41
" When you got captured, I didn't know..." He trailed off, had to chug whiskey before he could continue. " If it'd be like..." " What?" " Like it was with Clotile." " Oh, Jackson, no. I was okay. I'm unharmed." " Didn't know if I'd get there too late," he said with a shudder. Then he crossed over to me, until we stood toe-to-toe. " Evie, if you ever get taken from me again, you better know that I'll be coming for you." He cupped my face with a bloodstained hand. " So you stay the hell alive! You don't do like Clotile, you doan take that way out. You and me can get through anything, just give me a chance." --his voice broke lower " just give me a chance to get to you." He buried his face in my hair, inhaling deeply. " There is nothing that can happen to you that we can't get past." ..." When you say we...?" He pulled back, gazing down at me, his eyes blazing. " I'm goan to lay it all out there for you. Laugh in my face--I don't care. But I'm goan to get this off my chest." " I won't laugh. I'm listening." " Evie, I've wanted you from the first time I saw you. Even when I hated you, I wanted you." He raked his fingers through his hair. " I got it bad, me." My heart felt like it'd stopped--so that I could hear him better." For as long as you've been looking down your nose at me, I've been craving you, an envie like I've never known." " I don't look down at you! I'm too busy looking up to you." ..." The corners of his lips curled for an instant before he grew serious again. " You asked me if I had that phone with your pictures, if I'd looked at it. Damn right, I did! I saw you playing with a dog at the beach, and doing a crazy-ass flip off a high dive, and making faces for the camera. I learned about you" - his voice grew hoarse -" and I wanted more of you. To see you every day." With a humourless laugh, he admitted, " After the Flash, I was constantly sourcing ways to charge a goddamned phone--that would never make a call." I murmured, " I didn't know...I couldn't be sure." " It's you for me, peekon. "
45
" At the unexpected sight of Spence, Colbie startled hard. How was it that he was the one who needed glasses and yet she’d not seen him standing against the window? “No, I don’t kill a lot of people,” she said cautiously because she was wearing only a towelin front of a strange man. “But I’m happy to make an exception.”
He laughed, a rough rumble that was more than a little contagious but she controlled herself because, hello, she was once again dripping wet before the man who seemed to make her knees forget to hold her up.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said and pushed off the wall to come close.
She froze, but he held up his hands like, I come in peace, and crouched at her feet to scoop up the clothes she hadn’t realized she’d dropped.
Leggings, a long forgiving tee, and the peach silk bra-and-panty set that hadn’t gotten so much as a blink from the TSA guy.
But it got one out of Spence. He also swallowed hard as she snatched them back from him.
“Hold on,” he said and caught her arm, pulling it toward him to look at her bleeding elbow.
“Sit,” he said and gently pushed her down to a weight bench. He vanished into the bathroom and came back out with a first aid kit.
It took him less than two minutes to clean and bandage the scrape. Then, easily balanced at her side on the balls of his feet, he did the same for both her knees, which she hadn’t noticed were also scraped up.
“You must’ve hit the brick coping as you fell in the fountain,” he said and let his thumb slide over the skin just above one bandaged knee.
She shivered, and not from the cold either. “Not going to kiss it better?” she heard herself ask before biting her tongue for running away with her good sense.
She’d raised her younger twin brothers. Scrappy, roughhouse wild animals, the both of them, so there’d been plenty of injuries she’d kissed over the years.
But no one had ever kissed hers. Not surprising, since most of her injuries tended to be on the inside, where they didn’t show. Still, she was horrified she’d said anything at all. “I didn’t mean—”
She broke off, frozen like a deer in the headlights as Spence slowly lowered his head, brushing his lips over the Band-Aid on her elbow, then her knees. When he lifted his head, he pushed his glasses higher on his nose, those whiskey eyes warm and amused behind his lenses. “Better?”
Shockingly better. Since she didn’t quite trust her voice at the moment, she gave a jerky nod and took her clothes back into the bathroom. She shut the door and then leaned against it, letting out a slow, deliberate breath. Holy cow, she was out of her league. He was somehow both cute and hot, and those glasses . "
― Jill Shalvis , Chasing Christmas Eve (Heartbreaker Bay, #4)
47
" I’d like to share with you a parable: the parable of Bob the Angel.
A girl was walking down a darkly lit city street late at night. A man jumped out from the shadows and attacked her, suddenly she was suffocating and disoriented as hands clasped around her neck and the force of his attack started to push her down. She tried to yell as she struggled to pull his arms from her neck while she crumpled backwards to the ground, “God . . . help me!”
The next thing she remembers—just as the fear consumed her, and right as she disappeared into the misery and despair of helplessness—was a loud crash and an explosion of glass which rained down upon her and her attacker. The assailant’s lifeless body was suspended above her, held from collapsing on her by an unknown force, and then pulled away from hovering over her and dropped onto the pavement beside her.
She opened her eyes in the faint shadowy light, to see black matted hair and a long, black beard framing the eyes of a man. The smell of alcohol on his breath would have knocked her out if the adrenaline was not still trilling through her veins.
There he stood, God’s angel, off-kilter and drunk, with a broken whiskey bottle in his hand.
“You probably shouldn’t be walking through here this late at night,” was all he said as he turned away.
“Wait! What’s your name?” she asked, still stunned half sitting up on the ground.
All she heard as he walked away was his trailing voice calling, “Bob’s as good as any. . . .”
An angel is a messenger, and sometimes we only want letters sent in white envelopes with beautiful gold print, when sometimes a simple “no” on the back of a gum wrapper is what we are offered.
Every postcard from heaven does not come with a picture of the sunset there, nor should it. If it is an answer we want, an answer we will get. As far as pretty postcards, there are many others willing to send us that.
If not harps and gold-tipped wings, what then is the mark of an angel? An answer which pierces your soul, and which inspires a question that invites you to look outside of yourself and up to God. "
― Michael Brent Jones , Dinner Party: Part 2
56
" You have a hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder, and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction, of duty, charity, and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind wonders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration. "
― W. Somerset Maugham , Of Human Bondage
58
" The group’s laughter echoed off the stained, plaster ceiling. I raised my beer, but before I clinked the bottles together, I challenged him. “You think you’re a man I won’t forget?”
“Ah’m nae any man ye’ve met before.”
“Praise be,” I smirked, “the others haven’t been worth spit.”
Then the whiskey came, and I was taken by the tawny light, forgetting to worry about my ‘crazy’. Until Angus’ efforts at gilding my heart, called my ‘alter’ to the fore. "
― Cheryl R. Cowtan , Girl Desecrated: Vampires, Asylums and Highlanders 1984
