Kennedy Ryan Quotes

If you were mine, Iris there would be no doubt what position you’d hold in my life. You’d be center. I’d play you at the five.

Take them back. Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.

Sometimes the heart speaks in whispers, and by the time we hear, by the time we listen, it’s too late…

Even when you think you’re defeated, dig deeper. Go harder. Press, because there is something worth it on the other side.

Hope is the gap between what if and what is, but you have to fill that gap with a lot of hard work. And that’s what we’re going to talk about this week. Hope. Dreams. Work.

I heard someone say once that when you try to fix people’s hurt, you’re controlling it instead of sitting with them and connecting.

finding someone you can laugh with when everything hurts—was the stuff happily ever afters were made of.

Struggle does not make you weak,” she whispers back. “Struggling against those who hold us is what makes us, over time, stronger than they are. Strong enough to fight back. Strong enough to win.

And when the years have passed, and we have watched a thousand sunsets, and we are bent, our bodies crooked with age ask me again. In the twilight, in the shadow of the life we have shared, ask me if I love you, and my heart will answer before my lips can part. My love, my life, my heart never left your hands. Always, evermore, even after. Still.

i cannot love you gently, it’s not in me to love in part, so I will love You completely, and a little madly . . . – Matt Spencer, Poet

She remembered who she was and the game changed.

Still?” she asks with a watery smile. “Yeah.” Always. Evermore. Even after. “Still.

Depression,” she goes on, “is a liar. If it will tell you no one loves you, that you’re not good enough, that you’re a burden or, in the most extreme cases, better off dead, then it can certainly convince you that you’re better off without the man you love, and that, ultimately, he’s better off without you.

a woman who wants more and realizes she deserves it is a dangerous thing.

There aren’t enough sonnets for friendship. Not enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care. They are the ones we choose to laugh and cry and live with. When lovers come and go, friends are the ones who remain. We are each other’s constants.

I’ve fallen in love with the warrior woman who walked through fire, the one who came through stronger, reshaped by sorrow, reformed by grief, reborn in joy.

Grief is a grind. It is the work of breathing and waking and rising and moving through a world that feels emptier. A gaping hole has been torn into your existence, and everyone around you just walks right past it like it’s not even there. But all you can do is stand and stare.

And I think I’m most grateful for time, which doesn’t always heal all wounds, but teaches us how to be happy again even with our scars.

You’re right.” I loosen my fingers from hers so I can hold her face between both hands. “Going to Houston is my best shot at winning a ring.” “Then why would you—” “But staying here,” I cut in, caressing the fullness of her bottom lip with my thumb. “Staying is my best shot at winning you.

You can’t change what has already happened. What you did or decided. So you have two choices. Wallow in it, stay in the chokehold of guilt and shame that holds you back from the next phase of your life”—she taps the pad with the pen—“or decide you’ve punished yourself long enough for things you can never change and set a date when you’ll forgive yourself and move forward.

I like the color of smart, the shade of funny, and sexy is my favorite hue.

If you were mine, Iris, there would be no doubt what position you’d hold in my life. You’d be center. I’d play you at the five.

Iris is my constellation. She took the darkness as her cue to shine. It only made her brighter, stronger, and tonight, her hard-won glimmer lights up the sky.

When are we ever done working on ourselves? I believe wholeness is not a destination, but a lifetime process. Something that instead of waiting for, you could be living for.

Ask me when your belly is full like the moon, and our love has stretched your body with my child, leaving your skin, once flawless, now silvered, traced, scarred, I will worship you. My eyes will never stray. My heart will never wander, gladly leashed to you all my days. I am fixed on you.

When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through. I’m a hornet. I can love. And I can sting.

Don’t you feel how connected we are?” I ask. “If I break your heart, I break mine.” A sweet smile spreads over her lips and she nods.

Sometimes we hold so tightly to the hurt from the past that we miss the happiness ahead,

You’re a great player, August.” She tips up on her toes until her lips are at my ear. “But I think you’ll be an even greater man.

Dwell in possibility.

Yes.” MiMi’s affirmation infuses the air with power. “Strength. Dignity. Courage. All these things belong to you. Take them back. Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.” Yours to keep and yours to share.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.

The heart speaks in whispers. I heard too late.

