Sticky Fingers Quotes

I love the juice but I loathe sticky fingers. Clean hands, Sansa. Whatever you do, make certain your hands are clean.

His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say.

I hate when counselors and teachers blame everything on low self-esteem in teens. Some of us actually have self-esteem, believe it or not. And when we make mistakes, it's not because of a defect in our psyche. We screw up just because.

His eyes glow in the shadows as he slides the soft liquid semen dripping down my thigh in a path leading back into my swollen entry, as if he doesn't want to come out of my body. "Sticky?" he asks in a gruff murmur, bending his head and licking my shoulder as he pushes his semen back inside with one finger.

Unrequited love and insomnia are longtime friends of mine. They might even be siblings—evil and uncaring with sticky fingers.

Come over here so I can wipe my hands on your shirt," she said, holding up her beer-sticky hands. Eyebrows raised in amusement, Blue did as she asked. He stood between her legs at the front of the car, his knees against the bumper. "Go for it," he said. Her wet fingers grazed the muscle of his abdomen as she fumbled to dry her hands on his T-shirt. Blue sucked in a breath when her hands brushed his skin, and something electric ran through her. A flush burned her cheeks. She made herself focus on the artwork on his T-shirt. "Now the ick is on you, where it belongs," she said. "You are a very nasty princess," Blue said.

It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use.

Marya put down her fork. “Why are you doing this, Koschei? I have had lovers before. You have, too. Remember Marina? The rusalka? She and I swam together every morning. We raced the salmon. You called us your little sharks.” The Tsar of Life held his knife so tightly Marya could see his knucklebones bulging. “Were any of them called Ivan? Were any of them human boys all sticky with their own innocence? I know you. I know you because you are like me, as much like me as two spoons nested in each other.” Her husband leaned close to her, the candlelight sparking in his dark, shaggy hair. “When you steal them, they mean so much more, Marousha. Trust me. I know. What did I do wrong? Was I boring? Did I ignore you? Did I not give you enough pretty dresses? Enough emeralds? I’m sure I have more, somewhere.” Marya lifted her hand and laid it on her husband’s cheek. With a blinking quickness, she drove her nails deep into his face. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that. I have worn nothing but blood and death for years. I have fought all your battles for you, just as you asked me. I have learned all the tricks you said I must learn. I have learned not to cry when I strangle a man. I have learned to lay my finger aside my nose and disappear. I have learned to watch everything die. I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too. And if I have watched all my soldiers die in front of me, if I have only been saved by my rifle and my own hands, if I have drunk more blood than water for weeks, then I take the human boy who stumbled into my tent and hold him between my legs until I stop screaming, you will not punish me for it. Are we not chyerti? Are we not devils? I will not even hear your punishment, old man.

I love messy homes, homes where a woman and kids have left their mark on every inch: sticky finger marks down the walls, trinkets and nests of pastel hair-gadgets on the mantelpiece, that smell of flowery things and ironing.

When Isaiah predicted that spears would become pruning hooks, that's a reference to cultivating. Pruning and trimming and growing and paying close attention to the plants and whether they're getting enough water and if their roots are deep enough. Soil under the fingernails, grapes being trampled under bare feet, fingers sticky from handling fresh fruit. It's that green stripe you get around the sole of your shoes when you mow the lawn. Life in the age to come. Earthy.

Being strong is important. But knowing who you can count on is equally important

Still, the thing lurks in the corners of my mind, that squat little beast called memory, its sticky fingers covering everything with a thin layer of slime.

I'm so sorry we've kept this for such a long time," she said, pulling the watch from her skirt pocket. She unfolded Mother's handkerchief from around it, and offered it to Lord Bradford cradled in her hands. "We shouldn't have taken it in the first place." Lord Bradford's eyebrows rose at the offering, and he opened his mouth, then closed it. He lowered his eyes to the books in his hands, then back to Azalea, and he managed a smile. "When we first met," he said, "ages ago, you gave me a candy stick. Just like you did now, with your hands like that. Do you remember?" Azalea raised an eyebrow. "It happened when my father had just died," he said, quietly. "You came to the graveyard, licking a candy stick. You saw me. You put the stick in my hands, folded my fingers over it, and kissed my fingertips." "That must have been sticky," said Azalea.

I sighed, sinking back, head filling with pleasant images; pictures Pietr floated to the surface. Kisses scorched along my face and neck. "Pietr...." There was a growl, and I felt fingers at the waistband of my jeans. The button opened and a hand traced along the top of my underpants. "No," I said. The kissing resumed, harder. "Jessica." The word rumbled in someone's throat. Not Pietr's. To him, I was Jess. "No," I insisted, trying to pry my eyes open. Something was wrong....Not Pietr... I pushed at the chest above me, my eyelids stinging as I willed them apart. "Relax..." a voice said, lips dragging along the cornerof my jaw, filling my head with honey, sticky and sweet....

You wouldn’t break an oath,’ said Damen, past the feeling in his chest. ‘Even to me.’ He had to force himself back. The tent was large enough to accommodate the movement, four paces between them. Laurent didn’t answer. He still had a hand clutched to his shoulder, his fingers sticky with blood. Laurent said, ‘Even to you?’ He

Hope... is those first tiny buds that form at the very end of winter. How dry they look! How dead! And how cold they are in our fingers! But not for long. They grow big, then sticky, then swollen, and then the whole world is green.

Inside, Howl was still sitting on the stool. He sat in an attitude of utter despair. And he was covered all over in thick green slime. There were horrendous, dramatic, violent quantities of green slime – oodles of it. It covered Howl completely. It draped his head and shoulders in sticky dollops, heaping on his knees and hands, trickling in glops down his legs and dripping off the stool in sticky strands. It was in oozing ponds and crawling pools over most of the floor. Long fingers of it had crept into the hearth. It smelled vile. “Save me!” Calcifer cried in a hoarse whisper. He was down to two desperately flickering small flames. “This stuff is going to put me out!” Sophie held up her skirt and marched as near Howl as she could get – which was not very near. “Stop it!” she said. “Stop it at once! You are behaving just like a baby!

I couldn’t tell you why the carnival lured me with its sticky fingers and bright, whirling colors, except to say that it was different, and that excited me. I’d only read about ‘different’ in books, never experienced it for myself. Perhaps it was a case of be careful what you wish for.

The passageway smelled of smoke: burning wood, a torch, acrid. His head ached. Blood was wet and sticky upon his arm and on his fingers, and the orange glow of torchlight played from behind his back and over the corridor walls, leaping like a bonfire. There was a strange familiarity to it: the narrow walls in around him. And when he came to a wooden door set in the wall, he put his hand upon it and pushed it open. There was a room, and a pallet inside it; a small torch burned low in a socket upon the wall. A man lay upon the cot, his face bruised and battered, his hands curled against his chest bloody: and Laurence knew him; knew him and knew himself. He remembered another door opening, in Bristol, three years before, and a voice asking him to come outside his prison, in a Britain under siege. “Tenzing,” Laurence said, and, as Tharkay opened feverish eyes, went to help him stand.

Still, I wonder if more women artists, musicians and writers aren't household names because we don't have enough faith in our own pursuits to give ourselves the time we desperately need to be transformed by a creative vision. Maybe that glass ceiling isn't really made of glass at all, but of sticky little fingers, dishes piled in the sink, and mortgages that demand two incomes.

Lea, I want to lick him up like a freaking cherry ice pop, let him melt in my mouth, get all sticky and lick my fingers clean. But so does every other girl he meets. And I'm like the last girl in line, a line that freaking wraps around the corner.

You say cute. I say plague-carrying, sticky-fingered dirt monsters,” Sheridan said slapping Eve on the shoulder as she passed her to leave the room.

few things were more disturbing than sticky fingers. Forest fires, perhaps. And people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens.

I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw. The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn’t be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike. I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn’t feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror’s reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus. These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall. The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. ‘Who are you?’ I’d ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn’t me. I’d watch my lips moving and say it again, ‘Who are you?

