“I haven’t been avoiding you,”
“You’re lying. The last time we were both at dinner, you got up in the middle of Mom’s fajita presentation and said you forgot to feed your cat.”
Uh-oh.
“So?”
“You don’t have a cat.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Your grandmother used to say that you were two souls separated in heaven. She mainly meant you were both trouble and deserved each other.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Maybe we should have this conversation in an alternate universe where Alternate Indy gives a shit what Alternate Lee wants her to wear.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Do you always wear underwear like this, or is it for me?”
I rolled to my back and pulled the sheet to my waist.
“It isn’t for you, I’ve been wearing underwear like this since Gram gave me my first Frederick’s of Hollywood box on my sixteenth birthday. Now, I owe Victoria’s Secret my first-born child.”
Before speaking again, Lee waited several seconds that can only be described as ‘loaded silence’. While this silence was going on, he pulled the sheet back down.
“You’re tellin’ me that since you were sixteen you’ve been sittin’ next to me every year at Christmas Dinner wearin’ underwear like this?”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“So, now you’re getting shot at, you’re gonna leave me?”
“Girlie, I’m from Texas. We shoot at each other to say good morning.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“You want to marry me?”
“No. I’m gonna marry you.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Lee, you’re gonna have to get over this jealous-possessiveness thing.”
“Indy, you’re gonna have to get used to the fact that I’m the jealous-possessive type.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“I turned to Eddie. "Okay, I've never done this. This is the guy's department. What do I do? We need to get Lee's size and we need industrial strength. Show me which ones to buy."
Eddie looked at the display and looked to me. "You're askin' me to help you buy condoms for Lee?"
" Industrial strength condoms," I reminded him.
Eddie stared at me like he was re-thinking his crush on me.
"okay," I said, trying to be helpful, "we'll break it down. We'll start with the size."
He shook his head. "First, I'm a little worried you're lookin' to me to tell you Lee's size. Lee es mi hermano , but we aren't that close. Second, they don't come in sizes.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“For what it’s worth, I’ll share my intentions. You and me, we aren’t practice for the real thing. It isn’t that too much is at stake with family and friends, it’s because I love you. You’re funny, beautiful and you care about people. I like the way you look at me, especially when you think I don’t notice it. I like that we have history and our kids will have a big family and share that history because there was never a time when their Mom and Dad weren’t together. If you were a terrible lay, I might have second thoughts but you and I are dynamite together. I intend to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you. If that freaks you out, tough, because now we’ve started this, there’s no goin’ back.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“I do this thing for Rosie, you sleep with me"
I stared at him, open-mouthed and in stunned silence.
I did, of course, understand what he meant but he explained further.
"Not like last night, we'll both be naked and sexual acts will be performed."
My expression didn't change except maybe my mouth opened wider.
"I'll expect your participation."
Holly shit.
"Your avid participation."
Dear Lord in Heaven.
Eventually, I whispered, "You must be joking."
He shook his head and watched me.
I dropped my eyes, unable to hold his stqare.
"I think I need more coffee," I told his throat.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“I don’t get a taste of you soon, I’m givin’ up the search and takin’ you to my cabin in Grand Lake. No phones, no cell coverage, no buzzer. Anyone knocks on the door and I’m shooting them.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Okay, I’ve never done this. This is the guy’s department. What do I do? We need to get Lee’s size and we need industrial strength. Show me which ones to buy.”
Eddie looked at the display and looked at me. “You’re askin’ me to help you buy condoms for Lee?”
“Industrial strength condoms,” I reminded him.
...
“Let me get this straight,” he said and I could tell he was laughing, “you dragged Eddie to Walgreen’s to help pick out condoms for me?”
“Well, I didn’t know!”…
“Did you tell Eddie the part about long-lasting reliability?”
Oh Lord.
“Forget it,” I said.
“Indy?” he called.
“What?” I snapped, kinda pissy.
“I love you.” He still had laughter in his voice and there was something very cool about him laughing and saying I love you at the same time.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“If it’s just you sharing your feelings, perhaps you can voice it less like an order,” I suggested.
“I’m used to giving orders and if it sounds like one then there’s always a chance you’ll obey.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“How did Terrible Teddy’s face get like that?”
“Me.”
“You hit him?”
“He touched you, you said it hurt. I found him and beat the shit out of him.”
Oh… my… God.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Jeez, we haven’t even slept together and already you don’t trust me.”
“I’ve known you all your life not to mention the fact that my idiot sister is in the next room and when you two get together it’s like Laurel and Hardy do Denver.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“They’re on Lee and Indy Sex Watch.”
“Come again?”
“They want to know when we’ve done it.”
Silence. I went on.
“If we don’t do it soon, they might force us to at gunpoint.”
“Christ.”
“I know. No pressure though. I told them we’re taking is slow.”
“You have to report in?”
“I kind of feel obliged.”
“How’s that?”
I didn’t want to tell him I’d recruited them both for Lee Maneuvres in the past, so I said, “Never mind.”
“If something doesn’t happen soon, it’s gonna be bad. I can’t keep focussed, all I can think of is what’s on your Victoria’s Secret credit statement.