A long shot?” I ask, pausing at the door to give him a cocky grin. “Last I heard, I’m pretty good at those.

My therapist says sometimes the people who are always keeping things together are the least prepared when they actually fall apart.

She’s not someone you banished with therapy and meds. She is you. You cannot dissociate from her. Until you reconcile that, you won’t find true peace. Until you have compassion for her instead of judgment, you cannot fully heal.

OVERTIME “I have been bent and broken, but - I hope – into a better shape.” -- Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Ours is a love that reimagines—that peels back the sky at high noon searching for the stars, collecting them like shells in a bucket. We bathe in stardust, drink from the Milky Way, and dance on the moon. We pierce the firmament, peer into infinity, and tread on time and space. There is no before. There is no after. Now gives birth to forever. This moment may die, but this love never will. Time is not a line. It’s a circle, and we, August and Iris, we stand at the center.

I love your body because it has you in it.

Give yourself permission to let it hurt, but allow yourself permission to let it heal.” Nikki Rowe, Once a Girl, Now a Woman

Well, a woman in this world has to keep her wits about her and her weapons at hand.

We both gave each other space to be misunderstood, because we really wanted to understand.

Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. My generation’s out of breath. We ain’t running no more.

There is something about falling in love with a beautiful mind ...

There will be men who fall in love with your skin and others who drown themselves in everything that lies beneath.” -Cindy Cherie, Poetess

HOPSCOTCH.

There is no before. There is no after. Now gives birth to forever. This moment may die, but this love never will. Time is not a line. It’s a circle, and we, August and Iris, we stand at the center.

My beloved is mine and I am his. --Song of Solomon 2:16

My mother's story has no end. Her life was interrupted mid-sentence -a dangling participle. An infinite etcetera of dots, but no period.

For black and brown girls, the world is full of sharp edges, and with every step forward, we risk being cut,

She is day and I am night. When day and night are absolutely equal, it’s equinox. Banner is my equinox. My equal.

How do people do this? When the rug is pulled out from under the life the thought they would have forever, how do they pretend it's not seismic? That the roof hasn't fallen in and they're trapped under a concrete beam?

In my dreams I choose him, my prince, instead of the fraud. In this parallel universe, at this second-chance juncture, I turn right instead of choosing wrong… and there only there, we are together.

Life is a constellation of decisions, connected by coincidences and deliberations, painting pictures in the heavens. During the day, when things are brightest, we don’t see the stars, but they are there. It’s only in the contrast of night, when things are darkest, that the stars shine.

We just tiptoe around things, afraid we’ll offend or look ignorant, be misunderstood. Honesty is a risk few are willing to take.

I have found the one whom my soul loves. --Song of Solomon 3:4

There’s something helpless about truly being in love, the kind of love they write songs about, that inspires poetry and launches ships and wreaks havoc. It leaves you slightly off balance, controlling when you mean to cherish, smothering when you mean to hold close.

I have learned to love myself without judgment or condition. It’s the only way I have enough love for everyone who needs it—to love myself. No one can love me like I do. No one knows me like I know myself.

You save all your tears for the things that set you on fire inside.

because first she loved herself.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” —bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

I saw you first,” he whispers, kissing the bridge of my nose where my freckles are. “I had you first.” He kisses my face where the dimple dents my check when I smile. “I want you back,” he declares, meeting my eyes and taking my mouth in a deep kiss, never looking away.

Every day that ends with me still breathing has ended well.

However imperfect she appears to some, she is ours, and we already love her deeply and will treasure any time we have with her.

I’ll never forget this moment when, through the abject fear and despair and exhaustion saturating her eyes, I glimpse her trust in me. It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever received.

Hope is the gap between what if and what is, but you have to fill that gap with a lot of hard work.

The heart speaks in whispers, but sometimes by the time we listen, it’s too late.

And it still isn’t enough. Anything that ended would never be enough for a love like ours. A love like ours is only satisfied by forever.

But we are sometimes in the most danger when we let our guards down, when we let peace deceive us and trick us into forgetting.

Funny how the words he doesn't say can sting more than the ones he does.

And every time I make you smile, I feel like I’ve conquered the world.

Love is as strong as death.

Traditions are the memories of those before us, breathed to life when we carry them on.