I was ten years old, and I was still playing conkers and knocking off sweet shops while she was sitting on the linoleum floor of her cell sawing at her wrists with a bit of broken glass she'd got from heaven-knows-were. Cut her fingers up, too, but she did it all right. They found her in the morning, sticky, red, and cold.

The woman had gasped beneath his heavy body. He rubbed against her, lubricated by the warm, sticky liquid, but as her body gradually grew cold, he felt as though they'd been glued together. She seemed to be see-sawing between agony and ecstasy, but finally Satake pressed his lips over hers to quiet the groans-of pain or pleasure-that were leaking from her mouth. He found the hole that he had made in her side and worked his finger deep into the opening. Blood was pumping from the wound, staining their sex a gruesome crimson. He wanted to get further inside, to melt into her. As he was about to come, he pulled his lips from her and she whispered in his ear: "I'm finished . . . finished." "I know," he'd said, and he could still hear the exact sound of his own voice.

Some instinct made her lift her hand and cup his cheek with her fingers. The room was too dark for her to see him, but she could feel the stickiness of the blood, and a wetness that was not blood. "Little bird," he said once more, his voice raw and harsh as steel on stone. Then he rose from the bed. Sansa heard cloth ripping, followed by the softer sound of retreating footsteps. When she crawled out of bed, long moments later, she was alone. She found his cloak on the floor, twisted up tight, the white wool stained by blood and fire. The sky outside was darker by then, with only a few pale green ghosts dancing against the stars. A chill wind was blowing, banging the shutters. Sansa was cold. She shook out the torn cloak and huddled beneath it on the floor, shivering.

Dante watched Tess eat the thick, caramel-laced brownie, feeling her pleasure radiate across the small space that separated them on the river-walk bench. She’d offered him a bite, and although his kind could not consume crude human food in anything more than a mouthful, he accepted a small taste of the sticky chocolate confection if only to share in Tess’s unabashed enjoyment. He swallowed the heavy, pretty much revolting bit of pasty sweetness with a tight smile. “Good, huh?” Tess licked her chocolate-coated fingers, slipping one after the other into her mouth and sucking them clean. “Delicious,” Dante said, watching her with his own brand of hunger. “You can have some more if you want it.” “No.” He drew back, shaking his head. “No, it’s all yours. Please. Enjoy it.

Your name is Do Kyungsoo. You have short-term memory loss, antesomething amnesia, so you won’t remember what happened last night. But let me help you out. Last night I put my head on this pillow and my arms around your waist. My name’s Kim Jongin. I call you hyung. Yesterday you loved me. Today you’ll love me again. This is where you undressed me. This is where I undressed you. And here I pushed you up against the wall and kissed you really hard (approximately, it was kind of dark) and we thought we should have sex. Here you sat, dangling your legs. I put my palm on your kneecap and you bent forward and kissed me first. We talked about ballet. You hummed a tune and my fingers did an arabresque here, grand jeté onto the floor, fouetté en tourant and then sissonne on the back of your hand. Pas de valse fast up your arm and you smiled. I leaned on this and read your green sticky notes while you went around cleaning up invisible messes. It came to me that all the green looks like grass, and grass is boring without daisies. So I hope you like yellow? And here’s Kim Jongin. Say hello to me?

At that moment there was total clarity.Life was neither love nor duty.Life was not friendship or loneliness,pleasure or pain.Life was red,liquid and sticky,and it leaked through Snape's fingers as he struggled to stem the exodus of life from his body.

For my part, I ignored her jibes, as I had long ago formed the opinion that it is best never to notice children at all in any capacity lest they take a simple greeting as an overture for discussion -- or worse yet, touching by grubby, sweet-sticky fingers.

She wanted to see if it would be as easy with a woman as it had always been with Robert. Ten thousand of your children perished in my palm, Your Grace, she thought, slipping a third finger into Myr. Whilst you snored, I would lick your sons off my face and fingers one by one, all those pale sticky princes. You claimed your rights, my lord, but in the darkness I would eat your heirs.

It's a marriage of convenience. Temporarily, so long as our interests coincide, however long it takes to dispose of that mob of petit blancs at Port-au-Prince. Afterward,' he waved his sticky fingers airily, 'everything will return to the way it was before.

Children were fishing lines entangling you in their cruelties and wants and sticky fingers and dramas and disappointments. The mommy industrial complex made you think it was all going to be hugs and campfires, and peewee soccer practices, and that was all bullshit.

My father always used to tell one of his dreams, because it somehow seemed of a piece with what was to follow. He believed that it was a consequence of the thing's presence in the next room. My father dreamed of blood. It was the vividness of the dreams that was impressive, their minute detail and horrible reality. The blood came through the keyhole of a locked door which communicated with the next room. I suppose the two rooms had originally been designed en suite. It ran down the door panel with a viscous ripple, like the artificial one created in the conduit of Trumpingdon Street. But it was heavy, and smelled. The slow welling of it sopped the carpet and reached the bed. It was warm and sticky. My father woke up with the impression that it was all over his hands. He was rubbing his first two fingers together, trying to rid them of the greasy adhesion where the fingers joined." ("The Troll")

Susan was haunted by the gap between the sensation of three boys climbing her torso like a tree, combing sticky fingers through her hair, muttering into her ears—and the constraint of adulthood: How are you, honey? You look a little tired. Is there anything I can do? How about a hug for your old mom? If she’d had an inkling, back then, of the ache this constraint would cause her, she would never—not once!—have said, “Let go of me, boys, I just need a minute,” and shaken them off. She would have held still and let them pick her clean, understanding that there would be nothing better to save herself for.

I placed some of the DNA on the ends of my fingers and rubbed them together. The stuff was sticky. It began to dissolve on my skin. 'It's melting -- like cotton candy.' 'Sure. That's the sugar in the DNA,' Smith said. 'Would it taste sweet?' 'No. DNA is an acid, and it's got salts in it. Actually, I've never tasted it.' Later, I got some dried calf DNA. I placed a bit of the fluff on my tongue. It melted into a gluey ooze that stuck to the roof of my mouth in a blob. The blob felt slippery on my tongue, and the taste of pure DNA appeared. It had a soft taste, unsweet, rather bland, with a touch of acid and a hint of salt. Perhaps like the earth's primordial sea. It faded away. Page 67, in Richard Preston's biographical essay on Craig Venter, "The Genome Warrior" (originally published in The New Yorker in 2000).

Willem puts down his fork and knife. 'This is falling in love.' With his finger, he swipes a bit of the Nutella from inside his crepe and puts a dollop on the inside of my wrist. It is hot and oozy and starts to melt against my sticky skin, but before it has a chance to slither away, Willem licks his thumb and wipes the smear of Nutella off and pops it into his mouth. It all happens fast, like a lizard zapping a fly. 'This is being in love.' And he takes my other wrist, the one with my watch on it, and moves the watchband around until he sees what he's looking for. Once again, he licks his thumb. Only this time, he rubs it against my birthmark, hard, as if trying to scrub it off. 'Being in love is a birthmark?' I joke as I retract my arm. But my voice has a tremble in it, and the place where his wet thumbprint is drying against my skin burns somehow. 'It's something that never comes off, no matter how much you might want it to.' 'You're comparing love to a...stain?' He leans so far back in his seat that the front legs of his chair scrape off the floor. He looks very satisfied, with the crepe or with himself, I'm not sure. 'Exactly.

Some people have the Midas touch, other’s dip their fingers in sticky, permanent black ink, Smudged. Unlucky.

Oh, Colin." She dabbed a fingertip to his sticky abdomen, then rubbed her fingers together, as though testing the quality of his seed. "That was fascinating.

Dipping my sticky glove into the bowl, I grabbed a handful of fingers. That’s five, if you’re counting.

If rock and roll was the common tongue, maybe Rolling Stone could be a translation device.

Each bloomed into a little galaxy that I could cup inside my palm, the sticky stars of its pollen caught between my fingers.

