It’s funny how your life can come apart in an instant. How you can feel safe and satisfied one moment, and the next you’re dangling over an abyss, no warning, no quarter. You’re absolutely about to fall.

There is a fierce joy to letting loose, to cutting yourself free from all the countless mundane threads of restraint that fix like you in your place, that tighten so gradually day by day that you do not even realize how bowed you are until you’re quit of them.

I lay in my bed and tried not to miss him, to miss the entire experience of him. I wanted to feel the shape of him beside me. I wanted him to touch my hair. To kiss me, long and velvety slow.

I hate it here. I hate everyone here. I hate that I am so different. I love it here and I want to belong and I know that I never will.

She was spirit and presence, as rare and brilliant as snowflakes in sunlight, and he could not bring himself to harm her.

I want to love, and be loved.

He mouthed the words to her that she could not see, and that she could not hear. It was all he dared tonight, strangers in a castle, strangers to this land, their future a great black question mark and an ending he could not foresee. He bent his lips to her ear and said without breathe:Lia-heart. Little dragon. I love you too.

Something inside his chest unlocked--wildly, slowly, a peculiar sort of melting. He was lost. He was the thorn and the thistle, blown upon her breeze. He felt, strangely enough, staring into her yes, like he was going to weep.

I love you. Even more than gold and dreams, I love you. It seems insane you haven't realize it. You were the one who first informed me of it.

It wasn't an itch. It was a sickness. It was poison blazing through him, thinking of her all the time, watching her, touching her, wanting and wanting and wanting until his mind went black.