There is no place, no spot on the continuum of time that could have hidden this man from me.

don’t mind being the villain, but between you and me, we’ll know that you want it as badly as I do. I’m just the one with the balls to make it happen.

Your dreams and ambitions got swallowed up when you had to follow Caleb,” I say, holding her eyes with mine. “I want you to know there’s someone who will follow you.

He’s dictating my heartbeat, governing my pulse, holding my next breath cupped in his hands.

Then she laughed and I wondered if this—finding someone you can laugh with when everything hurts—was the stuff happily ever afters were made of.

Tomorrow,” she says from the screen, from a wheelchair precipitously close to the edge of a pier, “is the most presumptuous word in the world, because who knows if you even get that.

I watched Zanders strip the façade he wore for so long to allow the flight attendant on his team’s plane to see the real him.  I watched Stevie learn to love herself the way the arrogant hockey player who followed her everywhere loves her. The way we all do. I watched Indy come out of a relationship she wasn’t meant for and learn to be loved in a new, quieter way. I watched Ryan allow someone into his home and his heart after shutting everyone else out for so long, only for the brightest ray of sunshine to move in and light every dark space she could touch. I watched Kai learn to ask for help, only for that help to come in the form of a firecracker pastry chef who taught him how to have fun again. I watched Miller stop running and grow deeper roots than she ever thought she could by falling in love with a single dad and his little boy.  I watched Kennedy learn how to love and be loved thanks to her husband who refused to go a day without showering her with it. I watched Isaiah persist in showing his wife exactly who he was behind the smile, all while keeping his heart open for the only woman he wanted to have it.   

Wild women are an unexplainable spark of life. They ooze freedom and seek awareness, they belong to nobody but themselves . . . she'll allow you into her chaos, but she'll also show you her magic.”—Nikki Rowe, Once a Girl, Now a Woman

So what color am I then?” I ask before thinking better of it. He’ll probably just say I’m white, obviously. “What color are you?” he repeats, his eyes never leaving my face. “You, Bristol, are a freaking prism.

If a kiss has a color, this one is the muted shades of the sky overhead, a ménage à trois of midnight and indigo and moonshine silver. If a kiss has a sound, this one is the concert of our breaths and sighs and moans. If a kiss has a taste, it tastes like this. Hunger flavored with yearning and spiced with desperation.

Can you miss someone you’ve never had? Because I miss Iris. I can’t even share that with anyone because they’d think I was a lunatic. Obsessed. Fixated. I like to think of it as certain. Like when I’m in the zone, the game comes to me easily and I’m certain I’ll make every shot before the ball even leaves my hands—that’s how I feel about Iris. She’s a shot that hasn’t even left my hands, but I know will be nothing but net. I’m certain that if ever given the chance, it would be that way for us.

When I thought of my husband, I didn’t dream in color, I dreamt in character.

I was no walk in the park, Merry.” “Who wants to walk in the park? I think that man would run wild with you.

That’s the part of depression people don’t consider, that at times it physically hurts.

What if she gave me to you?” I bend to whisper over her lips. “What if I’m your gris gris now?

There is no one else but you, my friend, my equal.” --Song of Solomon 5:2

Age ain’t nothing but a number.” “Please let Aaliyah rest in peace.

Watching you guys trying to be friends is like watching porn with no penetration. Really hot, but no climax.

I come here with my heart bleeding on my sleeve, and it's still not enough for him. He needs me to cut it out and hand it to him in chunks of flesh and blood.

He’s looking at me like I’m the sunrise and he’s grateful for a brand new day.

We splinter into a thousand pieces in her kitchen, becoming more together than we were apart. More than we were alone. With whispered promises and words of love, we exchange hearts.

It means seeing myself clearly—good, bad, beautiful, ugly, faults, mistakes—acknowledging what I really think and feel, and not judging those emotions. Understanding myself. Not censoring it. Having compassion for myself.

You have no idea what I’d do for you if you’d let me.” He runs his thumb over my bottom lip., his touch light, but enough to seize my breath. Enough to triple my heartbeat. “But one day you will.

It’s us admitting to the universe we don’t have all the answers. Too often religion says yes, I do have all the answers, and if you don’t like them, you can’t sit at my table. So we have all these tables. Too many tables, and not enough love.