When she’s gone far and long enough that she no longer remembers her name, she stops, and presses her fingers deep into her sockets, scooping her eyes out and pinching off the long ropes of flesh that follow them out of her body like sticky yarn. What rushes from her mouth might be screaming or might be her soul, and it is smothered in the indifferent silence of the wild world.

The only options I have are a four fingered shuffle and an aging vibrator whose batteries, the last time I looked, were leaking a sticky liquid. I long to do the same.” Time Was by Paul Adams

Theirs was the snot-nosed, sticky-fingered world of peanut butter sandwiches and cartoons, playgrounds and superhero pajamas, crayons and pop-up books, booster chairs and midday naps. Their world existed no farther than the reach of their tiny arms. They were new. Innocent. Vulnerable. Yet they were somehow able to take personal and public responsibility for a hard-wired sin nature, implored to pledge allegiance to an invisible overlord they could not see, and charged to prevent their own torture in a nasty, horrible place that the Vacation Bible School teachers called Hell.

Somebody would surely have to look after this little barbarian whose lust for money, drugs, and sex threatened to outpace his razor intellect and turn him into Augustus Gloop falling into the chocolate river of the 1960s.

Today, it is the scent of honeysuckle that takes me back in time and lays me down near a barn. I pick a honeysuckle blossom, touch the trumpet to my nose and inhale. With sticky filthy fingers, I pinch the base of its delicate well then lick the drop of nectar. The sweet liquid makes me thirst for more, and I reach for another and another, the same hands that reach again and again for tobacco as I string. I separate honeysuckle blossoms and taste.

From Venice to Rome, Paris to Brussels, London to Edinburgh, the Ambassadors watched, long-eared and bright-eyed. Charles of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor, fending off Islam at Prague and Lutherism in Germany and forcing recoil from the long, sticky fingers at the Vatican, cast a considering glance at heretic England. Henry, new King of France, tenderly conscious of the Emperor's power and hostility, felt his way thoughtfully toward a small cabal between himself, the Venetians and the Pope, and wondered how to induce Charles to give up Savoy, how to evict England from Boulogne, and how best to serve his close friend and dear relative Scotland without throwing England into the arms or the lap of the Empire. He observed Scotland, her baby Queen, her French and widowed Queen Mother, and her Governor Arran. He observed England, ruled by the royal uncle Somerset for the boy King Edward, aged nine. He watched with interest as the English dotingly pursued their most cherished policy: the marriage which should painlessly annex Scotland to England and end forever the long, dangerous romance between Scotland and England. Pensively, France marshalled its fleet and set about cultivating the Netherlands, whose harbours might be kind to storm-driven galleys. The Emperor, fretted by Scottish piracy and less busy than he had been, watched the northern skies narrowly. Europe, poised delicately over a brand-new board, waiting for the opening gambit.

*Gone are the days of Benton's childhood, when his sticky fingers dung through caramel-glazed popcorn and peanuts for treasure, such as a plastic whistle or BB game or, best of all, the magic decoding ring that little Benton wore on his index finger, pretending it empowered him to know wgat people thought, what they would do and which monster he would defeat on his next secret mission. *The toy surprises inside are games printed on folded white paper, cheap as hell, and require the IF of a pigeon.

You know, we still have like, half an hour down here. Seems a shame to waste it.” I poked him in the ribs, and he gave an exaggerated wince. “No way, dude. My days of cellar, mill, and dungeon lovin’ are over. Go castle or go home.” “Fair enough,” he said as we interlaced our fingers and headed for the stairs. “But does it have to be a real castle, or would one of those inflatable bouncy things work?” I laughed. “Oh, inflatable castles are totally out of-“ I skidded to a stop on the first step, causing Archer to bump into me. “What the heck is that?” I asked, pointing to a dark stain in the nearest corner. “Okay, number one question you don’t want to hear in a creepy cellar,” Archer sad, but I ignored him and stepped off the staircase. The stain bled out from underneath the stone wall, covering maybe a foot of the dirt floor. It looked black and vaguely…sticky. I swallowed my disgust as I knelt down and gingerly touched the blob with one finger. Archer crouched down next to me and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a lighter, and after a few tries, a wavering flame sprung up. We studied my fingertip in the dim glow. “So that’s-“ “It’s blood, yeah,” I said, not taking my eyes off my hand. “Scary.” “I was gonna go with vile, but scary works.” Archer fished in his pockets again, and this time he produced a paper napkin. I took it from him and gave Lady Macbeth a run for her money in the hand-scrubbing department. But even as I attempted to remove a layer of skin from my finger, something was bugging me. I mean, something other than the fact that I’d just touched a puddle of blood. “Check the other corners,” I told Archer. He stood up and moved across the room. I stayed where I was, trying to remember that afternoon Dad and I had sat with the Thorne family grimoire. We’d looked at dozens of spells, but there had been one- “There’s blood in every corner,” Archer called from the other side of the cellar. “Or at least that’s what I’m guessing it is. Unlike some people, I don’t have the urge to go sticking my fingers in it.

This human gets to take over when things are hot and sticky, if you know what I mean.” He threaded his fingers through his thick mat of chest hair, getting tangled and pulling some hair free. “Ugh, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little,” Penny mumbled. “I’m trying not to look at him,” Emery replied.

For my part, I’d come for the textbook and was glad to have it. Betta’s tortellini are now in my head and my hands. I follow her formula for the dough—an egg for every etto of flour, sneaking in an extra yolk if the mix doesn’t look wet enough. I’ve learned to roll out a sheet until I see the grain of the wood underneath. I let it dry if I’m making tagliatelle; I keep it damp if I’m making tortellini. I make a small batch, roll out a sheet, then another, the rhythm of pasta, each movement like the last one. My mind empties. I think only of the task. Is the dough too sticky? Will it tear? Does the sheet, held between my fingers, feel right? But often I wonder what Betta would think, and, like that, I’m back in that valley with its broken-combed mountain tops and the wolves at night and the ever-present feeling that the world is so much bigger than you, and my mind becomes a jumble of associations, of aunts and a round table and laughter you can’t hear anymore, and I am overcome by a feeling of loss. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that’s handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality.

Get your sticky fingers away from my cookies,” Ben ordered, without turning his head, to see Jaxton trying to steal one from the cooking tray. “You weren't saying that last night,” Jaxton retaliated, coming up to Ben's side, to give him a nudge. They were both smiling, while looking down at the counter, where Ben was making his delicious rosemary cookies. “In fact, I seem to remember you grabbing my sticky fingers and putting them in your mouth,” he teased, speaking quietly, so that Lyon wouldn't hear them at the other side of the room. Ben turned to Jaxton and abandoned his baking, to catch his face in flour covered hands and plant a deep kiss on his lips. Jaxton opened his mouth, in acceptance of his kiss. ~ From the Heart

The red light throbbed in time to her own pulse; she panted in a rhythm begun by its fluctuations; the sweat that ran into her eyes was red, and it burned. And now she had something else to worry about, for she had touched the tender skin of her throat with her surka-sticky fingers when she pulled at the thong that held the dragon stone’s pouch, it burned too. But it’s throb had nothing to do with the tower. It throbbed angrily and self-consciously, and her mind was distracted enough to think, This is typical. On my way to gods know what unspeakable doom, and I break out in a rash. But it lightened the evil a little; she did not notice this as such, only that she toiled on in a slightly better spirit. Idly she pulled one end of her collar loose and pressed it against the surka rash, which didn’t help at all.

This is the nature of time — it dilates during suffering and also during joy, rushes through our fingers into the sea when we seek to hold it tight; when we are depressed, the hours open up indefinitely as we are condemned to endure yet another day of consciousness, and then, and then, we look up and realize that we have lost weeks, months, even years to the sticky-fingered destroyer of joy, never to be regained.

