Pillow Sayings Quotes

Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.

When I lay my head on the pillow at night I can say I was a decent person today. That's when I feel beautiful.

You know, most girls sleep with a teddy bear or an extra pillow. But I gotta say, that's kinda hot...

It's funny how bed and pillows and covers can change a conversation. Words turn quiet and you mean more and say less. It's like you can build your own little world, Population: 2.

He stuck the pencil over his ear, looking unconvinced. "Mmm. What position would you be the most comfortable for you?" I couldn't say aloud the answers that popped into my head at that question, but the flush that spread across my face like wildfire gave me away. He caught his lower lip in his teeth, and I was sure it was to contain a laugh. Most comfortable position? What about with my head stuck under a pillow?

There’s nothing to read into. I’m here to collect my beloved Damon and Stefan is just helping me.” Bonnie looked at her with her brows knitted and her mouth pursed, but didn’t venture a word. “Bonnie?” “Um-hm?” “Did I just say what I thought I said?” “Um-hm.” Elena, with one motion, gathered an armful of pillows and deposited them on her face.

Are you still scared of Mike's room?" I say, giggling. He falls face first onto the pillow I just threw at him. In a muffled voice he replies, "No, I'd rather just stay with you.

They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer’s 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman.

Before I leave the bathroom, I pinch my cheeks hard to bring blood to the surface of my skin. It’s stupid, but I don’t want to look weak and exhausted in front of everyone. When I walk back into Tobias’s room, Uriah is sprawled across the bed facedown; Christina is holding the blue sculpture above Tobias’s desk, examining it; and Lynn is poised above Uriah with a pillow, a wicked grin creeping across her face. Lynn smacks Uriah hard in the back of the head, Christina says, “Hey Tris!” and Uriah cries, “Ow! How on earth do you make a pillow hurt, Lynn?” “My exceptional strength,” she says. “Did you get smacked, Tris? One of your cheeks is bright red.” I must not have pinched the other one hard enough. “No, it’s just … my morning glow.

Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish.

Say stop, whenever you want to stop. Understand?" I nodded. "Do you want to stop now?" My head moved back and forth to the pillow. "Thank God.

Shh." I squeeze his hand. His palm feels clammy. "We have to keep it down, okay? We don't want my dad coming in." He grits his teeth against more shivers. "Always knew I'd end up in your bed . . . and hear you say those words one day." He manages a smirk. Jeb snarls. "Unbelievable. Even when he's at death's door he's a tool." He arranges a pillow beneath Morpheus's neck. "Why don't you keep your mouth shut while we help you." Morpheus laughs weakly, his skin flashing with blue light. "What say Alyssa"--his breath rattles--"give my mouth something else to do?

I am plenty romantic. Just this morning while he slept, I had left Carter a box of his favorite candy next to his pillow - Globs: piles of white chocolate covered, crushed potato chips and pretzels drizzled with caramel. I figured it would soften him up to the note I placed next to the box telling him if he left the toilet seat up one more time and my ass got an involuntary bath at six in the morning, I would put super glue on the head of his penis while he slept. I had even signed the note with a couple of Xs and Os. Who says romance is dead?

Oh no, I never do much ironing, except the outside clothes. We must not iron out the fresh air and sunshine, you know. It is much more healthful not to, the doctors say.” Seriously, there is something very refreshing about sheets and pillow slips just fresh from the line, after being washed and dried in the sun and air. Just try them that way and see if your sleep is not sweeter.

Lynn smacks Uriah hard in the back of the head, Christina says, “Hey Tris!” and Uriah cries, “Ow! How on earth do you make a pillow hurt, Lynn?” “My exceptional strength,” she says.

Hodge says he's on his way and he hopes you can both manage to cling to your flickering sparks of life until he gets here," she told Simon and Jace. "Or something like that." "I wish he'd hurry," Jace said crossly. He was sitting up in bed against a pair of fluffed white pillows, still wearing his filthy clothes. "Why? Does it hurt?" Clary asked. "No. I have a high pain threshold. In fact, it's less of a threshold and more of a large and tastefully decorated foyer. But I do get easily bored." He squinted at her. "Do you remember back at the hotel when you promised that if we lived, you'd get dressed up in a nurse's outfit and give me a sponge bath?" "Actually, I think you misheard," Clary said. "It was Simon who promised you the sponge bath." Jace looked involuntarily over at Simon, who smiled at him widely. "As soon as I'm back on my feet, handsome.

All the time I think I can never love you more than I already do. And then you do something or say something, and I love you more than ever. Like just now. Like now. How is it possible? Can you love someone more and more and at the same time, all the time, love them as much as it's possible to love someone?

They say love is blind, but in your case I’m assuming it’s also deaf, dumb, and completely brain dead.

I will say, this bed is really comfortable... What is it a pillow top? Damn, I slept great.

Your mother says she will be brave and keep a stiff upper lip,” said Father. “Americans are heartless. I will cry into my pillow every night.

If I ever meet with the man who fulfills my ideal, I shall make it a condition of the marriage settlement, that I am to have chocolate under the pillow.

Because my patient just sat herself up--and I'm not talking about her raising her torso off the damn pillows. I wasn't there when she did it and I need to see how it happened." Red Sox seemed to stop breathing. "What...I'm sorry. What the fuck are you saying." "Do I need to reenact it in charades or some shit?" "I'll pass on that--I so don't need you on your knees in front of me with only a towel on." "Which makes two of us." "Wait, are you serious?" "Yeah. I'm really not interested in blowing you, either.

I can't wait to tell him one day," she says with a giggle. "'Hey, Chaz, guess what? We knew where your precious car was all the time.' I'd like to take a photo of his face. What do you think?" "I reckon I'd smile really nicely in the photo," Santangelo says behind me, yanking me out of the way, "knowing that you'll be keeping it under your pillow for the rest of your life.

They say don’t fall in love with writers because their poems are messy and their letters are empty words dressed up to look pretty. But I say fall in love with me because underneath the mess and in between the lines is a heart too full of love that would follow you to any city.

I’ve always been a slow learner in some areas of my life.mostly the areas known as myself. Or maybe I should say ‘selves.’because the fact is, I’ve never, even as a child, felt I’m only one self, only one person. I’ve always felt I’m quite a few more than one. For example, there’s my jokey self, there’s my morose and fed-up self,there’s my lewd and disgusting self. There’s my clever-clogs self, and my fading-violet-who-cant-make-up-her-mind-about-anything self. There’s my untidy-clothes-everywhere-all-over-my-room self, and my manically tidy self when I want my room to be minimalist and Zen to the nth degree. There’s my confidant, arrogant self and my polite and reasonable and good listener self. There’s my self-righteous self and my wickedly bad self, my flaky self and my bsentimental self. There are selfs I like and selfs I don’t like.there’s my little-girl selfnwhonlikes to play silly games and there’s my old-woman self when I’m quite sure I’m eighty and edging towards geriatric. The self I show in action at any moment depends on where I am, who I’m with, the circumstances of the situation and the mood I’m in.

Lucy,” is all he can seem to say. “Lucy. How am I going to walk away from tonight? Seriously. How?” I get goosebumps. I’m wondering the same thing. I let my head drop to one side, and we kiss. I’m hoarse and breathless. “I’m gonna die tonight. Please take your pants off.” “I want that embroidered on a pillow.

people always say that it hurts at night and apparently screaming into your pillow at 3am is the romantic equivalent of being heartbroken. but sometimes it’s 9am on a tuesday morning and you’re standing at the kitchen bench waiting for the toast to pop up and the smell of dusty sunlight and earl gray tea makes you miss him so much you don’t know what to do with your hands.

If a boy, if a man, asks you if you're all right and you say yes, he'll always believe you and get on with what he wants to do. It's just the way they're made.

One day you are going to look at someone and say, "I survived." There is great satisfaction in that. Even more if the person staring back comes from your mirror.

This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, "It's too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings." And then someone else on board says something like, "But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d'oeuvres." At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs who'd been hired by the father who owned the yacht, hired for the express purpose of removing any and all agitators on the yacht to keep them from making unnecessary waves, or even referencing the father or the yacht itself. Meanwhile, the man thrown overboard begs for his life, and the people on the small inflatable rafts can't get to him soon enough, or they don't even try, and the yacht's speed and weight cause an undertow. Then in whispers, while the agitator gets sucked under the yacht, private agreements are made, precautions are measured out, and everyone quietly agrees to keep on quietly agreeing to the implied rule of law and to not think about what just happened. Soon, the father, who put these things in place, is only spoken of in the form of lore, stories told to children at night, under the stars, at which point there are suddenly several fathers, noble, wise forefathers. And the boat sails on unfettered.

If I had any say and my life to do again, I’d have moved us closer.