She’s something rare—smart, classy, gorgeous, funny, opinionated, and under it all, where she tries to hide it, kind. And burrowed beneath all of that, vulnerable. She isn’t the kind of girl you mess over.

I want my love to be the most extravagant gift I ever give you,” he whispers, his voice deep and reverent. “I want it to be outrageously unconditional. I want it to overflow and spill into every crevice of your life, every corner of your heart because that’s what you do for me. You overwhelm me, Hendrix.

We said till death do us part.” “Death is tearing us apart.

Dude had serious game.” Grip laughs. “No one writes about love and sex and passion like Neruda.

But it’s such a rich white,” I say, forcing my lips to stay curved. “Well, this is Tribeca,” Grip deadpans. “There’s bound to be a lot of rich whites.

I will kiss him a million times in our life together and never tire of it. My lips will always cling, curious and searching. His touch is an endless thrill.

He's a castle with secret tunnels and abandoned dungeons and heavy locked doors. And I'm his skeleton key.

My mother was my first country. The first place I ever lived.” – “lands” by Nayyirah Waheed, Poet & Activist

No one has to tell a queen to wear her crown.

But there’s something more fragile about her this time. I’m a big guy. I’m sometimes clumsy and not always careful. Whatever is fragile about her, I’d rather die than break.

You can risk loving completely when you completely love yourself.

I don’t give a damn about odds,” she says. “Odds don’t tell me what I can’t do. Odds just tell me how hard I’ll have to work to get what I want. Don’t allow anyone to make you feel less.

It begins with a tremor, a realization that love happens in the fragile context of our mortality. That love and life occur just beyond the reach of our control. There is only one letter of difference between love and lose, and somewhere along the way, for me they became synonymous. I understand now that something broke in me after my parents died that somehow healed wrong, and I started measuring how much I loved people in terms of how much it would hurt to lose them.

He studies me a moment longer, and the intimacy and openness are almost too much, but I force myself not to look away. I’ve never been more vulnerable to anyone, and I’ve never trusted anyone else the way I trust Grip— with my life, with my heart.

I’m a mix of everything the bayou could come up with,” she continues, taking a sip of her drink. “So my cousin says I had more ingredients than—” “Gumbo,” I finish with her. We share a smile, and she nods. “So you’re a mutt like me.

I know it’s unreasonable because I met her no more than an hour ago. We’ve had one conversation. Some people leave an impression. Lennix Moon Hunter has left more than an impression. She’s left her mark on me. And it’s shaped like a star.

She loves an undeserving man. It’s a sorrow most women experience at some point in their lives, whether it’s a father who neglects or a son who forgets or a husband who betrays. These men let us down and we pull ourselves back up, hopefully with the help of other women who love us in ways that heal.

In what world could you possibly think I would belong to you?” “In the one we make together.

Something can feel good, but not feel right.

Let nothing hold you back or keep you down. Even when you think you’re defeated, dig deeper. Go harder. Press, because there is something worth it on the other side

Art, specifically music, is a living thing,” he says. “It isn’t just absorbed by the people who hear it, but it absorbs them.

When we are alone, you and I, through years, through pain, my heart will answer again and again, still.

On rare occasion, you come across someone who just gets you, and you don't have to figure out your place. Wherever you are is okay.

Better todays make better tomorrows, and if you don’t get tomorrow at least you had today.

And if you’re lucky, you find people along the way who keep your feet on the ground—who remind you that real life matters, too.

We are artists,” she quotes softly, her eyes set on mine. “When there is no joy to be found, we have the power in our hands, the will of our souls, to make it.

History is so picked over, by the time you get to the tree, there’s barely any fruit left.

Children and bored adults need to be entertained. Grown men living with purpose require time and quiet and energy.

But religion, as it’s tossed around now, has so little compassion. So little humanity, and faith is first human.

Sometimes the things that could have happened affect us almost as much as the things that did.

What?” I ask, smiling back involuntarily. “Your laugh,” he says. “I want to make you laugh like that every day.

Breathe out the lies. That it was your fault. That you failed. That you are what they said you were. Breathe in truth. You are pure. You are enough. You are strong

I'm his and he's mine.