But if you’re two guys like us, riding the Bronx tracks, you better make sure you hide any sign of affection if you want to fly under the radar. I’ve known this for the longest—I just hoped it wouldn’t matter. Someone whistles at us and I instantly knew I was wrong. These two guys who were competing in a pull-up contest a few minutes ago walk up to us. The taller one with his jeans leg rolled up asks, “Yo. You two homos faggots?” We both tell him no. His friend, who smells like straight-up armpits, presses his middle finger between Collin’s eyes. He sucks his teeth. “They lying. I bet their little dicks are getting hard right now.” Collin smacks the dude’s hand, which is just as big a mistake as my mom trying to save me from being thrown out the house last night. “Fuck you.” Nightmare after nightmare. One slams my head into the railing, and the other hammers Collin with punches. I try punching the first guy in his nose, but I’m too dizzy and miss. I have no idea how many times he punches me or at what point I end up on the sticky floor with Collin trying to shield me before he’s kicked to the side. Collin turns to me, crying these involuntary tears from shock and pain. His kind brown eyes roll back when he’s kicked in the head. I cry out for help but no one fucking breaks up the fight. No one fucking does the right thing. The train stops and the doors open but there’s no chance for escape. For us, at least.

Ink was black, in inkwells and bottles, in the past. It would get all over your fingers because it would run and flow relentlessly. This inevitable messiness was the flip side of writing. I always felt caught between two kinds of black: that of the dirty and dirtying substance and that of the signs that miraculously emerged from it through the magic of wayward fountain pens, which, when dipped too deep in the inkwell, had a strong tendency to cover the paper with what used to be called “inkblots.” Oh, the miracle of a clear and possibly elegant sentence emerging from the sticky ink and wending its way between the blots! It is the black of meaning wrung from the black of matter. (…) Isn’t the most profound education the one that was afforded me at my childhood elementary school, the one that divides the ink sharply between thought become Letter and drive turned into splotches and blots? How will those who begin with the darkish gray on the palish gray of computer screens manage? Without the slightest inkblot? Won’t they think that thought is just another variation of formlessness, that the intellect is just a thin additional coat of gray over the gray of drive, and drive a mere stripping of the gray of the intellect? Everything in the world is the result of a creative and careful dosing of black as it is projected onto the formidable invariability of white. Anyone who hasn’t experienced this, and sooner rather than later, will never learn anything.

Pedro, the Guardia, asked him if he could inspect the inside of his van because hundreds of very expensive ham legs had been stolen recently and the robbery perpetrated by a gang of men dressed as priests ‒ how do you say, monks. Danny felt the beads of sweat trickle down his back as he slid open the door. Along the side was a clothes rack with different costumes hung on hangers. He couldn't actually remember when he'd last cleaned the van out, hadn't the front to admit to such slovenliness. Pedro the cop lifted off a cassock. "I use that for my work." Pedro put his hand on the van and poked his nose in, sniffed and backed his face away and looked at his hand covered in sticky egg yolk and shell. "It's for the wash," continued Danny, fighting a smirk. Pedro pointed at his eyes with his fingers and then at Danny's to indicate, I'm watching you. Danny reluctantly handed the cash over to the cop. They ambled off as he watched his money scrunch into his pocket. Danny slumped at the bar, deflated.

I show her my palms, surrendering before the fight has even begun. "You don't really want this and neither do I. Especially because I wouldn't want to mess up that pretty face of yours, darling." She all but rolls her eyes at me. "That's funny because I won't hesitate to mess up your pretty face." I smirk. "I knew you thought I was pretty." At that, she throws another punch at my face that I easily evade. We continue circling each other, slowly. Damp hair clings to my forehead and I comb my fingers through it, pushing it off my sticky skin. "You do know that I have eight powers at my disposal right now and any one of them could drop you." I grin as I say it, watching her eyes narrow. "I don't want to fight your power-I want to fight you. Just you." Her piercing gaze never leaves mine as she says it, even as the other Elites turn their attention toward us, finding this fight far more interesting than their training. "So, you just want me? No powers?" "Yes, I just want you," she breathes, annoyed with me. My mouth twists into a crooked grin. "I knew you wanted me, Gray.

Look, I was a hungry shade, nothing more. I latched onto the men, and their energy felt like sticky fruit sliding between my fingers. and when we were done, I was still hungry. And after the next time. I was still hungry. And after the one after that one, I was still hungry. I would have drowned them all. I would have inched slowly over their bodies, dipped my fingers inside their throats and ripped out sounds. I filled their bed with secrets. Ada was right- I found pleasure in evil. I did many things in hunger that could be misconstrued.

Wilbury, my dear,” Caroline said, “would you mind taking the children and keeping them occupied for a bit?” "Twould be the high point of my golden years, my lady,” he replied with frigid politeness. “The culmination of a lifelong dream I had nearly abandoned in favour of waiting peacefully for the Grim Reaper to come and relieve me of my earthly duties.” Immune to his sarcasm, Caroline beamed fondly at him. “Thank you, Wilbury. I thought that’s what you would say.” Shuffling toward the hearth, the butler muttered under his breath, “I just love children, you know. I simply dote upon the overindulged little darlings with their grasping little hands and their sticky little fingers that foul up every freshly polished surface in the house”. As he leaned toward the hearth, the twins paused in play to gape at him. Baring his pointed yellowing teeth in a grimace of a smile, he rasped, “Come now, lads. I’ll take you to the kitchen for some nice hot chocolate.” Eyes widening in terror, the two boys leapt to their feet and ran shrieking from the room. Wilbury straightened as much as his hunched back would allow, rolling his eyes. “Wilbuwy!” Eloisa crowed, scrambling from her mother’s lap and toddling across the room. Wrapping her arms around one of the butler’s scrawny legs, she looked up and batted her long eyelashes at him. “Me want cocoa!” With a long-suffering sigh, he scooped the plump child into his arms, every one of his ancient bones creaking in protest. She joyfully tugged at his misshapen ears as he carried her toward the door. His curdled expression never varied, but as he passed Portia he gave her a nearly imperceptible wink.

I like to watch Peter when he doesn’t know I’m looking. I like to admire the straight line of his jaw, the curve of his cheekbone. There’s an openness to his face, an innocence--a certain kind of niceness. It’s the niceness that touches my heart the most. It’s Friday night at Gabe Rivera’s house after the lacrosse game. Our school won, so everyone is in very fine spirits, Peter most of all, because he scored the winning shot. He’s across the room playing poker with some of the guys from his team; he is sitting with his chair tipped back, his back against the wall. His hair is still wet from showering after the game. I’m on the couch with my friends Lucas Krapf and Pammy Subkoff, and they’re flipping through the latest issue of Teen Vogue, debating whether or not Pammy should get bangs. “What do you think, Lara Jean?” Pammy asks, running her fingers through her carrot-colored hair. Pammy is a new friend--I’ve gotten to know her because she dates Peter’s good friend Darrell. She has a face like a doll, round as a cake pan, and freckles dust her face and shoulders like sprinkles. “Um, I think bangs are a very big commitment and not to be decided on a whim. Depending on how fast your hair grows, you could be growing them out for a year or more. But if you’re serious, I think you should wait till fall, because it’ll be summer before you know it, and bangs in the summer can be sort of sticky and sweaty and annoying…” My eyes drift back to Peter, and he looks up and sees me looking at him, and raises his eyebrows questioningly. I just smile and shake my head. “So don’t get bangs?” My phone buzzes in my purse. It’s Peter. Do you want to go? No. Then why were you staring at me? Because I felt like it.

Whoops. Wait a minute. I think my butt is stuck. I stand from the swing slowly. It feels pretty hard—like I said, my butt seems stuck. But I pull up my back-end from the swing. I feel it slowly detaching. I finally stand straight on my feet. “Ugh, what is on my butt?!” I say. It really does feel sticky! I reach behind to see what I might’ve sat on. I look at my fingers. Uh-oh. My fingers are blue! I turn around and look at the swing. Oh, no. There in the middle of the swing seat is a butt-shaped bare spot without paint on it. And the paint that should be there is on my butt.

