personal stake in my safety, although it made sense. Clancy was a guy who took pride in his work.

I feel like an actress who’s losing her Schmidt while giving her Oscar acceptance speech: I have so many things to be thankful for! Thank you to the Academy of Hot Guy Arts and Sciences. For Vince Devlin’s penis. His mouth and hands and tongue. Thank you for his eyes and voice and the way he smells. For all the exciting places he’s been taking me—in New York and inside my own heart and mind. For giving me this opportunity to experience love in this new way. Also, I’d like to thank whoever invented multiple orgasms, because wow. My skin is amazing right now.

The guy from Brooklyn 99 says that’s one of the most intimate things partners can do. Was Boyle actually onto something?

You can’t be mad at her. She had a hard time. I watched you guys every day. You’re an amazing girl, Alejandra. Your mom did the best she could even if it didn’t feel like it was enough. She did the best she could.

I have new words for the dictionary. to knock boots, phr., to have sexual intercourse tracks, n., contract (as in “I got a track to kill him”) to do, v., to fuck to do, v., to kill clean, adj., handsome to Brodie, v., to jump, usually from a building or a bridge; taken from a Mr. Brodie who claimed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge to lash, v., to urinate chronic, n., marijuana, esp. high-quality smudge, n., black person Ape Avenue, n., Eighth Avenue (police slang) puppy, n., handgun (Jamaican word) scrambler, n., low-level runner for a drug dealer cocola, n., black person (Puerto Rican word) spliv, n., black person to be hung like a horse, phr., to have influential connections in the police department; also a guy who is hung like a horse ground ball, phr., something easy or simple to pull a train, v., to have group sex, gang-bang stinger, n., drug dealer to inflash, v., to inform (as in “he inflash me with the bitch’s scenario”) to double, v., to double-park to sleep in a tent, exp., to have a large penis to be built like a tripod, phr., to have a large penis dixie cup, n., a person who is considered disposable her, she, pron., wife

The gruff, gold-hearted Brooklyn guys who won’t hesitate to help someone out. The way New Yorkers pull together when they need to.

You know how selfish that sounds right?” he says. “Why?” I turn back to him. “Because men always get what they want? Why should I have to give you more?” “So how is it fair that I give you exactly what you want and I don’t get what I want?” “What haven’t I given you? Think long and hard before you answer, because you came your brains out last night.” “I—” “Yeah. It’s simple gender inequality, my guy,” I say in that voice Brooklyn always does to make me laugh. “I still don't follow.” “Men expect certain things and usually they get them, but I say fuck that. I almost never get what I want in life. I get some things, but almost everything, even the shit I work really hard for? I know I would get even more if I were a man. Especially a white man.” (pp. 190-191, Kindle Edition)

Lori, good news!” she announced in her heavy Brooklyn accent. “Somebody returned a vial of the Clooney kid.” The Clooney kid . . . my guy. The one who was “the whole package.” “Returned?” I asked. I wasn’t sure how I felt about returned semen. I thought about how at Whole Foods, you couldn’t return any personal-hygiene items, even with a receipt. But Kathleen assured me that the vial hadn’t left its sealed nitrogen tank and that there was nothing wrong with the “product.” Somebody had simply gotten pregnant some other way and no longer needed the backup. If I wanted it, I had to buy it now. “Clooney has a waiting list, you know—” she began, but before she finished her sentence, I had already said yes.

No other guy has ever affected me the way Brixton has, and much as I hate to even think it, I’m addicted to the way he makes me feel.

I’m drawn to the guy like moths to a flame even though everything about him is wrong, dangerous, and detrimental to my future. But at the same time, everything about him is magnetic, intoxicating, and all-consuming.

Dammit, why does this guy have so much power over me? And why am I so turned on by his disdain and disgust?

The guy is worse than manipulative. He’s unknowingly fucking manipulative. He’s toying with my heart strings like I’m a freaking puppet.

If Jack is what he wants, and Christ knows, the guy is stable as a fucking rock, then I walk. Sam needs that. Deserves it. Me, on the other hand? Yeah, I’m about as stable as a tropical storm. And everyone knows it.

Take your head out of your ass and fix your life because it’s a damn good one.” “I know,” I say to Davis. “I will. And I miss the shit out of you, too.” “I’ll always be watching over you guys. Take care of my girls for me.” “I will,” I say. “I love you.

So I did a good thing, prevented that guy from getting brain damage from this cretin, and now I’m going to be stuck with him for the foreseeable future. How the hell did I draw the short straw in this whole thing?” “But you love helping people,” Brixton cajoles. “Just consider me your newest charity case. That must get you all kinds of excited, trying to reform the hopeless, unredeemable asshole.” “I’d rather gauge out my eyes with hot fire pokers,” I grumble. “There’s definitely gonna be a place in heaven for you, choir boy.

God, I hate him. And I really try hard not to hate anyone. But this guy… fuck my life.

Fucking social media. I mean, seriously, how many other guys did Mr. Clean beat to shit before karma came back to bite him in his big ass?

I don’t care that he’s the hottest man I’ve ever laid eyes on. He’s practically a priest. Probably never fucked another guy, either. He’s way too good to get dirty.

Jesus, this guy has power if they’re even considering doing what he just asked.

You’re so sadistic,” I mutter. “Some guys like that about me,” he murmurs back. “Don’t be so quick to judge if you don’t know what you’re missing, choir boy.

We’re just supposed to walk into the Emergency Room and wait around to see if the guy wakes up or becomes a vegetable?” Brixton scoffs. “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.

Three years ago, on the hardest night of my life, I met the guy of my dreams. But my brother had just died and my head was a mess. I resisted playing here at the Sun Arena because of what happened on that night. The last time I played here, I found my guy again. And I knew he’d been sent to me.

But I was stupid. Did a lot of dumb things. I thought I lost him. And then I almost died. I learned a really important lesson after that. Life is so fucking short, you can’t waste a second of it.” I look at Sam. “I know I won’t ever again. And tonight, I want to create a new memory, a happy one, right here at the Sun Arena because I believe with my whole heart this guy was always meant to be here with me.” Dropping to my knee, I stare up at Sam. “I fucking love you, Sam Hartley. I always did and I always will. Will you marry me?” He falls to his knees in front of me. “Fuck, yes.

I think I have ever since you attacked the guy who stabbed me that night in the hospital.” A light breaks over Sam’s face. “I’ve loved you since that night in the chapel two years ago. And I always knew we’d find each other again.” “This time, I won’t let go.” “Me either.