No, not giving up—accepting. Accepting that you can’t control a wave, so you ride it.

The right one won’t ask you to give up your dreams, but will care just as much as you do about them.

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” I quote. “I love this country too much to settle for the lies written in our history books. I love the constitution too much not to hold the men who wrote it accountable for the truth of its principles.

You accept a man shitting on you,” she used to say, “he’ll make himself at home. There’s no three strikes. You use me, take me for granted, you prove you don’t deserve to be in my life.

Winston Churchill said history is written by the victors, but I would amend that to say it’s often written by liars. History is fact. You can’t change what happened, but you can edit it. People lie and leave out the truth, bend it to suit their needs.

There are so many ways to break a woman’s heart. Her children. Her lover. Her body when it betrays her. Life is clever that way, devising plans for our demise from the moment we’re born. Death by a million heartbreaks, a thousand regrets, a hundred goodbyes.

Our traumas, the things that injure us in this life, even over time, are not always behind us. Sometimes they linger in the smell of a newborn baby. They surprise us in the taste of a home-cooked meal. They wait in the room at the end of the hall. They are with us. They are present. And there are some days when memories feel more real than those who remain, than the joys of this world.

The back of his hand slams into my mouth, shoving any other words down my throat. I stumble. My back hits the mirror, sending spikes of pain through my shoulder. I’ve never been hit in the face. My mother didn’t bother disciplining me. Though I saw men hit her and my aunt from time to time, no man has ever hit me, so I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known that the first hit, that baptism into violence, doesn’t just sting the flesh. It startles the soul.

I'd follow Dean Di Laurentis to the ends of the earth. To the bowels of a volcano, if he asked me to be the Meg Ryan to his Tom Hanks. To fucking Mordor, if he asked me to be the Sam to his Frodo.

We feel the things we need to know instead of say them. With my chest pressed to his back, forgiveness, love, understanding, and tenderness transfer noiselessly between the layers of our clothes, an emotional osmosis through blood and bone, through hurt and fear.

Careful, or I’ll stop believing you’re the asshole everyone thinks you are,” I tease. “Oh, I’m an asshole.” He tips his head back to rest against the seat and watches me, eyes heavy-lidded. “Just not to you.

Do what you need to do. Change your world,” he says softly, his eyes connected to mine so intensely there’s no hope of looking away. “I have to go make my world, but when the time is right, I’ll be back for you.

I’d play you at the five. If you were mine, you’d be at the center of my life. August’s words filter through tiny gaps in the barbed-wire fence surrounding my heart. That could be my place. Instinctively, I know August would put me at the center, but one could argue I was Caleb’s center, too. A dark, twisted center with the sides closing in and choking, but the center nonetheless.

That,” she says, “is an irreversible outcome. Divorce may or may not be. Broken relationships may or may not be. You may never repair those completely, but you’re still here to try. Do you recognize what an amazing gift that is? To still be here to try?

They buried us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.

You signed up for me ... And I signed up for you, whatever that means, wherever that takes us.

I’ll take Banner any way I can get her. Snorted, smoked, shot in my veins. I want her with marrow-level hunger, the kind you have to dig inside your bones to satisfy.

Extraordinary wants no parts of normal.

As the stars dim and the darkness encroaches, I understand I’m like those who stayed too long, blindly assuming their survival.

I think I’m most grateful for time, which doesn’t always heal all wounds, but teaches us how to be happy again even with our scars.

If therapy has taught me anything, it’s that you run from your pain in a circle.

I guess I wanted to let you know that when you are ready to spend time with someone else,” he says, “I’d like to be someone.

Boy, we all gonna die. Question is, how did you live? Did you live or just wait for death to come? Not me. I ain’t waiting for nothing.

I look at her, cataloging her features one by one and realizing the most fascinating thing about this girl isn’t visible to the naked eye.

I bet your leg has gone to sleep.” “Not my third leg.

Grief handed me a heart of iron, and I rusted it with my tears, a muscle not made of flesh, not pumping blood.

Marlon James, you better fix her.” It takes the rest of the day to reprogram Nina...

MiMi says she was tutored by the bayou, by the Mississippi itself. She says that river is the blood meandering through Louisiana’s veins, and it casts a spell on all who love it.