When the last peak died away, Alan opened his eyes. Huiann was watching his face. He was embarrassed until he saw the glitter of tears in her eyes. He touched her cheek. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…” His sticky spunk was all over her hand and his belly and he felt like a fool. He reached to grab the undershirt he’d tossed aside and wiped both of them clean. “I’m sorry.” “No. No, Alan.” She touched her fingers to his mouth. “Gou. It is good. You face is beau-ti-ful.” She pronounced each syllable with exquisite care. He kissed the fingers pressed to his lips. “No, you’re beautiful. A damn miracle.

Cersei cupped the other woman’s breast. Softly at first, hardly touching, feeling the warmth of it beneath her palm, the skin as smooth as satin. She gave it a gentle squeeze, then ran her thumbnail lightly across the big dark nipple, back and forth and back and forth until she felt it stiffen. When she glanced up, Taena’s eyes were open. “Does that feel good?” she asked. “Yes,” said Lady Merryweather. “And this?” Cersei pinched the nipple now, puling on it hard, twisting it between her fingers. The Myrish woman gave a gasp of pain. “You’re hurting me.” “It’s just the wine. I had a flagon with my supper, and another with the widow Stokeworth. I had to drink to keep her calm.” She twisted Taena’s other nipple too, puling until the other woman gasped. “I am the queen. I mean to claim my rights.” “Do what you wil.” Taena’s hair was as black as Robert’s, even down between her legs, and when Cersei touched her there she found her hair al sopping wet, where Robert’s had been coarse and dry. “Please,” the Myrish woman said, “go on, my queen. Do as you wil with me. I’m yours.” But it was no good. She could not feel it, whatever Robert felt on the nights he took her. There was no pleasure in it, not for her. For Taena, yes. Her nipples were two black diamonds, her sex slick and steamy. Robert would have loved you, for an hour. The queen slid a finger into that Myrish swamp, then another, moving them in and out, but once he spent himself inside you, he would have been hard-pressed to recal your name. She wanted to see if it would be as easy with a woman as it had always been with Robert. Ten thousand of your children perished in my palm, Your Grace, she thought, slipping a third finger into Myr. Whilst you snored, I would lick your sons of my face and fingers one by one, al those pale sticky princes. You claimed your rights, my lord, but in the darkness I would eat your heirs. Taena gave a shudder. She gasped some words in a foreign tongue, then shuddered again and arched her back and screamed. She sounds as if she is being gored, the queen thought. For a moment she let herself imagine that her fingers were a bore’s tusks, ripping the Myrish woman apart from groin to throat. It was stil no good. It had never been any good with anyone but Jaime. When she tried to take her hand away, Taena caught it and kissed her fingers. “Sweet queen, how shal I pleasure you?” She slid her hand down Cersei’s side and touched her sex. “Tel me what you would have of me, my love.

A honey pie, lovingly made. The tiny sugar bee, still perched on the edge of the flaky crust, mocked me. That little bee nibbling on her honey pie. A pulse of sheer heat lit up my sex, licked down my thighs, tweaked my nipples. I shoved another messy bite into my mouth, relishing the taste, wanting...him. This was his work, made with his hands, his skill, his mind. My grumpy man with the ability to create sweetness in the most unexpected of ways. Somehow, at the back of my mind, I'd known from the start. From the way he'd all but ordered me to try his brest. How he'd watched me eat it with that strange intent look upon his face. Pride. That was what it was. He was proud of his work. I ate up my honey pie without pause, devouring it until it was nothing more than a sticky paste on my fingers, buttery crumble on my lips. Moaning, I licked my skin clean like a cat might. I swore I felt claws prickling, aching to come out. Because he had known, and I hadn't. Was it a joke to him? What had he said? The chef was temperamental. Oh, how he must have laughed on the inside at that. With a growl, I washed my hands and headed for the door, half of me more turned on than I'd ever been in my life, the other half ready to tear into the most irritating man I'd ever met.

Wenner began a campaign to get his parents back together. Sim told her son she wanted him to call only every other week to reduce her phone bills. “Your demand that Dad and I be something to each other that we’re not, is basically a child’s demand,” she wrote to him in 1959, when Wenner was thirteen. “One stamps one’s foot and says, ‘Change the world and I will be all right!’ and it’s a nice comforting thought to have, but the world can’t be changed, families can’t be changed, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers…There is only one thing that can be changed, or rather, only one thing that you can change, and that is yourself.” (“Maternally yours,” she signed the letter.)

She had never eaten food like this before. No: she had never eaten before. It was as if these flavors had always existed, had always been there in her imagination, but now she was tasting them properly for the very first time. Each course was more intense than the last. The spaghetti was coated in a thick sauce of meat, tomatoes, and wine, rich, pungent, and sticky. The lamb, by contrast, was pink and sweet, so tender it seemed to dissolve in her mouth. It was served without vegetables, but afterward Tommaso brought the first of the contorni to the table: a whole artichoke, slathered in warm olive oil and lemon juice and sprinkled with chopped mint. Laura licked every drop of oil off her fingers, amazed by the depth of the flavor.

It was a perfect spring day. The air was sweet and gentle and the sky stretched high, an intense blue. Harold was certain that the last time he had peered through the net drapes of Fossebridge Road (his home), the trees and hedges were dark bones and spindles against the skyline; yet now that he was out, and on his feet, it was as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees, and hedgerows and exploded with growth. A canopy of sticky young leaves clung to the branches above him. There were startling yellow clouds of forsythia, trails of purple aubrietia; a young willow shook in a fountain of silver. The first of the potato shoots fingered through the soil, and already tiny buds hung from the gooseberry and currant shrubs like the earrings Maureen used to wear. The abundance of new life was enough to make him giddy.

Then, suddenly, a shadowy flash came to me. Tiffany, taking an order, arguing with a girl. Shockingly, not me. Another flash, of Detective Toscano walking into Yummy’s minutes ago. Tiffany nervously kneading a coaster between her fingers. The coaster I held in my hands right now. Tiffany was scared. Why was she scared of the cop? “Hey! Space shot! You want your Coke or not?” I tried to ignore Tiffany’s screeching and hold on to the vision, but it blurred and disappeared. I grabbed my new glass from her outstretched hand. “I heard you got into an argument last night,” I said. Tiffany paled, which I never thought possible since her skin was so fake-and-bake tan. She nervously twirled a lock of her bleach blond hair around her finger. “Where did you hear that?” “Doesn’t matter where I heard it.” I took a chance and added, “But it was pretty juicy gossip, considering who she was.” Tiffany’s pale face turned to green and I involuntarily took a step back ,half expecting an Exorcist-style stream of vomit to shoot out of her gaping mouth. Instead, she narrowed her eyes and leaned closer. “Get away from me,” she growled. And then it became clear. My flash of her argument. Her fear of the detective. She’d argued with the girl who was murdered last night. And she did not want Detective Toscano to find out about it. I stepped away from the bar, giddy with my new knowledge. I had the upper hand on Tiffany Desposito. I could torture her with this. Drag it out. Hold it over her head for days, even weeks. “It’s too bad you’re not with Justin anymore,” she said to my back. “He’s a cutie. And such a good kisser.” And that was my limit. I spun around and dumped my brand-new Coke over her head. She shrieked and flailed her hands as the liquid streamed over her face and down between her giant boobs. She peeled her sticky hair off her eyes and snarled, “I’ll get you for this.” I merely smiled, then sauntered over to the two Toscanos, who had apparently been watching this whole display with entertained grins on their faces. “You’re the new detective?” I asked the elder Toscano. He nodded. Either his mouth was too full with French fries or he was too scared of me to speak at the moment. “Tiffany Desposito, the wet and sticky waitress over there? She had a fight with the girl who was murdered. Last night, at this restaurant. You should question her right away. I wouldn’t even give her a chance to go home and shower first. I think she’s a flight risk.” I strolled back to my booth, sat down, and tore into my pancakes, happy as a kid on Christmas. Nate and Perry stared at me in silence for a few moments. Then Perry said, “Maybe you should have let me go over.” Nate shook his head. “Nah. She did just fine.