27. Trees I shall say absolutely nothing about the spindle tree.

If you'd only let me come by myself, none of this would have happened. Having you around makes everything worse.' She buried her head under her pillow. 'Stop it! you're so cold! You're heartless, you little robot!' The pillow muffled her words, but they still stung. 'I feel things,' I said. 'I'm not a robot!' I stamped my foot and screamed. Then I burst into tears. I touched the wet little drops and held them toward her. 'See, I'm not a robot. This is proof.

Holly smiled weakly. Gerry would know exactly how she was feeling, he would know exactly what to say and he would know exactly what to do. He would give her one of his famous hugs and all her problems would melt away. She grabbed a pillow from her bed and hugged it tight. She couldn't remember the last time she hugged someone, really hugged someone. And the depressing thing was that she couldn't imagine ever embracing anyone the same way again.

Reed’s face inches closer to mine on the pillow as he says, “Let me try to explain something to you, Evie. All of these years that I have been here, it is as if I have been sleeping. I have to always pretend to be something that I am not—pretend to be human. When I am not pretending to be human, then I am hunting evil, vicious angels who want nothing more than to…” his voice trails off and there is hollowness in his tone that reflects the loneliness of his existence. “But now, I am awake, for the first time in my existence, and not only am I awake, but I feel flames when you are near me. You have changed things for me. There is no reason to pretend around you. If I had to live without you now…now that I know what I have been missing…” The need in his voice makes me want to promise him anything, give him anything, just to fill that void in him. “I cannot go back to sleep, Evie. You are the only thing that makes me want to live. If you leave here, if you ascend to Paradise, or even if you are cast into the abyss, or taken there by the Fallen…I will have to follow you, no matter where you go. Even if I have to pursue you into the dark…if you cease to be, then so will I. You are my sin and my redemption.

I have to remove your . . . whatever this is.’ ‘Nightdress,’ I say, my cheek against the pillow. ‘It’s from Paris. You’ve been alive how long and still can’t identify a woman’s clothing?

Packing up. The nagging worry of departure. When shutting drawers and flinging wide an hotel wardrobe, or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa, I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood. This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room. Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure. If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it.... It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me. I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun. We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took. And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things. They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums. Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me. If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe. Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.

Life is too short for games unless it’s a game of cards. Don’t text back right away; if you like them, pretend you don’t; and don’t you dare say I love you first. Well screw all that. I will text you back in three seconds; I will tell you that I like you; and if I love you, I’ll tell you every chance I get. Life is unpredictable, and I’d rather play every card as honestly as I can than have a deck full of regrets and what-ifs.

You won’t remember, they say, when someone drifts away. One minute you are talking about life’s greatest adventures and listening to mixtapes on Monday afternoons, and the next their presence is replaced with silence: a fragile nonexistence with nothing else to lose. But I will always remember our drift. It took up all this space, like a planet with many moons. It was the year you forgot my birthday.

It kind of scares me though, to keep wearing it every day like I do. What happens when I run out of it? Will I forget what she looked like? What it looked like when the sun reflected on her hair? The way her pillow always smelled like her? Will my memory of her run out too?

But life is not about half doing. You cannot half love or half accept or half live. It's about giving everything you have. When you are old and worn, do you really want to look back and say you gave the bare minimum? You owe yourself more than that.

I doubt the world is in the mood for a miracle, so we know not to expect a happily-ever-after. I only care about the endings we lived through today. Like how I stopped being someone afraid of the world and the people in it.” “And I stopped being someone I don’t like,” I say. “You wouldn’t have liked me.” He’s tearing up and smiling. “And you wouldn’t have waited for me to be brave. Maybe it’s better to have gotten it right and been happy for one day instead of living a lifetime of wrongs.” He’s right about everything. We rest our heads on his pillows. I’m hoping we die in our sleep; that seems like the best way to go.

They say transitions happen with big events. Like a wedding, your birthday, or your gradation. But maybe it's really in the smaller moments, like when you look at yourself in the mirror and realize how far you've come or how far you still have to go.

Last night... I'm sorry if I was too forward with you." He paused. "Celaena, you're grimacing." Had she been making a face? "Er- sorry." "It did upset you, then!" "What did?" "The kiss!" ... "Oh, it was nothing," she said, thumping her chest as she cleared her throat. "I didn't mind it. But I didn't hate it, if that's what your thinking!" She immediately regretted saying it. "So, you liked it?" He grinned lazily. "No! Oh, go away!" She flung herself onto her pillows, pulling the blankets over her head. She was going to die from embarrassment.

Sometimes I’d hide him under the covers (Rory, not the mailman) so that when Victor turned down the bed there was Rory on his pillow, as if to say, “SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKER! THERE’S A DEAD RACCOON IN YOUR BED AND HE WANTS SOME SNUGGLIN’.

It's always the accent that drives you American women crazy. I'd no idea you fancied it, too…” he trailed off. “Oooh, fancied it. Say more like that,” I begged, smiling into the pillow. “Like what, Grace?” “Talk British to me,” I whispered, only half joking. “Dustbins.” “More,” I encouraged. “Crumpets.” “More!” I demanded. “Knickers.” If I could hear Jack Hamilton say a second word for the rest of my life, it would be knickers. “Say put another shrimp on the barbie!” I cried. “Grace, that's Australian,” he chided. “Say it!” “Fine. Put another shrimp on the barbie. Bloody hell,” he muttered. “Aaaahhhhhhh!” I screamed into the phone.

Why can't you say it?" I hardened my voice. "Because I'm telling you, you never have. I'd have remembered." He stared at me with disbelief. Then he lunged forward, pushing me flat in the pillows once more. He leaned over me, his mouth a brush of lips away from my own, his breath warm on my face. "Love you? Of course I love you. Baby, I fucking worship you.

I hate you." My sister said it different than she said it to my dad. She meant it with me.She really did. "I love you," was all I could say in return. "You're a freak, you know that? Everyone says so. They always have." "I'm trying not to be.” Then, I turned around and walked to my room and closed my door and put my head under my pillow and let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be.[pp.28]

Aye. You gender-malcontent. You otherling,” she said, the fog of anesthesia wearing off. She could see him clearly now. The curl of his lashes. The white flecks of skin over his dry lips. “Me too. I am a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body. Do you think my body couldn’t decide what it wanted to be?” “I think it doesn’t matter because we get to decide what our bodies are or are not,” he answered. Aster sat up, and Theo helped her prop two pillows beneath her head. “Is that so? Then I am magic. I say it, therefore it is true,” she said.

Well maybe you'll get lucky. Maybe you'll marry a man who is rich and powerful and wise AND wonderful to be naked with.' I can't help the giggle that bubbles from my mouth. 'Maybe,' she says, 'you should ask all your suitors to drop their breeches so you can inspect the merchandise.' 'Mara!' 'You could make it a royal command.' I toss a pillow at her.

Julia closed her eyes and concentrated on the words to Lacrimosa, sung loudly and hauntingly by the multi-voice choir in Latin… Day of Weeping,on which will rise from ashes guilty man for judgment. So have mercy, O Lord, on this man. Compassionate Lord Jesus, grant them rest. Amen. What is wrong with Gabriel that he listens to this over and over again? And what does it say about me that I can’t help but feel close to him when I listen to it? All I’ve done is replace his photograph with his cd — I’m just not sleeping with it under my pillow. I am one sick puppy.

Here you sit on your high-backed chair Wonder how the view is from there I wouldn't know 'cause I like to sit Upon the floor, yeah upon the floor If you like we could play a game Let's pretend that we are the same But you will have to look much closer Than you do, closer than you do And I'm far too tired to stay here anymore And I don't care what you think anyway 'Cause I think you were wrong about me Yeah what if you were, what if you were And what if I'm a snowstorm burning What if I'm a world unturning What if I'm an ocean, far too shallow, much too deep What if I'm the kindest demon Something you may not believe in What if I'm a siren singing gentlemen to sleep I know you've got it figured out Tell me what I am all about And I just might learn a thing or two Hundred about you, maybe about you I'm the end of your telescope I don't change just to suit your vision 'Cause I am bound by a fraying rope Around my hands, tied around my hands And you close your eyes when I say I'm breaking free And put your hands over both your ears Because you cannot stand to believe I'm not The perfect girl you thought Well what have I got to lose And what if I'm a weeping willow Laughing tears upon my pillow What if I'm a socialite who wants to be alone What if I'm a toothless leopard What if I'm a sheepless shepherd What if I'm an angel without wings to take me home You don't know me Never will, never will I'm outside your picture frame And the glass is breaking now You can't see me Never will, never will If you're never gonna see What if I'm a crowded desert Too much pain with little pleasure What if I'm the nicest place you never want to go What if I don't know who I am Will that keep us both from trying To find out and when you have Be sure to let me know What if I'm a snowstorm burning What if I'm a world unturning What if I'm an ocean, far too shallow, much too deep What if I'm the kindest demon Something you may not believe in What if I'm a siren singing gentlemen to sleep Sleep... Sleep...