She’s right. I’m dirty. How could I not be after that animal was inside me? After he subdued me like a rabbit he only left alive for sport?

Death has a way of uniting or dividing. Families come together and draw comfort from each other or fight about wills and the things that have kept them apart.

Your soul is yours. Your heart is yours. Your body is yours. Yours to keep and yours to share.

Fucking Kenan. First, he elbows my head. Now, he blocks my cock.

We all know you’re a gifted athlete, August. Don’t just show off. Show us you can lead.

Damn, my head hurts. That’s what happens when Jolly the Big Ass Giant elbows you in the head.

I howl like a wounded animal, but there’s no one to rescue me. I am the dumb lamb that wandered from the fold, and I’ve stumbled into the razor teeth of a hunter’s trap.

In the words of that great comedic philosopher Kevin Hart, “We gon’ learn today!

When other people are as outraged and as curious about those problems as black people are,” he says. “Then maybe we can solve them together.

But now and for the rest of my life, Kai is the living, breathing address that is my home. She’s my entire damn zip code. In

Sometimes we have to fight our way out of the dark because the light doesn’t come looking.

He tells me in the way he knows melts me into a puddle—with a song. “You have stolen my heart with one look of your eyes.

I feel the exhilaration of being hunted, pursued. The promise of being caught and taken. His control hangs by a gossamer strand,

In the end, we are just animals. Primitives driven by urges we barely understand but, with the right person, find ourselves slave to.

That, my beautiful girl,” she’d said, smiling, “is your crown. Your pride. Your self-esteem. The glory of knowing who you are, and that it’s enough. No one has to tell a queen to wear her crown.

heard someone say once that when you try to fix people’s hurt, you’re controlling it instead of sitting with them and connecting. I didn’t have the words for it then, but I have language for it now.

But if you don’t ride me hard enough, I’m flipping you over and tearing that ass up. Got it?” “That sounds fair.” I nod frantically, no breath left for banter. I’m just ready to impale myself on him.

She is bright and good. And I can be dark, bad when I have to be. Sometimes when I don’t have to be, but just want to be. She is day and I am night. When day and night are absolutely equal, it’s equinox. Banner is my equinox. My equal. The revelation rattles around inside me, but my face, my surface remains smooth.

Electric current spears me down the middle, landing in my core. He sucks all the oxygen from the room, and my lungs desperately push breath from my chest. He studies me under hooded lids, knowing exactly what he’s doing to me.

I look at each of my daughters with deliberate care, wanting them to see strength and resolve. I love that I’ve raised girls who think about me, who care about me as a human, not just their mother who exists to serve their every need.

Oh, I want you.” Lust roughens his voice. Love makes it soft. His gaze drops, a lazy, heated sweep over my body, a sweet searing of my skin. The look is as heavy as a stroking hand, but so gentle that I barely feel its tantalizing weight.

I’m learning that to love and be loved is a perfectly healthy desire, unless we believe that relationship is somehow supposed to make us feel worthy or fulfilled. There’s so much pressure not to be alone that sometimes it makes you feel like as a single person you don’t have as much identity. It compels us to search for that person who will make us feel whole.

Is it simple that I can’t stop thinking about you? About the kiss in that hospital room?” He took one step, eating up the small space separating them until he knew she could hear his whisper. “About how you taste? How you feel? Is that simple, Kerris?

I lift my chin, tighten my thighs at his hips, and roll again. Clench tighter, introducing his cock to its new mistress. I will possess this warrior under me. The man they call Gladiator taken captive by a girl half his size and a decade younger. I'm a girl he could crush, but everything in the way he looks at me says cherish. Says treasure. Says protect. Says I'm his, too.

It’s not an existential question of immortality, of living forever, but a challenge of numbered days and what we do with what we have. It’s not a string of todays that become yesterdays and aspire to tomorrow, but living like there is no guarantee. Living with an urgency to say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done. To no matter what, live with what you’ll leave behind in mind.

Tomorrow...is the most presumptuous word in the world, because who knows if you even get that. Yesterday, spilled milk and old news. You can’t do nothing about how you messed up or fell short or didn’t do yesterday. Even when you mess up and make it right, it has to be done today.