He heard a dresser drawer slide shut in the bedroom. She came out dressed all in black, as she almost always did, and carrying the three pieces of a plate that had fallen off the bed the night before; it was a light shade of blue, and sticky with pomegranate juice. He heard her dropping it into the kitchen trash can before she wandered past him into the living room. She stood in front of his sofa, running her fingers through her hair to test for dampness, her expression a little blank when he glanced up at her, and it seemed to him later that she’d been considering something, perhaps making up her mind. But then, he played the morning back so many times that the tape was ruined—later it seemed possible that she’d simply been thinking about the weather, and later still he was even willing to consider the possibility that she hadn’t stood in front of the sofa at all—had merely paused there, perhaps, for an instant that the stretched-out reel extended into a moment, a scene, and finally a major plot point. Later he was certain that the first few playbacks of that last morning were reasonably accurate, but after a few too many nights of lying awake and considering things, the quality began to erode. In retrospect the sequence of events is a little hazy, images running into each other and becoming slightly confused: she’s across the room, she’s kissing him for a third time—and why doesn’t he look up and kiss her? Her last kiss lands on his head—and putting on her shoes; does she kiss him before she puts on her shoes, or afterward? He can’t swear to it one way or the other. Later on he examined his memory for signs until every detail seemed ominous, but eventually he had to conclude that there was nothing strange about her that day. It was a morning like any other, exquisitely ordinary in every respect.

Slave, my hands are sticky. Come, wash them. Bring the perfumed water." Passia waved at me with a finger slick with honey. She was radiant, lying on the couch next to Helene. Both were dressed in new stolae that Aelia had gifted them for the holiday. I grinned and rushed forward with the basin and a towel. "Permission to speak," I asked her as I took her sticky hand in mine. She smirked. "Permission granted." I slowly ran the damp towel across each slender finger. I kept my voice low so only she could hear. "Later, my dear Domina, I would be delighted to wash you in private." She raised an eyebrow at me. "I think you will have to prove yourself first, boy." I bowed in front of her, my head on the tiles. "I will do anything you require, Domina." "Good. Now fetch me some more honey fritters. And you will clean my hands again, when I call for you." I winked at her. "Yes, Domina. Anything for you." That night our lovemaking tasted sweeter than all the honey in Iberia.

I looked over at Jason. “Want some?” He grinned. “Sure.” I pulled some off, held it out to him. He opened his mouth slightly, a challenge in his eyes. I don’t know why I’d thought he’d take it from me. Finally, he said, “I don’t want to get my fingers sticky.” Oh, right. I got really warm, but I pushed the cotton candy into his mouth--and couldn’t help thinking about a bride shoving the cake into the groom’s mouth. Jason’s lips barely touched my fingers as his mouth closed, and I pulled back, but I got that much hotter, had felt his breath skim across my knuckles. It was so intimate, so personal, like something you’d do with someone you had a serious crush on. Much more intimate than spooning him ice cream. With ice cream, there was the distance of the spoon, not to mention that it was cold. “I haven’t had cotton candy in forever,” he said. “I’d forgotten how…sugary it is.” “It’s pure sugar.” “I wonder who invented it.” “I think it was a dentist.” He laughed, a laugh that revealed his perfect smile, his perfect teeth. “I’ll bet you’re right.

Hands- there were hands on my shoulders, shaking me, squeezing me. I thrashed against them, screaming, screaming- 'FEYRE.' The voice was at once the night and the dawn and the stars and the earth, and every inch of my body calmed at the primal dominance in it. 'Open your eyes,' the voice ordered. I did. My throat was raw, my mouth full of ash, my face soaked and sticky, and Rhysand- Rhysand was hovering above me, his eyes wide. 'It was a dream,' he said, his breathing as hard as mine. The moonlight trickling through the windows illuminated the dark lines of swirling tattoos down his arm, his shoulders, across his sculpted chest. Like the ones I bore on my arm. He scanned my face. 'A dream,' he said again. Velaris. I was in Velaris, at his house. And I had- my dream- The sheets, the blankets were ripped. Shredded. But not with a knife. And that ashy, smoky taste coating my mouth... My hand was unnervingly steady as I lifted it to find my fingers ending in simmering embers. Living claws of flame that had sliced through my bed linens like they were cauterising wounds-

Suddenly, a rock hits the other side of the hex. It stays there. It's just a few inches away from me. It's roughly triangular, kind of a dark brown, and has rough, jagged edges. Like you might see on the tip of a spear from a caveman. Have I met spacefaring cavemen? Stop being stupid, Ryland. Why did they put a rock there? And is it sticky? Are they trying to block my view? If so, they're doing a terrible job. The little triangle is only a couple of inches wide at the thickest point and the hex is a good 8 inches across. And it gets sillier. Now the rock is bending at articulated joints, and there are two similar rocks that do the same thing, and there's a larger rock attached to them that- That's not a rock. It's a claw! It's a claw with three fingers! ... The alien's claw-er... I'll call it a hand. That's less scary. The alien's hand has three triangular fingers, each one with articulation points. Knuckles, I guess. They can close up in to a raindrop shape of widen out to a sort of three-legged starfish. The skin is weird. It looks like brownish-black rock. It's irregular and bumpy, like someone carved the hand out of granite and hasn't gotten around to smoothing it out yet. Natural armour, maybe? Like a turtle shell, but less organised? There's an arm, too. I can barely see it from this angle, no matter how hard I stupidly press my face in to the Hot Wall of Pain. But there's definitely an arm leading away from the hand. I mean, there'd have to be, right? Not just a magic floating hand.

Everywhere along the line there were people involved. Farmers who planted and monitored and cared for and pruned and fertilized their trees. Pickers who walked among the rows of plants, in the mountains’ thin air, taking the cherries, only the red cherries, placing them one by one in their buckets and baskets. Workers who processed the cherries, most of that work done by hand, too, fingers removing the sticky mucilage from each bean. There were the humans who dried the beans. Who turned them on the drying beds to make sure they dried evenly. Then those who sorted the dried beans, the good beans from the bad. Then the humans who bagged these sorted beans. Bagged them in bags that kept them fresh, bags that retained the flavor without adding unwanted tastes and aromas. The humans who tossed the bagged beans on trucks. The humans who took the bags off the trucks and put them into containers and onto ships. The humans who took the beans from the ships and put them on different trucks. The humans who took the bags from the trucks and brought them into the roasteries in Tokyo and Chicago and Trieste. The humans who roasted each batch. The humans who packed smaller batches into smaller bags for purchase by those who might want to grind and brew at home. Or the humans who did the grinding at the coffee shop and then painstakingly brewed and poured the coffee or espresso or cappuccino. Any given cup of coffee, then, might have been touched by twenty hands, from farm to cup, yet these cups only cost two or three dollars. Even a four-dollar cup was miraculous, given how many people were involved, and how much individual human attention and expertise was lavished on the beans dissolved in that four-dollar cup. So much human attention and expertise, in fact, that even at four dollars a cup, chances were some person—or many people, or hundreds of people—along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited.