I imagine you could send letters, though.” “Never with enough postage.” “No, faxes,” Gansey corrected himself. “Pretend I didn’t say letters. Faxes is funnier.” Blue laughed into the pillow. “Okay, that was all.” “All what?” “All I had to say.” “I’ve learned a lot. I’m glad you misdialed.” “Well. Easy mistake to make,” she said. “Might do it again.” A very, very long pause. She opened her mouth to fill it, then changed her mind and didn’t. She was shivering again, even though she wasn’t cold with the pillow on her legs. “Shouldn’t,” Gansey said finally. “But I hope you do.

Time to go,” he says. “I already see this heading somewhere I’m too drunk to go right now. I’ll see you tomorrow night.” I jump up and run and block the window before he can leave. He stops in front of me and folds his arms over his chest. “Stay,” I say. “Please. Just lay in bed with me. We can put pillows between us and I promise not to seduce you since you’re drunk. Just stay for an hour, I don’t want you to go yet.” He immediately turns and heads back to the bed. “Okay,” he says simply. He throws himself onto my bed and pulls the covers out from beneath him. That was easy.

What do you see when you look at me?” My eyes narrowed and I pressed my lips together, weighing my thoughts. All of his bimbo admirers aside, what did I see? What did my gut tell me about this man? What did it say that allowed me to wind up here with him, under such impulsive circumstances? “You’re a sad man,” I swallowed. “You’re arrogant and set in your ways, but that creates a fortress for you. It’s your safe haven. Behind the moat is someone who has lost something he loved, only I’m not sure what, or who. You’re afraid of something and your loyalty is hidden away in a cell, wounded by betrayal.” I rested my head on the pillow. “That’s what I see.” “On second thought,” he exhaled, letting his head drop next to mine. “You’re psychic.

People like to say that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. There tends to be a whispered reverence around the expression, as if it has magical healing powers. Better to be hated than ignored by that angry ex of yours; better to be hated than ignored, generally. Otherwise, you may spend your life staring straight down the barrel of the opposite of love. But I think that's bullshit. Nonsense print copy for a paper towel. A sound bit e to needlepoint on a throw pillow. Could indifference really be worse than hate? How depressing to think we could be spending most of our days surrounded by people who feel something worse than hate toward us.

People grow apart. Distance doesn’t always mean miles. Sometimes it means two friends going separate ways. The person you poured your heart out to, traveled through new cities with, called at three in the morning just to get ice cream, suddenly becomes someone who can’t even text you back. So, you start to wonder what happened and where it all went wrong. How can this person who was once your lifeline now be a stranger who holds all your memories? But people change and become caught up in their own lives. They may not even realize they are doing it. Sometimes friends disappear and we don’t know why. But you don’t deserve to be ignored. The things you have to say are important; you should never allow someone to make you feel as though they aren’t. You should never tolerate someone who can’t acknowledge the news you have to share. You don’t need this in your life. Let go of people who don’t make you happy.

You promised to be on your best behavior,” I reminded him, breathless. “You kissed me,” he growled. His voice had gone very deep. “Well, but you started it by kissing my neck.” “True. I hadn't planned that.” His sultry voice, paired with those blazing eyes, told me I needed to get away from him. I hurried to the end of the bed, where I jumped off and began to pace back and forth, yanking out my loose hairband and pulling my hair back into a tight ponytail. I tried hard not to think about the taste of his lips. I'd had my first kiss, and I'd never be the same. “Why did you stop?” he asked. “Because you were moving on to other things.” He scratched his chin and cheek. “Hmm, moved too quickly. Rookie mistake.” I crossed my arms again, watching him speculate internally like a coach outlining a play that had gone wrong. Incredible. Then he sized me up in his sights again. “But I can see you still want me.” I gave him my meanest stare, but it was hard to look at him. Gosh, he was hot! And a total player. The kiss meant nothing to him. “Oh,” he said with mock sadness, “there it goes. Mad instead? Well, sort of. You can't seem to muster a really good anger—” “Stop it!” “Sorry, was I saying that out loud?” “I can read people, too, you know. Well, not you, but at least I have the decency to try not to notice, to give them some sort of emotional privacy!” “Yes, how very decent of you.” He hadn't moved from his languid position on my bed. I leaned forward, grabbing a pillow and throwing it at him. “Pillow fight?” He raised an eyebrow. “Get off my bed. Please. I'm ready to go to sleep.

Peter sighed into the water, and his breath sent a small circle of it into tiny ripples. "It seems cowardly, getting old. Don't you think?" She rolled onto her side to look at him, pillowing her ear with her right arm, and letting her fingers dangle in the water beyond her head. "How is it cowardly?" Peter kept his eyes on his reflection. "You just curl up around yourself, and sit by the fire, and try to be comfortable. When you get old, you just get smaller inside, and you try not to pay attention to anything but your blankets and your food and your bed." "Being comfortable is not a bad thing." Peter shrugged and turned his head to look at her as if it was a matter of fact. "Of course it is. Old people lock out all the scary, wild things. It's like they don't exist." She wanted to say that she would have liked for those things not to exist, either, but she held her tongue, because she didn't want to sound like a coward.

Then I stay beside you for as long as we have." He kept stroking my hair. Cats like to be petted. Cait Sidhe like to pet. "October, I meant it when I told you I was not leaving you. I will never leave you while both of us are living. You were not quite this human when I met you, and you were far less human when I finally allowed myself to love you. But the essential core of your being has remained the same no matter what the balance of your blood." "How is it that you always know the exact right stupid romance novel thing to say?" I asked, leaning up to kiss him. He smiled against my lips. When I pulled back, he said. "I was a student of Shakespeare before the romance novel was even dreamt. Be glad I do not leave you horrible poetry on your pillow, wrapped securely around the bodies of dead rats.

Not easy when you can't talk, is it?" I grinned. "Well, not easy for you but I could get used to it." He grumbled, but I could see relif in his eyes, like he was glad to see me smile. "SO i was right, wasn't I? It's still youm even in wolf form." He grunted. "No sudden uncontrollable urges to go kill something?" He rolled his eyes. "Hey, you're the one who was worried." I paused. "And i don't smell like dinner, right?" I got a real look for that one. "Just covering all the bases." He gave a rumbling groul, like a chuckle, and settled in, lowering his head to his front paws, gaze on me. I tried to get comfortable, but the ground was ice-cold through his swearshirt, and i was wearing only my new pajamas, a light jacket, and sneakers. Seeing me shiver, he stretched a front leg toward the swearshirt, pawing the edge and snarling when he realized he couldnt grab it. "The lack of opposanle thumbs is going to take some getting used to, huh?" He motioned me closer with his muzzel. When I pretended not to understand, he twisted and gingerly took the hem of the swearshirt between his teeth, lips curled in discust as he tugged it. "Okay, okay. I'm just trying not to croud you." That wasnt the only reason i was uncomfortanle getting too cozy with him now, but he just grunted, again seeming to say it was fine. i moved over beside himm. He shifted, his torso making a partial wind block, the boddy heat from the change still blasting like a furnace. He grunted. "Yes, thats better.thanks. now get some rest." i had no idea what would happen now. i doubted derek did either. he'd been focused on getting through the change. what i did know was that this was only half the process. he had to change back, and he'd need time and rest for that. and how would it happen? did he have to wait until his body was ready, like he did with the change to a wolf? how long would that be?hours?days? Feeling his gaze on me, i forced a smile and pushed back my worries. it would be okat. he could change. that was the important thing. when i relaxed, he shifted closer, fur brushing my hand. i tentatively touched it, feeling the coarse top layer and soft undercoar. he leaned against my hand, as if to sat it was okaym and i buried my hand in his fur, his skin so hot from the change it was like putting my numb hands on a radiator. my cool fingers must have felt just as good, because he closed his eyes and shifte until i was leaning on him. within minutes he was asleep. i closed my eyes, meaning to rest for just a moment, but the next thing i knew, i was waking up, curled on my side, using derek as a pillow. i jumped. he looked over at me. "S-sorry, I didn't mean-" He cut me short with a growl, telling me off for apologizing.

Our house was littered with books- in the kitchen, under the beds, stuck between the couch pillows--far too many for her the ever finish. I suppose I thought if my grandmother kept up her interests, she wouldn't die; she'd have to stay around to finish the books she was so fond of. "I've got to get to the bottom of this one," she'd say, as if a book were no different from a pond or a lake. I thought she'd go on reading forever but it didn't work out that way.

Two uniformed trolls were standing in front of Sergeant Colon's high desk, with a slightly smaller troll between them. This troll was wearing a slightly downcast expression. It was also wearing a tutu and had a small pair of gauzed wings glued to its back. " - happen to know that trolls don't have any tradition of a Tooth Fairy," Colon was saying. "Especially not one called' - he looked down - "Clinkerbell. So how about we just call it breaking and entering without a Thieves' Guild license?" "Is racial prejudice, not letting trolls have a Tooth Fairy," Clinkerbell muttered. One of the troll guards upended a sack on the desk. Various items of silverwear cascaded over the paperwork. "And this is what you found under their pillows, was it?" said Colon. "Bless dere little hearts," said Clinkerbell.