I have found the one whom my soul loves,” he quotes. More tears rain over my cheeks; a release years overdue. I weep for every time I’ve felt unloved, unwanted, unnecessary, and imperfect. It’s all there in the look he settles on me. To him, I’m more than enough. I’m all that he wants.

Mama always reminded me that love keeps no record of wrongs. I didn’t know until now that true love, pure love, the right love, doesn’t keep that record because it can’t. I can’t. I have to forgive Rhyson because I have to be with him. I just want it to be right. I want us to be right. To

sky. Life is a constellation of decisions, connected by coincidences and deliberations, painting pictures in the heavens. During the day, when things are brightest, we don’t see the stars, but they are there. It’s only in the contrast of night, when things are darkest, that the stars shine.

I’ve learned that life isn’t about taking what you deserve, it’s about getting all you can while you can because it’s short. Because it’s fickle. Because it takes when we least expect it. Now everything I’ve lost makes me cherish the things I have, instead of always being afraid I’ll lose them.

I settle back in my seat, gazing out the window as we cross the bridge toward New Jersey. I don’t know where the heck he’s taking me, but I’m happy to let him. I’d follow Dean Di Laurentis to the ends of the earth. To the bowels of a volcano, if he asked me to be the Meg Ryan to his Tom Hanks. To fucking Mordor, if he asked me to be the Sam to his Frodo. To— “We’re here,” he announces. I’m jolted out of the most ridiculous train of thought I’ve ever ridden.

Rhyson’s words set my heart free like a stampede of wild notes across a music staff, falling off the lines, running off the page. I’m a composition out of control, without form. Freestyled. Improvised. Unsure of where we’re going, but certain that it’s right. Sure that in the end, it will be a thing of beauty. “You

Our eyes hold and our gris-gris rings lock together like our lives, our destinies, have remained entwined. It could be my imagination, but as she bears down and squeezes my hand for one final agonizing push, I feel that power surge the doctor mentioned. The power in our veins passed between two little girls in the Lower Ninth. We held it in a field of rotting cane, even when we were torn apart. It flows between us now through years and heartache and unconditional love. The power of an unbroken line. We are the magic.

Too many people, too many times, have come between us. Not again.” This man, this beautiful, unattainable man is mine. And he loves me like a Mack truck—the huge ones that just keep coming and don’t stop for anything in their path. Being the object of such singular focus can be overwhelming, but it’s also the best feeling in the world. “Are you saying you want this for good?” I ask, more confident than I’ve ever been. “For good?” He frowns and gives a quick shake of his head. “For good is too sanitized. I want your dirt and your pain and your darkness. Your weakness and your flaws.” He sprinkles kisses over my cheeks and nose, leaving adoration everywhere he touches me. “I don’t want you for good, Banner,” he says. “I want you forever.” I gasp at hearing the future in his words, of the picture he’s painting. “I love you,” he tells me again. “I didn’t even think I was capable of saying that, much less feeling it, but I feel it for you.

No matter what happens, my heart and my soul, I give them to you. They’re yours to keep.” “Yours to keep,” I echo back to him, threading our fingers together. “The only thing that’s true, that’s real, is this, Pep.” He pulls my other hand over his heart, pressing his hand over mine. “So you don’t have to worry about losing me. You can’t lose me. My soul is lodged that deeply in yours. I’m completely yours.

If there is one thing I can leave with you, it’s this: we work in a jungle and are surrounded by alpha males and apex predators. Everyone’s looking to be the last one standing, to be at the top of the food chain, and they sometimes don’t care who gets hurt in the process. Don’t lose your heart. Don’t lose your soul. Don’t lose your compass, and that doesn’t mean don’t win. Win. Fight. Conquer. You have just as much right to success as anyone who works for it. It may be a jungle, and they may be lions . . .” She pauses, her eyes finding mine again, holding mine. “But the daughter of a lion is still a lion, and this is your domain.

A few moments with the truth don’t chase away the lies forever,” she says, pushing back the sweat-dampened hair clinging to my face. “Lies don’t give up easily. You’ll have to remind yourself and heal yourself over and over, every time they come.” “You mean I need to talk to a therapist?” I ask. I’ve thought of that and probably will at some point. “Yes.” Her smile is that of a younger woman, knowing, teasing. “And sleep naked sometimes. Soon, you’ll want again.