“You need to keep focused,” I told him, “bad guys are after me.”
“Tell me about it.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“At the sight and realisation that I was sleeping next to a naked Liam Nightingale, I’m not embarrassed to admit, I think I had a mini-orgasm”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“We’re not exactly together and were not, not together. We’re in together-limbo. We’re test-driving together to see if we want to buy it.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Liar. You've loved me since I held your hand at your mother's memorial service when you were five years old.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Jesus," he buried his face in my neck. "There's nothin' better in the world than hearing you say my name when I'm inside you." He slid in deeper, filling me. "I've been waiting years to be right here.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Fucking hell, India Savage wants hearts and flowers.”
I went up on my forearm. Hearts and flowers! As if! I was a Rock Chick!
“I do not!” I snapped.
He was grinning at me. “Yes you do.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Rule Number One in the India Savage Life Code: When in doubt or possible trouble, lie.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“The Coffee Guy, whose name is Rosie by the way, has moved to El Salvador.' I lied.
This was not met with happy noises.
'He's turned his back on coffee and is in the wilds of Central America building houses for the poor. I think we should all take a moment away from our quest for coffee-satisfaction and think about this noble decision. As you clamor for caffeine and curse the hard-working but innocent staff at my store, Rosie is sitting in the bed of a beat-up pickup bumping across roads to make one room homes out of mud for those who have nothing at all”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“He’s good at this stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Relationship stuff. He’s a natural. It’s weird, we’re new and we’re old. I can’t get my head around it.”
“He’s shit at relationship stuff. He’s only good at it because it’s you.”
“Sorry?”
“You’re shit at it too, but only because it was never him.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“You know, you wouldn't even want a man who wouldn't go back to save someone's mother and a drag queen.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“I don’t have black lace underwear and a matching garter belt,” I told Lee.
Eddie leaned back and chuckled again. Lee’s face didn’t change.
“I have red lace underwear and a matching garter belt,” I said.
This was true, I did.
Eddie quit chuckling.
“And black satin underwear and a garter belt. And then there’s my purple teddy thing with attached garters.” I paused. “I’ll model them all and you can choose.”
I looked at Eddie out of the corner of my eye and the smile was gone.
Then I sat back.
My work was done.
Lee granted me A Smile. It was small but it was meaningful.
“You’ve always been a lucky fuck,” Eddie murmured to Lee.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Lee on the other hand was not asexual. He might think of me as his little sister and could calmly sleep next to me without his nipples getting hard (or anything else getting hard for that matter) but I was pretty certain I could not do the same.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“At that promise, and him calling me “gorgeous”, an electric spasm went straight through my lower belly and he kissed me and that was it. I’m a slut. I don’t know what to say, even with the emotional scene, I gave in.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“What we have here is good and if you’d get over your thoughts that it isn’t gonna last, you’d realise how much better it’s gonna get if you’d just relax.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“My life was over, finished, and I’d never seen Pearl Jam play live”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Rock Chick
“Erica…I love you…all of you. Even your scars.”
― Meredith Wild, quote from Hard Limit
“for unfortunately the person most dogged in the belief in a false reputation is always that one, the possessor, who has the best means of knowing that it is not true.”
― Thomas Hardy, quote from A Pair of Blue Eyes
“Tibet has not yet been infested by the worst disease of modern life, the everlasting rush. No one overworks here. Officials have an easy life. They turn up at the office late in the morning and leave for their homes early in the afternoon. If an official has guests or any other reason for not coming, he just sends a servant to a colleague and asks him to officiate for him.
Women know nothing about equal rights and are quite happy as they are. They spend hours making up their faces, restringing their pearl necklaces, choosing new material for dresses, and thinking how to outshine Mrs. So-and-so at the next party. They do not have to bother about housekeeping, which is all done by the servants. But to show that she is mistress the lady of the house always carries a large bunch of keys around with her. In Lhasa every trifling object is locked up and double-locked.
Then there is mah-jongg. At one time this game was a universal passion. People were simply fascinated by it and played it day and night, forgetting everything else—official duties, housekeeping, the family. The stakes were often very high and everyone played—even the servants, who sometimes contrived to lose in a few hours what they had taken years to save. Finally the government found it too much of a good thing. They forbade the game, bought up all the mah-jongg sets, and condemned secret offenders to heavy fines and hard labor. And they brought it off! I would never have believed it, but though everyone moaned and hankered to play again, they respected the prohibition. After mah-jongg had been stopped, it became gradually evident how everything else had been neglected during the epidemic. On Saturdays—the day of rest—people now played chess or halma, or occupied themselves harmlessly with word games and puzzles.”
― Heinrich Harrer, quote from Seven Years in Tibet (Paladin Books)
“Ahora ella está de frente a él. De golpe, Alberto descubre que el rostro tantas veces evocado en el colegio estás últimas semanas tenía una firmeza que no asoma en el rostro que ve a su lado, el mismo que vio en el cine Metro, o tras esa puerta, cuando se despidieron, un rostro cohibido, unos ojos tímidos que se apartan de los suyos y se abren y cierran como tocados por el sol de verano.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, quote from The Time of the Hero
“Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ...
McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history.
The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Best and the Brightest
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