His heart cracked, and he fell in love. He wondered if she would marry him. “Tu sei pazzo,” she told him with a pleasant laugh. “Why am I crazy?” he asked. “Perché non posso sposare.” “Why can’t you get married?” “Because I am not a virgin,” she answered. “What has that got to do with it?” “Who will marry me? No one wants a girl who is not a virgin.” “I will. I’ll marry you.” “Ma non posso sposarti.” “Why can’t you marry me?” “Perché sei pazzo.” “Why am I crazy?” “Perché vuoi sposarmi.” Yossarian wrinkled his forehead with quizzical amusement. “You won’t marry me because I’m crazy, and you say I’m crazy because I want to marry you? Is that right?” “Si.” “Tu sei pazz’!” he told her loudly. “Perché?” she shouted back at him indignantly, her unavoidable round breasts rising and falling in a saucy huff beneath the pink chemise as she sat up in bed indignantly. “Why am I crazy?” “Because you won’t marry me.” “Stupido!” she shouted back at him, and smacked him loudly and flamboyantly on the chest with the back of her hand. “Non posso sposarti! Non capisci? Non posso sposarti.” “Oh, sure, I understand. And why can’t you marry me?” “Perché sei pazzo!” “And why am I crazy?” “Perché vuoi sposarmi.” “Because I want to marry you. Carina, ti amo,” he explained, and he drew her gently back down to the pillow. “Ti amo molto.” “Tu sei pazzo,” she murmured in reply, flattered. “Perché?” “Because you say you love me. How can you love a girl who is not a virgin?” “Because I can’t marry you.” She bolted right up again in a threatening rage. “Why can’t you marry me?” she demanded, ready to clout him again if he gave an uncomplimentary reply. “Just because I am not a virgin?” “No, no, darling. Because you’re crazy.

Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion. If you rent a cell in the luminous waffle, room 1915 or 1959, in a tall business centre hotel browing the star dust, and pull up the window, and gently - not fall, not jump - but roll out as you should for air comfort, there is always the chance of knocking clean through into your own hell a pacific noctambulator walking his dog; in this respect a back room might be safer, especially if giving on the roof of an old tenacious normal house far below where a cat may be trusted to flash out of the way. Another popular take-off is a mountaintop with a sheer drop of say 500 meters but you must find it, because you will be surprised how easy it is to miscalculate your deflection offset, and have some hidden projection, some fool of a crag, rush forth to catch you, causing you to bounce off it into the brush, thwarted, mangled and unnecessarily alive. The ideal drop is from an aircraft, your muscles relaxed, your pilot puzzled, your packed parachute shuffled off, cast off, shrugged off - farewell, shootka (little chute)! Down you go, but all the while you feel suspended and buoyed as you somersault in slow motion like a somnolent tumbler pigeon, and sprawl supine on the eiderdown of the air, or lazily turn to embrace your pillow, enjoying every last instant of soft, deep, death-padded life, with the earth's green seesaw now above, now below, and the voluptuous crucifixion, as you stretch yourself in the growing rush, in the nearing swish, and then your loved body's obliteration in the Lap of the Lord.

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't grow on trees, like in the old days. So where does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy, like being unleashed with a credit card in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss. The sloppy kiss. The peck. The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lips taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss. The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss. The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad sometimes kiss. The I know your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get older, kisses become scarce. You'll be driving home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. If you were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's red door just to see how it fits. Oh where does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile. Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling. Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss. Now what? Don't invite the kiss over and answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspicious and stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey. It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters, but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out of your body without saying good-bye, and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left on the inside of your mouth. You must nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it illuminates the room. Hold it to your chest and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a special beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow, then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C. But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection of function and desire. The I do kiss. The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

I think the day might come, Bess, when all men will know of Dickon is what they were told by Tudor historians like Rous." "Jesú, no!" Bess sounded both appalled and emphatic. "You mustn't think that. Whatever the lies being told about Dickon now, surely the truth will eventually win out. Scriptures does say that 'Great is truth and it prevails,' and I believe that, Grace." Bess straightened up in the bed, shoved yet another pillow against her back. "I have to believe that," she said quietly. "Not just for Dickon's sake, but for us all. For when all is said and done, the truth be all we have.

She has never been a pretty crier. She sobbed the way she did everything else - with passion and excess. That she had managed to keep it inside her this long was astounding to James. He thought of pushing open the half-closed door and kneeling before his wife, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and helping her upstairs. He raised his hand, stroking the wood of the door, planning to say something to calm her. But what wisdom could he offer Gus, when he could not even heed it himself? James walked upstairs again, got into bed, covered his head with a pillow. And hours later, when Gus crept beneath the sheets, he tried to pretend that he did not feel the weight of her grief, lying between them like a fitful child, so solid that he could not reach past it to touch her.

I thought how little we know about the feelings of old people. Children we understand, their fears and hopes and make-believe. I was a child yesterday. I had not forgotten. But Maxim’s grandmother, sitting there in her shawl with her poor blind eyes, what did she feel, what was she thinking? Did she know that Beatrice was yawning and glancing at her watch? Did she guess that we had come to visit her because we felt it right, it was a duty, so that when she got home afterwards Beatrice would be able to say, “Well, that clears my conscience for three months”? Did she ever think about Manderley? Did she remember sitting at the dining room table, where I sat? Did she too have tea under the chestnut tree? Or was it all forgotten and laid aside, and was there nothing left behind that calm, pale face of hers but little aches and little strange discomforts, a blurred thankfulness when the sun shone, a tremor when the wind blew cold? I wished that I could lay my hands upon her face and take the years away. I wished I could see her young, as she was once, with color in her cheeks and chestnut hair, alert and active as Beatrice by her side, talking as she did about hunting, hounds, and horses. Not sitting there with her eyes closed while the nurse thumped the pillows behind her head. “We’ve got a treat today, you know,” said the nurse, “watercress sandwiches for tea. We love watercress, don’t we?

You could have mentioned that this kid never sleeps,” Tim calls from the living room. We go in to find him slumped in the easy chair next to the pulled-out sofa bed. Andy’s sprawled out on the bed, long tan legs in a V, George gathered in her arms. Duff, still in his clothes, lies across the bottom, Harry curled in a ball on the pillow under Andy’s outstretched leg. Safety, as much as could be found, must have lain in numbers.Patsy’s fingering Tim’s nose and pulling on his bottom lip, her eyes wide-blue open. “Sorry, man,” Jase says. “She’s usually good to go at bedtime.” “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to this kid? That is one fucked-up story. How is that a book for babies?” Jase laughs. “I thought it was about babysitting.” “Hell no, it’s addiction. That friggin’ mouse is never satisfied. You give him one thing, he wants something else, and then he asks for more and on and on and on. Fucked up. Patsy liked it, though. Fifty thousand times.” Tim yawns, and Patsy snuggles more comfortably onto his chest, grabbing a handful of shirt. “So what’s doin’?” We tell him what we know—nothing—then put the baby in her crib. She glowers, angry and bewildered for a moment, then grabs her five pacifiers, closes her eyes with a look of fierce concentration, and falls very deeply asleep.

I reach over and stroke her hair. When I do, a few of the strands fall off in my fingers. I pull my hand back and slowly wrap them around my finger as I walk to my room and pick my purple hair clip up off the floor. I open the clip and place the strands of hair inside and snap it shut. I place the clip under my bedroom pillow and I go back to my mother’s room. I slide into the bed beside her and wrap my arms around her. She finds my hand and we interlock fingers as we talk without saying a single word.

Dear Yesteryear, I do not feel alone anymore. I have found love. Maybe I should say love has found me. Well, to be fair, we found each other. Yesterday, I didn’t have a home. Yesterday, I didn’t have a pillow where I could lay my head. Yesterday, it was hard to find peace. Yesterday, I wondered if morning would ever come. Yesterday, I was unable to love, dream, and trust. Yesterday, I didn’t understand life. Yesterday, I was walking in my shadow. I didn’t know if I had meaning or a purpose. I am healing from my yesteryears. However, I am still rough around the edges and still have a lot to learn. I used to be so empty inside, but now I have lovely people to fill my no-longer-empty arms. Yesterday, my path was different. I was confused, not knowing if I should go right or left— move forward or turn around. I do not know what life has in store, but I know for a fact that I do not have to worry about the deadly and narrow path anymore. Yesterday, my sun was blocked by my shadows and everything thing else that came along that didn’t serve me. However, today, the sun is shining brighter than it ever has in my entire life. Yesterday, I will never forget you. You’ve taught me many lessons. I was taught lessons that a young person should never experience or even know about. Some lessons in life leave permitted marks. There have been many lessons I’ve learned that have left so many scars on my heart, but life goes on. I use to be overwhelmed by hate, disbelief, and not knowing if I was going to make it. Now, I am surrounded by warm hugs, smiles, love, and peace. Yesteryear, you will never be forgotten. I am healing, and it is a beautiful thing.