Public grief is tricky to negotiate. At a certain point, and it varies depending on the person and circumstance, there comes a time when you should be “over it.” You should have moved on by now. And you’re so aware of the fact that you have not, that you cannot. You don’t want others to see your past-due tears or sense the pain that has outstayed its welcome. You protect them from feeling awkward because you’re still in pain. When the facade fails and you lose it, the stares soaked in sympathy are as bad as the ones filled with contempt.

I watched Zanders strip the façade he wore for so long to allow the flight attendant on his team’s plane to see the real him. I watched Stevie learn to love herself the way the arrogant hockey player who followed her everywhere loves her. The way we all do. I watched Indy come out of a relationship she wasn’t meant for and learn to be loved in a new, quieter way. I watched Ryan allow someone into his home and his heart after shutting everyone else out for so long, only for the brightest ray of sunshine to move in and light every dark space she could touch. I watched Kai learn to ask for help, only for that help to come in the form of a firecracker pastry chef who taught him how to have fun again. I watched Miller stop running and grow deeper roots than she ever thought she could by falling in love with a single dad and his little boy. I watched Kennedy learn how to love and be loved thanks to her husband who refused to go a day without showering her with it. I watched Isaiah persist in showing his wife exactly who he was behind the smile, all while keeping his heart open for the only woman he wanted to have it. I watched Hallie, with so much goddamn pride, as her heart softened again. She forgave me while also continuing to stand up for herself along the way. And I . . . well, I found love because it was always out there, waiting for me, even when I questioned its existence. In fact, I found it right next door—where it had always been.

He kisses my chin, caresses my throat. I close my eyes against what I see in his eyes. It’s so much more than the need to fuck, than the base urge of one alpha male compelled to take a woman from another of his species. It’s tender and sincere and all the things I’ve told myself all these years he wasn’t capable of. “I saw you first,” he whispers, kissing the bridge of my nose where my freckles are. “I had you first.” He kisses my face where the dimple dents my cheek when I smile. “I want you back,” he declares, meeting my eyes and taking my mouth in a deep kiss, never looking away.

It’s usually used for scientists or inventors. The phenomenon of two people discovering something in different places at essentially the same time,” I say. “You’d be surprised how often it happens. Calculus, oxygen, the blast furnace . . . all multiple discoveries. Even Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was postulated at the same time by someone else.” Zo lifts his brows, silently asking what my nerd talk has to do with the price of tacos in Mexico. “I think that’s what happened to us,” I continue. “We both met Banner at the same time in her life, and we saw something in her no one else saw yet. We made a spectacular discovery, and the rest of the world didn’t recognize it. Couldn’t see it when we could. It’s like we shared a secret, the two of us.” “I get that,” he says quietly, lifting a speculative gaze to mine. “And how is it resolved? When two discover something at the same time?” I shrug, shove my hands into the pocket of my pants. “It becomes a matter of who tells the secret first,” I explain. “A rush to claim.” “So are you saying if I had met Banner first, she would have chosen me?” Dark humor fills his eyes. “No, I don’t think so,” I answer. “Banner is my opposite, but she’s my match.” My equinox. “The only way Banner would have chosen you,” I tell him frankly, honestly, “is if she’d never met me.

Blame this dress,” I tell her. “It shows off the sexiest parts of you.” “Let me guess.” Her laugh rumbles into me. “The ass?” I caress the dramatic curve from her back to her butt, rubbing my hand along her spine. “No, this is the sexiest thing about you.” The laughter leaves my voice. “This gorgeous backbone.” She pulls back to study my face in the shadows. With the sun setting, soon we’ll have to pick each other out of the dark like we did the first time we made love. “Your strength,” I continue, pressing my fingers along the delicate bones strung up her back. “And this.” I skim the curve of her breasts, but don’t stop there, not until I reach the skin left bare by the neckline of her dress. Until my hand rests on her heart. “This heart of yours.” My laugh is full of self-deprecation. “That you somehow miraculously have given to me, it’s the other sexiest thing about you.” She traces the line of my eyebrows, the slant of my cheekbones, my lips. I know what she sees. A good-looking guy with a not-always-good heart. Not a heart like hers. “That’s just about the most perfect thing anyone’s ever said to me,” she says.