Nope- it was not! Ava and her girls that day went, and they cut a class at some point in the day and broke into my baby. Then Ava- ‘Rubbed one out!’ that means that she masturbated, and squirted her lady- juices all over the inside of my car. Yes- and I mean it went all over. It was on my seat on the dash, on the floor, and Ava smeared what creaminess that was on her two fingers on the windows, and driver’s side vent. As her clan, sisters pissed all over the carpet on the floor, and took their dumps on the seat, and left their thongs behind. Alison, she wrote a note on her undies saying- ‘Now you have some pairs to wear!’ It was so nasty! Plus- the outside was covered and wrapped with toilet paper as well as littered with Ava and her sisters used feminine products. What is wrong with these girls? What did I do to deserve this one? Likewise, the other kids thought it was the most humorous thing, which they ever witnessed at the end of the school day. When I discovered it- You know, I was utterly sick to my stomach. I think I screamed so loudly it echoed throughout the land, and started to cry and ran while being pushed around bouncing around off their bodies, I cannot remember- I was so upset, and then the kids were all around me kicking, and pushing me from one place to another. I was just like a hacky sack for them, until I passed out, and dropped to the hard ground. That gave them time for them to spit on me, and dump things like glue in my hair or whatever that shit was. Then what gets me is that she signed her name- Ava on the dashboard with a black permanent sharpie marker, and It reads, ‘Suck on this- Nevaeh- lick, what I gave you all up!’ and she drew a heart, with a line through it also. She wanted me to know because there was not a thing I could do about it. Depressed- to say that her juicy sprays were more yellowish, and a thick sticky white, then clear on my blue and white cloth seats. Yet, Hope had the car towed and cleaned for me inside and out, she could not believe what kids do these days. Therefore, that was the first time that I drove my car to school and the last. That whole thing cost me a lot. I guess it is back to the bus. That is what everyone wants is it not. This completely sucked; I have a car that I cannot drive anywhere other than at home or have locked up in the barn- with the other rust bucket car.

Don’t provoke Cheat,” Arin said as they stepped out of the carriage and onto the dusky path that led to the governor’s palace, which looked eerie to Kestrel because its impressive façade was the same as the night before, but the lights burning in the windows were now few. “Kestrel, do you hear me? You can’t toy with him.” “He started it.” “That’s not the point.” Gravel crunched under Arin’s heavy boots as he stalked up the path. “Don’t you understand that he wants you dead? He’d leap at the chance,” Arin said, hands in pockets, head down, almost talking to himself. He strode ahead, his long legs quicker than hers. “I can’t--Kestrel, you must understand that I would never claim you. Calling you a prize--my prize--it was only words. But it worked. Cheat won’t harm you, I swear that he won’t, but you must…hide yourself a little. Help a little. Just tell us how much time we have before the battle. Give him a reason to decide you’re not better off dead. Swallow your pride.” “Maybe that’s not as easy for me as it is for you.” He wheeled on her. “It’s not easy for me,” he said through his teeth. “You know that it’s not. What do you think I have had to swallow, these past ten years? What do you think I have had to do to survive?” They stood before the palace door. “Truly,” she said, “I haven’t the faintest interest. You may tell your sad story to someone else.” He flinched as if slapped. His voice came low: “You can make people feel so small.” Kestrel went hot with shame--then was ashamed of her own shame. Who was he, that she should apologize? He had used her. He had lied. Nothing he said meant anything. If she was to feel shame, it should be for having been so easily fooled. He ran fingers through his cropped hair, but slowly, anger gone, replaced by something heavier. He didn’t look at her. His breath smoked the chill air. “Do what you want to me. Say anything. But it frightens me how you refuse to see the danger you risk with others. Maybe now you’ll see.” He opened the door to the governor’s home. The smell struck her first. Blood and decaying flesh. It pushed at Kestrel’s gut. She fought not to gag. Bodies were piled in the reception hall. Lady Neril was lying facedown, almost in the same place where she had stood the night of the ball, greeting guests. Kestrel recognized her by the scarf in her fist, fabric bright in the guttering torchlight. There were hundreds of dead. She saw Captain Wensan, Lady Faris, Senator Nicon’s whole family, Benix… Kestrel knelt next to him. His large hand felt like cold clay. She could hear her tears drip to his clothes. They beaded on his skin. Quietly, Arin said, “He’ll be buried today, with the others.” “He should be burned. We burn our dead.” She couldn’t look at Benix anymore, but neither could she get to her feet. Arin helped her, his touch gentle. “I’ll make certain it’s done right.” Kestrel forced her legs to move, to walk past bodies heaped like rubble. She thought that she must have fallen asleep after all, and that this was an evil dream. She paused at the sight of Irex. His mouth was the stained purple of the poisoned, but he had sticky gashes in his side, and one final cut to the neck. Even poisoned, he had fought. Tears came again. Arin’s hold tightened. He pushed her past Irex. “Don’t you dare weep for him. If he weren’t dead, I would kill him myself.

saints are just sinners who keep trying

Hate is a destructive emotion: like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

If you can’t trust the deep gut / balls combination then you can’t trust anything. The penis, on the other hand, the shaft, is another story altogether.

The very last thing a terminally ill patient wants is to be fussed over with antibiotics and feeding tubes in order to prolong his pain, but this is often what families insist on. They panic and press red buttons and jam oxygen masks over their loved ones’ faces, despite their clear DNR stickers, because they are the ones afraid of death.

Only the most striking parts of your existence are remembered, which means that you don’t remember the majority of your life. You have, roughly, the three seconds of your present moment, plus a (mostly inaccurate, and decaying) memory of around one percent of your past, and that’s it. The rest fades away.

The brain abhors a vacuum, and you no longer have that thing to reach for. Yes, you reach for bad memories, even though the experience is unpleasant. It’s like the compulsion to probe a sore tooth with a tongue: it’s difficult to just leave the pain alone.

Smith has been killed. He was in another fight and a man named Axxe drove a shiv into his stomach. Talk about nominative determinism.

While the family and servants gathered reverently to view the magnificent creation, Kathleen took West’s arm and tugged him out of the room. “Something is going on here,” she said. “I want to know the real reason why the earl has invited Mr. Winterborne.” They stopped in the space beneath the grand staircase, behind the tree. “Can’t he show hospitality to a friend without an ulterior motive?” West parried. She shook her head. “Everything your brother does has an ulterior motive. Why has he invited Mr. Winterborne?” “Winterborne has his finger in many pies. I believe Devon hopes to benefit from his advice, and at some future date enter into a business deal with him.” That sounded reasonable enough. But her intuition still warned that there was something fishy about the situation. “How did they become acquainted?” “About three years ago, Winterborne was nominated for membership at two different London clubs, but was rejected by both of them. Winterborne is a commoner, his father was a Welsh grocer. So after hearing the sniggering about how Winterborne had been refused, Devon arranged to have our club, Brabbler’s, offer a membership to him. And Winterborne never forgets a favor.” “Brabbler’s?” Kathleen repeated. “What an odd name.” “It’s the word for a fellow who tends to argue over trifles.” West looked down and rubbed at a sticky spot of sap on the heel of his hand. “Brabbler’s is a second-tier club for those who aren’t allowed into White’s or Brooks’s, but it includes some of the most successful and clever men in London.” “Such as Mr. Winterborne.” “Just so.

tattoos

Annoyed, he rubbed his eyes and moved on, closely followed by his friends. Then his hands touched something wet and sticky. In disgust, he looked up. His eyes widened. His fingers were stuck into the eye sockets of a woman’s head. He had seen many indescribably horrible things, but nothing had prepared him for this. Women don’t belong on battlefields. Sickened, he withdrew his hand and rubbed his fingers over his uniform. “What’s up?” Karl asked as he crawled up next to him. He silenced when he glanced at the poor woman’s head.

She drew the main outline, keeping her fingers on the ferrule—the metal piece that clamped the bristles to the handle—and created a nose, mouth, and eyelids. For a moment, she wondered what color his eyes might be, then shoved aside the macabre thought. He had a strong, square jaw, his hair pushed back, looking sticky from the dirt that had been thrown directly onto his face.

With a resigned sigh, Cal leaned across the table and took a bite. And suddenly there she was. His mom, her fingers sticky with caramel, her apron dusty with flour, her smile for him and him alone. He chewed the pie, but didn’t taste the sweetness. He tasted home. He tasted safety and warmth and love. He tasted every time his parents had held him, or hugged him, or read him a story and tucked him in. Cal’s

The solar eclipse of Donald Trump signaled the complete triumph of celebrity culture over every aspect of American life. A reality TV star with a casino and a Twitter feed. An egomaniac to rule them all. The message and the medium had merged. The message was fame, and fame was money, money was power, and power was just more fame, for ever and ever, amen.