He looked around for the most trustworthy person, for someone to be on his team. He took a gamble and dumped Bat into Lily's arms. "Watch him for me, will you?" he asked. "Make sure he gets out all right?" "Put that werewolf down immediately, Lily," Raphael ordered. "It really hurts that you would say that," Bat muttered, and shut his eyes. Lily considered Bat's head, pillowed on her lavender bosom. "I don't want to put him down," she announced. "The Shadowhunter gave this DJ to me." Bat opened one eye. "Do you like music?" "I do," said Lily. "I like jazz." "Cool," said Bat. Raphael threw up his hands. "This is ridiculous! Fine," he snapped. "Fine. Let's just vacate the collapsing mansion, shall we? Can we all agree on that one fun, non-suicidal activity.

Whenever I hurt myself, my mother says it is the universe’s way of telling me to slow down. She also tells me to put some coconut oil on it. It doesn’t matter what it is. She often hides stones underneath my pillow when I come home for the weekend. The stones are a formula for sweet dreams and clarity. I dig them out from the streets, she tells me what each one is for. My throat hurts, so she grinds black pepper into a spoonful of honey, makes me eat the entire thing. My mother knows how to tie knots like a ship captain, but doesn’t know how I got that sailor mouth. She falls asleep in front of the TV only until I turn it off, shouts, I was watching that! The sourdough she bakes on Friday is older than I am. She sneaks it back and forth across the country when she flies by putting the starter in small containers next to a bag of carrots. They think it’s ranch dressing, she giggles. She makes tea by hand. Nettles, slippery elm, turmeric, cinnamon- my mother is a recipe for warm throats and belly laughs. Once she fell off of a ladder when I was three. She says all she was worried about was my face as I watched her fall.

A lot of people believe in working long days and doing dou­ble, triple, or even quadruple shifts. I'm not one of them. Neither Transmeta nor Linux has ever gotten in the way of a good night's sleep. In fact, if you want to know the honest truth, I'm a firm believer in sleep. Some people think that's just being lazy, but I want to throw my pillow at them. I have a perfectly good excuse, and I'm standing by it: You may lose a few hours of your produc­tive daytime if you sleep, oh, say, ten hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake you're alert, and your brain functions on all six cylinders. Or four, or whatever.

I want to be dipped into the world of a novel. I want to be immersed. I travel a lot for my work and my happiest moments are coming back to the hotel late at night, [knowing that a] book I’ve brought with me [is] waiting for me there. It’s like my version of chocolates on a pillow. Fiction is a necessity in my life. It’s a strange moment where the world is roiling. People are glued to the news, and rightly so. But what fiction can do is look with nuance and depth at something that’s not always looked at that way. There are those studies that say fiction teaches empathy. I feel like, here’s a chance. Reading fiction gives me a chance to look into other people and their lives. That’s incredibly moving to me.

But I thought we might get naked, just like Adam and Eve, so natural...” I gasped. I'd forgotten all about that part of my conversation with Scott! Utter humiliation. I curled into a tighter ball. “Oh, come on. You haven't even thanked me yet.” “For what?” I asked, still not looking. “For saving you from snogging that plonker. You didn't really fancy him, did you?” My cheeks burned, and I was glad to be turned away from him. I kept my mouth shut. “So that's it, then?” he asked. I ignored him. “I always wondered what it would feel like.” That made me curious enough to turn to him. “What what would feel like?” I asked. “Rejection.” He seemed in the midst of a revelation. “What are you saying? That no girl has ever told you no?” “Not one.” Well, that explained a lot. “And what about you?” I asked. "Haven't you ever stopped or said no to a girl?” He laughed as if I'd said something ridiculous. "Why would I do that?” “Lots of reasons,” I said. “Never mind, just go to sleep. We have a long day tomorrow.” I turned away from him again, punching the thick pillow and laying my head down. “I suppose I did refuse one, but she doesn't count,” he said. “Why not?” “Because she was Neph.” Discomfort gnawed at me. “This must be the part where I take a cold shower?” he asked. “Good idea.” When he was in the bathroom with the water running, I jumped down and changed into my pajamas. Then I leaped back into bed and chanted to myself, Don't think about the kiss. Don't think about the kiss. Impossible.

A Faint Music by Robert Hass Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing

What do you want?” he growled. “I just want to talk.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “You don't have to try to scare me.” He kept a straight face, and his tone was seductively low. "There's hardly any room for fear when you're so bloody turned-on.” A flash of shock hit me at his audacity. His eyes lowered to my body, but he never moved away. “Ah, there's anger now,” he said coolly, “and a bit of embarrassment.” He was reading me — reading my colors! And I couldn't see his at all. I felt stripped bare before him, vulnerable. I concentrated on why I'd gone there to begin with. “I know what we are now.” I wished my voice weren't shaky. “Congratulations.” He stood over me for a second more, savoring his power, no doubt, and then walked away, tossing the knife in the general direction of the dartboard and hitting the bull's-eye. Never missing a beat, he swaggered to a white couch with oversize pillows. He fell back onto it, propping his big, black boots on the white cushions and lounging back with arms spread wide across the back of the sofa. He stared as if daring me to talk. I had no idea what to say or do. I didn't know anymore why I'd come. Had I just wanted to barge in and say, Ha, I know what we are! and then demand information?

Do you think we're being robbed?" I whispered. He nodded gravely, then crawled over to my closet and opened it. "Did you want to borrow something more formal to wear for the robbery? I'm not sure I have anything in your size." "Shh," he whispered. "Don't you at least have a tennis racket or anything?" "You think they came here looking for a doubles partner?" He turned quickly and gave me a look, then whipped a Wiffle bat out of the mess. "Wow," I said. "You jock-type people really are single-minded, aren't you? Uh-oh, we're being robbed. Let's play ball!" "It's for a weapon," Carson whispered. "You're gonna hit them with a Wiffle bat?" "What else you got?" "Um...A pillow" "Exactly" ... "Stay behind me," he whispered. "Can I just say that I never knew this about me before, but weirdly enough this whole protective he-man thing actually turns me on." "Josie." "What," I asked. "Shut Up." I grabbed my pillow, just in case, so to speak, and tiptoed behind him around the mussed-up bed. "Maybe we should just hide in the closet." He turned around, rolled his eyes and kissed me. "Shh," he repeated.

I wanted to tell Ren the truth. I wanted to say that he was the best friend I’d ever had. That I was sorry about the way I had treated him. I wanted to tell him…that I loved him. But I couldn’t say anything. My throat was closed up, probably swollen from snake venom. All I could do was look at him as he knelt over me. That’s okay. Looking at his gorgeous face one last time is enough for me. I’ll die a happy woman. I was so tired. My eyelids were too heavy to keep open. I closed my eyes and waited for death to come. Ren cleared a space and sat down near me. Pillowing my head on his arm, he pulled me onto his lap and into his arms. I smiled. Even better. I can’t open my eyes to see him anymore, but I can feel his arms around me. My warrior angel can carry me in his arms up to heaven. He squeezed my closer to his body and whispered something in my ear that I couldn’t make out. Then darkness overtook me.

and the girl and I get into her car and drive off into the hills and we go to her room and I take off my clothes and lie on her bed and she goes into the bathroom and I wait a couple of minutes and then she finally comes out, a towel wrapped around her, and sits on the bed and I put my hands on her shoulders, and she says stop it and, after I let her go, she tells me to lean against the headboard and I do and then she takes off the towel and she's naked and she reaches into the drawer by her bed and brings out a tube of Bain De Soleil and she hands it to me and then she reaches into the drawer and brings out a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses and she tells me to put them on and I do. And she takes the tube of suntan lotion form me and squeezes some onto her fingers and then touches herself and motions for me to do the same, and I do. After a while I stop and reach over to her and she stops me and says no, and then places my hand back on myself and her hand begins again and after this goes on for a while I tell her that I'm going to come and she tells me to hold on a minute and that she's almost there and she begins to move her hand faster, spreading her legs wider, leaning back against the pillows, and I take the sunglasses off and she tells me to put them back on and I put them back on and it stings when I come and then I guess she comes too. Bowie's on the stereo and she gets up, flushed, and turns the stereo off and turns on MTV. I lie there, naked, sunglasses still on and she hands me a box of Kleenex. I wipe myself off then look through a Vogue that's lying by the side of the bed. She puts a robe on and stares at me. I can hear thunder in the distance and it begins to rain harder. She lights a cigarette and I start to dress ....