When a child who has pinworms scratches his or her bottom, the eggs get lodged underneath his or her fingernails. Without serious scrubbing every morning, including underneath fingernails, it’s easy for those eggs to get around. They’re sticky little things and they easily make their way from fingers to everything the child touches—doorknobs, furniture, toys, even food. When other children touch those surfaces, they pick up some eggs. Eventually, those curious fingers make their way into mouths and some eggs are ingested orally, worms hatch in the small intestine, migrate to the large intestine, and begin the cycle again.

mumbo-jumbo in my head to tell me. And I definitely didn’t need Martina Crowe in there whispering it—she was the one doing the last message, in case you’re wondering. I dislike her enough outside my head, much less inside it. In fact, I think I’ll write an insulting poem about her… although, come to think of it, ‘Martina’ makes for a tricky rhyme.” Reynie, Kate, and Sticky glanced at one another with cautious optimism. Constance seemed to be feeling a little better. They all were, actually. They had spent the evening adjusting to the hidden-message broadcasts (there had been three more since Jillson’s class)—trying not to snarl at one another, or smash their fists on desktops, or slam drawers. Studying had been positively excruciating, like trying to read while someone bangs out an annoying tune on a piano—and with fingers on the wrong keys, at that. But an hour had passed since the last broadcast, and the children’s moods had improved. Which helped them focus on the fact that their situation, unfortunately, had not. The thing to come was getting closer. Mr. Curtain was not broadcasting his

with a fifteen-year-old boy from Shreveport, Louisiana, named Marquawn. Marquawn had gotten into some legal trouble because of his sticky fingers, and a judge had put an ankle monitor on him. I took him around New York City while they filmed us for a day.

These creatures, of course, have sex. Rolling and rollicking and robust sex, and sweaty and slippery and sticky sex, and trembling and quaking and tumultuous sex, and tender and tingling and transcendent sex. They have sex fingers to fingers. They have sex belly to belly. They have sex genital tubercle to genital tubercle. They /have/ sex. They do not have /a/ sex. In their erotic lives, they are not required to to act out their status in a category system – because there /is/ no category system. There are no sexes to belong to, so sex between creatures is free to be between genuine individuals – not representatives of a category. They have sex. They do not have a sex. Imagine life like that.

Dallas latched on to the forearm of my hand curled around her throat and plastered her back against the hood of the car as I continued fucking her hard. The door behind us opened, and Jared walked in. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to—” “Get the fuck out,” I roared. My demand shook the walls so hard I was surprised they hadn’t cracked. The door promptly closed. Perhaps because it was, by far, the most pleasurable experience I’d ever had, the orgasm wasn’t instant. It skulked forward, gripping each of my limbs with its claws, taking over me like a drug. I knew I’d regret what was about to happen. Yet, I could not even entertain the idea of stopping. Dallas quaked beneath me. The muscles of her thighs strained. Sliding into her hot tightness a few more times, I finally erupted inside her. It was glorious. And at the same time, felt as if someone had sucked my chest empty. I came, and I came, and I came into Dallas’s cunt. When I finally pulled out, everything between us was sticky. I peered down between her legs. My thick white cum dripped from her swollen red slit to the hood of my car. Pink flakes of blood scattered inside the cloudy, milky liquid. Panting and out of breath, I realized this marked the first time that I’d lost myself to a moment. That I’d forgotten everything. Including the fact that she was present. My gaze rode up her bruised pussy to her torso. Sometime during sex, I’d torn the top of her dress without even noticing. Red marks covered her exposed breasts. Full of scratches and bites. Her neck still bore the imprints of my fingers—how hard had I grabbed her? And though I dreaded seeing the aftermath on her face, I couldn’t stop myself. I looked up and nearly keeled over to vomit. Flushed pink cloaked her face. A single silent tear traveled down her cheek. A glossy sheen coated her hazel eyes, almost golden in their tone and empty as my chest. The corner of her lips had produced a thin line of blood. Her doing. Not mine. She’d bitten them to tamp down her pained cries. Shortbread wanted me to fuck her bareback so badly, she’d suffered through the entire ordeal. Incomparable guilt slammed into me. Bitterness hit the back of my throat. I’d taken her without considering her pleasure. Against my better judgment. And in the process, I’d ruined her first genuine experience of sex. “Sorry.” I jerked away from Dallas, shoved my dripping half-mast cock back into my pants, and zipped up. “Jesus. Fuck. I’m so—” The rest of the sentence vanished in my throat. I shook my head, still in disbelief that I’d fucked her to the point of blood and tears. Without even sparing her a glance. She sat up. That lone tear still shimmered from her cheek, somehow even worse than a loud sob. “Do you have any gum?” The perfect, even composure braided into her voice rattled me. In fact, everything about Dallas rattled me. On autopilot, I produced two pieces of gum from my tin container, forking them over to her. She tucked both into her pretty pink mouth that I would never kiss and fuck again. “Shortbread…” I stopped. An apology wouldn’t even begin to cover it. “No. It’s my time to speak.” She made no move to flee. To slap me. To call the police, her parents, her sister. My cum still dripped fat white drops through her exposed pussy. A single streak of blood smeared across the hood of my car. I stood far enough from her that I wasn’t a threat and listened.(Chapter 44)

Blood & Sand by Stewart Stafford Enduring to be burned, bound, beaten, And to die by the sword if necessary; Verus and Priscus entered the arena, To stain Colosseum sand with blood. Emperor Titus drained Nero's lake, Built the vast Flavian Amphitheatre, Panacea to the idle citizens of Rome, Symbol of his beneficence and might. Priscus, far from his Germanian home, Fighting within a symbol of Rome's power, Which ravaged his life and fatherland, For them to decide if he is free or dies. Verus, the hulking, bullish Murmillo; Trained to deliver heavy punishment, Priscus - lightly-armed, agile Thracian; Primed to avoid his rival's huge blows. Titus showed he was Nero's antithesis; No hoarding of tracts of primo Roma, In a profligate orgy of narcissistic pride, Nor taking his own life to escape execution. Domitian, the brother of Titus, watched in envy, The emperor-in-waiting who favoured Verus, And the direct Murmillo style of fighting, Titus favoured Thracian counter-punching. Aware of the patriarchal fraternity's preferences, The gathering looked on in fascinated awe, As their champions of champions clashed, Deciding who was the greatest gladiator of all. Titus had stated there would be no draw; One would win, and one would perish, A rudis freedom staff the survivor's trophy, Out the Porta Sanavivaria - the Gate of Life. One well aware of the other, combat began, Scared eyes locked behind helmeted grilles, Grunts and sweat behind shield and steel, Roars and gasps of the clustered chorus. For hour after hour, they attacked and feinted, Using all their power, skill and technique, Nothing could keep them from a stalemate; The warriors watered and slightly rested. The search for the coup de grâce went on, Until both men fell, in dusty exhaustion, Each raised a finger, in joint submission, Equals on death's stage yielded in unison. Titus faced a dilemma; mercy or consistency? Please the crowd, but make them aware, Of his Damoclean life-and-death sword, Over every Roman and slave in the empire. Titus cleaved the Rudis into a dual solution; Unable to beat the other, both won and lived, Limping, scarred heroes of baying masses, None had ever seen a myth form before them. It was Romulus fighting Remus in extremis, Herculean labours of a sticky, lethal afternoon, In the end, nothing could separate these brothers; Victors united as Castor and Pollux in Gemini. For life and limb on Rome's vast stage, Symbiotic compensation of adulation's rage. Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved

We spend the rest of the night baking, using the ingredients I have left over to make another batch of So Sorry Blondies--- this one modified with extra peanut butter, Paige's favorite. We turn on an old Taylor Swift album and eat the dough raw and catch up on each other's lives. We talk about how she and my dad came up with Big League Burger in the first place, and weird dessert hybrids we want to try in the city, and fall asleep watching Waitress with fingers still sticky from chocolate and toffee.

I wanted to get out of my body; I had to escape the stain of what I'd done; I had to get out- I couldn't endure the blood on my hands, the sticky warmth between my fingers.