Pick one,” he says just as I reach the handle. “One what?” He nods toward the shelves. I run my hands over my face in frustration. “You drive me insane.” I move toward the shelf and look over his collection. I pause when I see a few familiar titles. “You have a whole romance section.” I giggle and pull a book from the shelf. When I open it, a receipt falls to the floor. Inspecting it, I see he’s just bought ten books and spent a few hundred dollars opting for some pricy hardcovers over paperbacks. “You just bought these?” Upon closer inspection, I see most of them are romance titles by my favorite indies. There’s also a few suspense and an older historical, all of them titles from a familiar list that I wrote on a bookmark in my bedroom. When he was in my house, he had to have snooped in my room while Sean was distracting me. “You looked through my stuff?” He keeps his eyes on his book. It’s a stupid question. And the answer is so obvious, but I can’t help myself. “You bought these for me?” Silence. And again, I’m floating off the ground as he continues to read, feigning indifference. But I know differently now, and it changes everything. Beneath that mask is a man who’s been paying attention, very close attention to me. He turns another page and pulls an empty pillow closer to his shoulder. He wants me to read, with him, in his bed. And what better way to pass a day in stormy weather than curling up with a gorgeous man and getting lost in the words.

Father Brendan Flynn: "A woman was gossiping with her friend about a man whom they hardly knew - I know none of you have ever done this. That night, she had a dream: a great hand appeared over her and pointed down on her. She was immediately seized with an overwhelming sense of guilt. The next day she went to confession. She got the old parish priest, Father O' Rourke, and she told him the whole thing. 'Is gossiping a sin?' she asked the old man. 'Was that God All Mighty's hand pointing down at me? Should I ask for your absolution? Father, have I done something wrong?' 'Yes,' Father O' Rourke answered her. 'Yes, you ignorant, badly-brought-up female. You have blamed false witness on your neighbor. You played fast and loose with his reputation, and you should be heartily ashamed.' So, the woman said she was sorry, and asked for forgiveness. 'Not so fast,' says O' Rourke. 'I want you to go home, take a pillow upon your roof, cut it open with a knife, and return here to me.' So, the woman went home: took a pillow off her bed, a knife from the drawer, went up the fire escape to her roof, and stabbed the pillow. Then she went back to the old parish priest as instructed. 'Did you gut the pillow with a knife?' he says. 'Yes, Father.' 'And what were the results?' 'Feathers,' she said. 'Feathers?' he repeated. 'Feathers; everywhere, Father.' 'Now I want you to go back and gather up every last feather that flew out onto the wind,' 'Well,' she said, 'it can't be done. I don't know where they went. The wind took them all over.' 'And that,' said Father O' Rourke, 'is gossip!

Is Etienene okay?" "Haven't seen him.He went to Ellie's last night." Just when I thought I couldn't feel any worse.I twist the corners of my pillow. "Did I,uh,say anything weird to him last night?" "Apart from acting like a jealous girlfriend and saying you never wanted to speak to him again? No. Nothing weird at all." I moan as she recounts the night for me blow by blow. "Listen," she says when she finishes, "what's the deal with you two?"" "What do you mean?" "You know what I mean.You two are inseparable." "Except when he's with his girlfriend." "Right.So what's the deal?" I groan again. "I don't know." "Have you guys...you know...done anything?" "No!" "But you like him.And he likes you, too." I stop choking my pillow. "You think?" "Please.The boy gets a boner every time you walk in the room." My eyes pop back open. Does she mean that figuratively or has she actually seen something? No. Focus, Anna. "So why-" "Why is he still with Ellie? He told you last night. He's lonely, or at least he's scared of being lonely. Josh says with all of this stuff with his mom, he's been too freaked out to change anything else in his life." So Meredith was right. Etienne is afraid of change. Why haven't I talked about this with Rashmi before? It seems obvious now.Of course she has inside information,because Etienne talks to Josh,and Josh talks to Rashmi. "You really think he likes me?" I can't help it. She sighs. "Anna.He teases you all the time. It's classic boy-pulling-girl's-pigtai-syndrome.And whenever anyone else even remotely does it,he always takes your side and tells them to shove it." "Huh." She pauses. "You really like him, don't you?" I'm struggling not to cry. "No.It's not like that." "Liar.So are you getting up today or what? You need sustenance.

shapeshifter poems by Lucille Clifton 1 the legend is whispered in the women's tent how the moon when she rises full follows some men into themselves and changes them there the season is short but dreadful shapeshifters they wear strange hands they walk through the houses at night their daughters do not know them 2 who is there to protect her from the hands of the father not the windows which see and say nothing not the moon that awful eye not the woman she will become with her scarred tongue who who who the owl laments into the evening who will protect her this prettylittlegirl 3 if the little girl lies still enough shut enough hard enough shapeshifter may not walk tonight the full moon may not find him here the hair on him bristling rising up 4 the poem at the end of the world is the poem the little girl breathes into her pillow the one she cannot tell the one there is no one to hear this poem is a political poem is a war poem is a universal poem but is not about these things this poem is about one human heart this poem is the poem at the end of the world Credit: Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton.

The last werewolf tripped over Raphael Santiago’s foot. Alec hastily hit him in the back of the head with the hilt of his seraph blade, and the werewolf stayed down. “That was an accident,” said Raphael, with Lily and Elliott sticking close behind him. “He got in my way as I was trying to leave.” “Okay,” Alec panted. He wiped dust and sweat out of his eyes. Bat the DJ staggered toward them, claws out, and Alec flipped his seraph blade so he was holding the hilt again. “Someone dropped a piece of roof on me,” Bat told him, blinking in a way that was more owlish than wolfish. “Inconsiderate.” Alec realized Bat was not so much on a murderous out-of-control rampage as mildly concussed. “Easy there,” he said, as Bat tumbled against his chest. He looked around for the most trustworthy person, for someone to be on his team. He took a gamble and dumped Bat into Lily’s arms. “Watch him for me, will you?” he asked. “Make sure he gets out all right.” “Put that werewolf down immediately, Lily,” Raphael ordered. “It really hurts that you would say that,” Bat muttered, and shut his eyes. Lily considered Bat’s head, pillowed on her lavender bosom. “I don’t want to put him down,” she announced. “The Shadowhunter gave this DJ to me.” Bat opened one eye. “Do you like music?” “I do,” said Lily. “I like jazz.” “Cool,” said Bat. Raphael threw up his hands. “This is ridiculous! Fine,” he snapped. “Fine. Let’s just vacate the collapsing mansion, shall we? Can we all agree on that one fun, non-suicidal activity?

This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, “It’s too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings.” And then someone else on board says something like, “But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d’oeuvres.” At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs who’d been hired by the father who owned the yacht, hired for the express purpose of removing any and all agitators on the yacht to keep them from making unnecessary waves, or even referencing the father or the yacht itself. Meanwhile, the man thrown overboard begs for his life, and the people on the small inflatable rafts can’t get to him soon enough, or they don’t even try, and the yacht’s speed and weight cause an undertow. Then in whispers, while the agitator gets sucked under the yacht, private agreements are made, precautions are measured out, and everyone quietly agrees to keep on quietly agreeing to the implied rule of law and to not think about what just happened. Soon, the father, who put these things in place, is only spoken of in the form of lore, stories told to children at night, under the stars, at which point there are suddenly several fathers, noble, wise forefathers. And the boat sails on unfettered.

Just that winter she had found herself saying to a young woman who worked with her at the tasting bar on Saturdays that between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. 'That doesn't mean the weaker one doesn't love the stronger,' she'd pleaded. The girl looked at her blankly. But for my mother what mattered was that as she spoke, she had suddenly identified herself as the weaker one. This revelation sent her reeling. What had she thought all those years but the opposite? She pulled her chair as close to his head as she could and laid her face on the edge of his pillow to watch him breathing, to see the flutter of the eye beneath his eyelid when he dreamed. How could it be that you could love someone so far from home? She had put billboards and roads in between them, throwing roadblocks behind her and ripping off the rearview mirror, and thought that that would make him disappear? erase their life and children? It was so simple, as she watched him, as his regular breathing calmed her, that she did not even see it happening at first. She began to think of the rooms in our house and the hours that she had worked so hard to forget spent inside of them. Like fruit put up in jars and forgotten about, the sweetness seemed even more distilled as she returned. There on that shelf were all the dates and silliness of thier early love, the braid that began to form of their dreams, the solid root of a burgeoning family. The first solid evidence of it all. Me.

No need to be embarassed. After seeing you in my cousin's nightgown, you've got nothing to hide. But why were you crying in the shower?" he murmured into her hair. She could feel his lips moving against her scalp, and feel the press of his hips through the covers, but his arms were an unyielding cage. She tried to turn over to face him, to welcome him under the covers with her, but he wouldn't let her. "I was crying because I'm frustrated! Why are you doing this?" she whispered into her pillow. "We can't, Helen," was all he said. He kissed her neck and said he was sorry over and over, but try as she might, he wouldn't let her face him. She began to feel like she was being used. "Please be patient," he begged as he stopped her hand from reaching back to touch him. She tried to sit up, to push him out of her bed, anything but suffer lying next to someone who would play with her so terribly. They wrestled a bit, but he was much better at it than she was and felt even heavier than he looked. He easily blocked every attempt she made to wrap her arms or legs or lips around him. "Do you want me at all, or do you just think it's fun to tease me like this?" she asked, feeling rejected and humiliated. "Won't you even kiss me?" She finally struggled onto her back where she could at least see his face. "If I kiss you, I won't stop," he said in a desperate whisper as he propped himself up on his elbows to look her in the eye. She looked back at him, really seeing him for the first time that night. His expression was vulnerable and uncertain. His mouth was swollen with want. His body was shaking and there was a fine layer of anxious sweat wilting his clothes. Helen relaxed back into the bed with a sigh. For some reason that obviously had nothing to do with desire, he wouldn't allow himself to be with her. "You're not laughing at me, are you?" she asked warily, just as a precaution. "No. There's nothing funny about this," he answered. He shifted himself off her and lay back down alongside her, still breathing hard. "But for some reason, you and I will never happen," she said, feeling calm. "Never say never," he said urgently, rolling back on top of her and using all of his unusually heavy mass to press her deep into the cocoon of her little-girl bed. "The gods love to toy with people who use absolutes." Lucas ran his lips around her throat and let her put her arms around him, but that was all.

It seems like I've only shut my eyes for a few minutes, but when I open them, I flinch at the sight of Haymitch sitting a couple of feet from my bed. Waiting. Possibly for several hours if the clck is right. I think about hollering for a witness, but I'm going to have to face him sooner or later. Haymitch leans forward and dangles something on a thin white wire in front of my nose. It's hard to focus on, but I'm pretty sur what it is. He drops it in to the sheets. "That is your earpiece. I will give you exactly one more chance to wear it. If you remove it from your ear again, I'll have you fitted with this." He holds up some sort of metal headgear that I instantly name the head shackle. "It's alternative audio unit that locks around your skull and under your chin until it's opened with a key. And I'll have the only key. If for some reason you're clever enough to disable it" ---- Haymitch dumps the head shackle on the bed and whips out a tiny silver chip--- "I'll authorize them to surgically implant this transmitter into your ear so that I may speak to you twenty-four hours a day." Haymitch in my head full-time. Horrifying. "I'll keep the earpiece in," I mutter "Excuse me?" He says "I'll keep the earpiece in!" I say loud enough to wake half the hospital. "You sure? Because I'm equally happy with any of the three options," he tells me "I'm sure," I say. I scrunch up the earpiece protectivley in my fist and fling the head shakle back in his face with my free hand, but he catches it easily. Probably was expecting me to throw it. "Anything else?" Haymitch rises to go. "While I was waiting. . . I ate your lunch." My eyes take in the empty stew bowl and tray on my bed table. "I'm going to report you," I mumble into my pillow. "You do that sweetheart." He goes out, safe in the knowledge that I'm not the reporting kind.

If he wasn't angry, he certainly did a good imitation. His voice was clipped and as hard as stone. She wrung her hands together. "I love you. Clay." "No, you don't." Meg felt as though he'd just slapped her. "Yes, I do. When you leave this town, I'll go with you." Narrowing his eyes, he studied her. "Will you marry me?" "Yes." "Will you give me children?" "If I can. Kirk and I were never able to conceive, but if I can have children, I want to have yours." "In this town that we move to, wherever it is, will you walk down the street with me?" "Of course." "Holding my hand?" "Yes." "And the hands of my children?" "Yes." He unfolded his arms and took a step toward her. She wanted to fling herself into his embrace, but something hard in his eyes stopped her. "And what happens, Mrs. Warner, when someone you know rides through town and points at me and calls me a yellow-bellied coward? What will you do then? Will you let go of my hand and take my children to the other side of the street? Will you pretend that you haven't kissed me, that you haven't lain with me beneath the stars?" With disgust marring his features, he turned away. "You think I'm a coward. Go home." "I don't think that. I love you." He spun around. "You don't believe in that love, you don't believe in me." "Yes, I do." He stalked toward her. She backed into the corner and bent her head to meet his infuriated gaze. "How strongly do you believe in our love?" he asked, his voice ominously low. "If they threatened to strip off your clothes unless you denied our love, would you deny our love?" He gave her no chance to respond, but continued on, his voice growing deeper and more ragged, as though he were dredging up events from the past. "If they wouldn't let you sleep until you denied our love, would you deny our love so you could lay your head on a pillow? "If they stabbed a bayonet into your backside every time your eyes drifted closed, would you deny our love so your flesh wouldn't be pierced? "If they applied a hot brand to your flesh until you screamed in agony, would you deny our love so they'd take away the iron? "If they placed you before a firing squad, would you say you didn't love me so they wouldn't shoot you?" He stepped back and plowed his hands through his hair. "You think I'm a coward. You don't think I have the courage to stand beside you and risk the anger of your father. I'd die before I turned away from anyone or anything I believed in. You won't even walk by my side." He looked the way she imagined soldiers who had lost a battle probably looked: weary, tired of the fight, disillusioned. "You don't believe in me," he said quietly. "How can you believe in our love?

Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.” “Snap ending.” Mildred nodded. “Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.” Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down. Beatty ignored her and continued: “Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” Mildred smoothed the bedclothes. Montag felt his heart jump and jump again as she patted his pillow. Right now she was pulling at his shoulder to try to get him to move so she could take the pillow out and fix it nicely and put it back. And perhaps cry out and stare or simply reach down her hand and say, “What’s this?” and hold up the hidden book with touching innocence. “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

I feel him beside me, hear the even sound of his breathing, smell the delicious saltiness of his skin. I have missed him. I move to face him, and that’s when the pain reminds me that I’ve recently been stabbed. I bury my face in the pillow, but it doesn’t quite muffle my yelp. “Emma?” Galen says groggily. I feel his hand in my hair, stroking the length of it. “Don’t move, angelfish. Stay on your stomach. I’ll go tell Rachel you’re ready for more pain medicine.” Immediately I disobey and turn my face up to him. He shakes his head. “I’ve recently learned where your stubbornness comes from.” I grimace/smile. “My mom?” “Worse. King Antonis. The resemblance is uncanny.” He leans down and presses his lips to mine and all too quickly springs back up. “Now, be a good little deviant and stay put while I go get more pain meds.” “Galen,” I say. “Hmmm?” “How bad am I hurt?” He caresses the outline of my cheek. His touch could disintegrate me. “Hurt at all is bad enough for me.” “Yeah, but you’ve always been a baby about this stuff.” I grin at his faux offense. “Your mother says it’s only a flesh wound. She’s been treating it.” “Mom is here?” “She’s downstairs. Uh…You should know that Grom is here, too.” Grom left the tribunal and headed for land? Did that mean it all ended badly? Well, even worse than my getting impaled? An urgent need to know everything about everything shimmies through me. “Whoa. Sit. Talk. Now.” He laughs. “I will, I promise. But I want to make you comfortable first.” “Well, then, you need to come over here and switch places with the bed.” A blush fills my cheeks, but I don’t care. I need him. All of him. It feels like forever since we’ve talked like this, just me and him. But talking usually doesn’t last long. Lips were made for other things, too. And Galen is especially good at the other things. He walks back and squats by the bed. “You have no idea how tempting that is.” It seems like the violet of his eyes gets darker. It’s the color they get when he has to pull away from me, when we’re about to violate a bunch of Syrena laws if we don’t stop. “But you’re not well enough to…” He runs a hand through his hair. “I’ll go get Rachel. Then we can talk.” I’m a little surprised that his argument didn’t begin with “But the law…” That is what has stopped us in the past. Now the only thing that appears to be stopping us is my stabby condition. What’s changed? And why am I not excited about it? I used to get so frustrated when he would pull away. But a small part of me loved that about him, his respect for the law and for the tradition of his people. His respect for me. Respect is a hard thing to come by when picking from among human boys. Is that respect gone? And is it my fault?

Everett and his mom broke up with me,thank you very much." "You shouldn't have made out with him in his mother's scrapbooking room," Liz said sagely. "We're seventeen,"I snapped, "and Everett and I had been dating for two months when that happened.What were we supposed to do,eat dinner with his family and keep our hands on the table where everyone could see them?I mean, you and Davis are Mr. and Mrs. Polite Reserve, and even you were macking in the hot tub an hour ago." I picked up a pink fuzzy pillow that had fallen from he bed and threw it at Liz. "You were?" Chloe gushed. "You what? Hello,I need the details of Liz and Davis." "Hayden!" Liz squealed, ducking behind Chloe. "I'm not saying you shouldn't have made out with Everett.I'm saying you shouldn't have done it in his mother's scrapbooking room.Location, location,location.You might have disorganized her supplies.Some people are very particular about their chipboard getting mixed up with their cardstock." I closed my eyes,inhaled through my nose,and felt my lungs fill with air. My blood spread the life-giving oxygen throughout my body. "Watch out,"Chloe whispered to Liz. "She's doing yoga." My eyes snapped open.So much for controlling my temper. "Why the hell didn't you tell me Nick's mother left before I went into the sauna with him?" I hollered at Chloe. "We didn't know he was here!" Liz came to Chloe's defense. "And if we'd warned you about him before he got here," Chloe explained, "You would have known he was coming.We didn't want you to leave.The two of you are surprisingly hard to throw together,let me tell you." "I'm not buying it," I informed Chloe. "You were distracted.You had your mind on taking inventory." Liz giggled,turned red, and fell back to the pillows. "Taking inventory requires enormous concentration!" Chloe said with a straight face,but she was blushing,too.

Things I Used to Get Hit For: Talking back. Being smart. Acting stupid. Not listening. Not answering the first time. Not doing what I’m told. Not doing it the second time I’m told. Running, jumping, yelling, laughing, falling down, skipping stairs, lying in the snow, rolling in the grass, playing in the dirt, walking in mud, not wiping my feet, not taking my shoes off. Sliding down the banister, acting like a wild Indian in the hallway. Making a mess and leaving it. Pissing my pants, just a little. Peeing the bed, hardly at all. Sleeping with a butter knife under my pillow. Shitting the bed because I was sick and it just ran out of me, but still my fault because I’m old enough to know better. Saying shit instead of crap or poop or number two. Not knowing better. Knowing something and doing it wrong anyway. Lying. Not confessing the truth even when I don’t know it. Telling white lies, even little ones, because fibbing isn’t fooling and not the least bit funny. Laughing at anything that’s not funny, especially cripples and retards. Covering up my white lies with more lies, black lies. Not coming the exact second I’m called. Getting out of bed too early, sometimes before the birds, and turning on the TV, which is one reason the picture tube died. Wearing out the cheap plastic hole on the channel selector by turning it so fast it sounds like a machine gun. Playing flip-and-catch with the TV’s volume button then losing it down the hole next to the radiator pipe. Vomiting. Gagging like I’m going to vomit. Saying puke instead of vomit. Throwing up anyplace but in the toilet or in a designated throw-up bucket. Using scissors on my hair. Cutting Kelly’s doll’s hair really short. Pinching Kelly. Punching Kelly even though she kicked me first. Tickling her too hard. Taking food without asking. Eating sugar from the sugar bowl. Not sharing. Not remembering to say please and thank you. Mumbling like an idiot. Using the emergency flashlight to read a comic book in bed because batteries don’t grow on trees. Splashing in puddles, even the puddles I don’t see until it’s too late. Giving my mother’s good rhinestone earrings to the teacher for Valentine’s Day. Splashing in the bathtub and getting the floor wet. Using the good towels. Leaving the good towels on the floor, though sometimes they fall all by themselves. Eating crackers in bed. Staining my shirt, tearing the knee in my pants, ruining my good clothes. Not changing into old clothes that don’t fit the minute I get home. Wasting food. Not eating everything on my plate. Hiding lumpy mashed potatoes and butternut squash and rubbery string beans or any food I don’t like under the vinyl seat cushions Mom bought for the wooden kitchen chairs. Leaving the butter dish out in summer and ruining the tablecloth. Making bubbles in my milk. Using a straw like a pee shooter. Throwing tooth picks at my sister. Wasting toothpicks and glue making junky little things that no one wants. School papers. Notes from the teacher. Report cards. Whispering in church. Sleeping in church. Notes from the assistant principal. Being late for anything. Walking out of Woolworth’s eating a candy bar I didn’t pay for. Riding my bike in the street. Leaving my bike out in the rain. Getting my bike stolen while visiting Grandpa Rudy at the hospital because I didn’t put a lock on it. Not washing my feet. Spitting. Getting a nosebleed in church. Embarrassing my mother in any way, anywhere, anytime, especially in public. Being a jerk. Acting shy. Being impolite. Forgetting what good manners are for. Being alive in all the wrong places with all the wrong people at all the wrong times.

Candlelight flickered in the adjacent bedroom. She followed the ambient warmth to the threshold and paused there, marveling at what she saw. Lucan’s austere bedroom had been transformed into something out of a dream. Four tall black pillar candles set into intricate silver sconces burned in each corner. Red silk draped the bed. On the floor before the fireplace was a cushioned next of fluffy pillows and even more crimson silk. It looked so romantic, so inviting. A room intended for lovemaking. She took a step farther inside. Behind her, the door closed softly on its own. No, not quite on its own. Lucan was there, standing on the other side of the room, watching her. His hair was damp from a shower. He wore a loosely tied, satiny red robe that skated around his bare calves, and there was a heated look in his eyes that melted her where she stood. “For you,” he said, indicating the romantic setting. “For us tonight. I want things to be special for you.” Gabrielle was moved, instantly aroused by the sight of him, but she couldn’t bear to make love the way things had been left between them. “When I left tonight, I wasn’t going to come back,” she told him from the safety of distance. If she went any closer, she didn’t think she’d have the strength to say what had to be said. “I can’t do this anymore, Lucan. I need things from you that you can’t give me.” “Name them.” It was a soft command, but still a command. He moved toward her with careful steps, as though he sensed she might bolt on him at any second. “Tell me what you need.” She shook her head. “What would be the use?” A few more slow steps. He paused just beyond an arm’s length. “I’d like to know. I’m curious what it would take to convince you to stay with me.” “For the night?” she asked quietly, hating herself for how badly she needed to feel his arms around her after what she’d been through these past several hours. “I want you, and I’m prepared to offer you anything, Gabrielle. So, tell me what you need.

Are you falling asleep before midnight?" Cassie leaned over the edge of the couch to look at Jack. He was stretched out on the floor, his head resting against a pillow near the center of the couch, his eyes closed. She was now wide awake and headache free. He wasn't in so good a shape. "The new year is eighteen minutes away." "Come kiss me awake in seventeen minutes." She blinked at that lazy suggestion, gave a quick grin, and dropped Benji on his chest. He opened one eye to look up at her as he settled his hand lightly on the kitten. "That's a no?" She smiled. She was looking forward to dating him, but she was smart enough to know he'd value more what he had to work at. He sighed. "That was a no. How much longer am I going to be on the fence with you?" "Is that a rhetorical question or do you want an answer?" If this was the right relationship God had for her future, time taken now would improve it, not hurt it. She was ready to admit she was tired of being alone. He scratched Benji under the chin and the kitten curled up on his chest and batted a paw at his hand. "Rhetorical. I'd hate to get my hopes up." She leaned her chin against her hand, looking down at him. "I like you, Jack." "You just figured that out?" "I'll like you more when you catch my mouse." "The only way we are going to catch T.J. is to turn this place into a cheese factory and help her get so fat and slow that she can no longer run and hide." Or you could move your left hand about three inches to the right right and catch her." Jack opened one eye and glanced toward his left. The white mouse was sitting motionless beside the plate he had set down earlier. "Let her have the cheeseburger. You put mustard on it." "You're horrible." He smiled. "I'm serious." "So am I." Jack leaned over, caught Cassie's foot, and tumbled her to the floor. "Oops." "That wasn't fair. You scared my mouse." Jack set the kitten on the floor. "Benji, go get her mouse." The kitten took off after it. "You're teaching her to be a mouser." "Working on it. Come here. You owe me a kiss for the new year." "Do I?" She reached over to the bowl of chocolates on the table and unwrapped a kiss. She popped the chocolate kiss into his mouth. "I called your bluff." He smiled and rubbed his hand across her forearm braced against his chest. "That will last me until next year." She glanced at the muted television. "That's two minutes away." "Two minutes to put this year behind us." He slid one arm behind his head, adjusting the pillow. She patted his chest with her hand. "That shouldn't take long." She felt him laugh. "It ended up being a very good year," she offered. "Next year will be even better." "Really? Promise?" "Absolutely." He reached behind her ear and a gold coin reappeared. "What do you think? Heads you say yes when I ask you out, tails you say no?" She grinned at the idea. "Are you cheating again?" She took the coin. "This one isn't edible," she realized, disappointed. And then she turned it over. "A real two-headed coin?" "A rare find." He smiled. "Like you." "That sounds like a bit of honey." "I'm good at being mushy." "Oh, really?" He glanced over her shoulder. "Turn up the TV. There's the countdown." She grabbed for the remote and hit the wrong button. The TV came on full volume just as the fireworks went off. Benji went racing past them spooked by the noise to dive under the collar of the jacket Jack had tossed on the floor. The white mouse scurried to run into the jacket sleeve. "Tell me I didn't see what I think I just did." "I won't tell you," Jack agreed, amused. He watched the jacket move and raised an eyebrow. "Am I supposed to rescue the kitten or the mouse?