“My confession begins," Father S said, "as the confessions of many men begin - with three words"
"Father forgive me?" Michael hazarded a guess. Father S signed.
"I met Eleanor.”
“No safe word can protect the heart.”
“Many waters cannot quench love, Nor will rivers overflow it. Song of Solomon 8: 7.”
“Love is an open wound that you hope never heals.”
“Michael, Eleanor is without a doubt the most beautiful woman who has ever or will ever live. If you could take a nighttime thunderstorm and turn it into a woman, you would have a very good idea what she looks like. And a fairly good idea how she behaves as well.”
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been…”
“Eight days,” Søren supplied. “Eight days since my last confession. Let’s see… where to start?”
“Pace yourself, Eleanor. If you forget something, I will remind you.”
“Tell me, have you ever had sex in the back of a Rolls Royce?" -Kingsley”
“Scar tissue, she'd once read, was the strongest of all tissues. Maybe Soren's heart was so strong because it was so scarred.”
“I want to own you," Griffin whispered into Michael's ear. Michael smiled and for the first time in his life knew exactly what to say and how to say it. "You already do.”
“Jeg elsker dig. Du er mit hjerte.” I love you. You are my heart. -Soren”
“Michael, this is an order from your mistress. Tell me what you want. Now.” “I want Griffin.” The words came out immediately. She had trained him too well. “I want Griffin so much it hurts. I love him, Nora. I have never felt anything like this before. And it’s absolutely stupid because he’s rich and he’s perfect and amazing and I’m a nobody. I’m a nobody, and I’m in love with someone I can’t be with. He’s so beautiful. I can’t stop looking at him, I can’t stop thinking about him. I dream about him at night. And he’s the first thing I think about when I wake up. And I want to touch him so much. I want to touch his face and that fucking perfect hair of his. And his lips and his chest and his arms— and I think about those arms around me, and it’s humiliating how much I want that. And, God, I want to live in his bed. I want to spend the rest of my life underneath him. I want to feel him on top of me and inside me. And I want submit to him. I want to go down on my knees in front of him. I want to call him sir and wear his collar and kiss his fucking feet if he told me to. And I want to walk down the busiest street in New York with him holding hands so the entire world can see us together and know that I belong to him. I love Griffin, Nora. I’m in love with him. And I can’t be with him. But that’s… that’s it.” Michael turned his head and buried it a little deeper into the cleft of Nora’s neck and shoulder. He wanted to stay there so he wouldn’t have to look her or anyone in the eyes ever again. “You won’t tell him, will you?” “She doesn’t have to.”
“...Jamison appeared in the doorway with a cooler.
"Thank you, Alfred," Griffin said, taking the supplies. "There's a thousand dollars in the cookie jar. Go buy yourself something pretty."
"I will purchase a firearm and shoot you with it," Griffin's butler said, bowing elegantly. "Master Griffin."
He left the room...”
“Can I call you Mick? Michael's too formal. I'm not formal. You're lucky I've even got pants on today.”
“Good men don't hit women. Good men only hit the women who want to be hit.”
“Your mind is both fascinating and repulsive.”
“Hey, bad girl,” came the deep, sexy voice of The Griffin himself. “Can’t believe the Pope let
you out of the Vatican.”
“I’ll come back,” she promised. “I’ll always come back to you.”
“I know,” he said with cold, calm arrogance. “If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t let you go.”
“Believe it. It’s true.” She took a step back. Then another. “Always.”
“Eleanor, if you have any mercy in that dark heart of yours, when you leave right now, you will
walk and not run.”
... ...
crawl and she didn’t fly.
She ran. Down the hall she ran as if the hounds of hell nipped at her heels. She ran as if God
himself had ordered her to. She ran as if her life depended on it and in that moment she might
have sworn that it did.
She didn’t know why she ran. She didn’t know who or what waited for her in the White Room.
She only knew she had to get there as fast as she could and whoever it was, he was worth
running to.”
“You are my heart,” he said. He’d said those very words to her that morning. But that morning, they’d sounded affectionate and playful. Now he said them as if he were stating a fact of anatomy. “I will not lose you. I’m sending you away to keep you safe. Do you understand? Say ‘Yes, sir.’”
Nora nodded and swallowed a sudden lump in her throat.
”Yes, sir.”
Soren bent his head and kissed her long and slow before pulling back.”
“Why did you leave him?"
The sigh that was Nora’s first answer billowed out in front of her in a cloud of white.
"Winter," she finally said, "can be so beautiful and so cruel. Cruel and cold. And if you live in the presence of winter you never have summer." Nora stepped close to him and put her nose at his cheek. "You smell like summer.”
“This was our house. Mine and hers. I know she’d sneak over to the rectory every once in a while and let you wail on her for a night. But I got her the rest of the time. I cooked her breakfast. I answered her fan mail. I put her to bed when she fell asleep at her desk writing. I rubbed her back when she was sore from overworking herself. And when she got all wrought up over you, it was me she cried on. No, she and I never had sex. That’s true. But we had love, real love that didn’t take anything out of us, that didn’t bruise us or break us. I loved her without hurting her. You asked me if I, a virgin, could teach her what sex should be? No, course not. Hell no. But at least I can teach her what love should be like. And she knows it too.”
“If it’s an abomination, Dad, you’re just doing it wrong. Bear down hard, then release. It’ll fit better.”
“Fetishes…they’re the pet you feed or the beast that eats you. We’ll feed your beast until it’s tamed.”
“Alfred, I need ice and that vitamin K goop. To the nursery. Stat."
"I loathe you, Master Griffin," came a British accent over the intercom.
"Thanks, Alfred," Griffin answered and came back to the bed.
"Is your butler's name really Alfred?"
"No. It's Jamison, I think. Can't remember. I changed it to Alfred years ago. My first crush on a dude was Batman...”
“Master Griffin, I would marry my own mother for the excuse to stab my eyes out with her brooches than to see anything under your kilt," the man's voice said with an elegant aplomb. "Where would you like your guest's things, sir?”
“Are you threatening me, Ms. Sutherlin?”
Sutherlin only smiled.
“No. Of course not. All I’m saying is that I’ll do anything
to protect him. Anything at all. But there’s no need to worry.
I’ve hurt people. I’ve hurt them badly. I’ve left permanent
scars on some clients. Some outer scars. Some inner. But all
that pain I’ve inflicted…it was all consensual. I’ve never hurt anyone without their permission. All I’m saying, Ms. Kanter, is…” Sutherlin leaned forward and pressed the lightest, softest, most terrifying kiss onto Suzanne’s lips before pulling back an inch and whispering, “There’s a first time for everything.”
“Welcome to the world of being owned. You'll like it. Until you hate it." Nora”
“Whatever,” he said. “Like you care. I’m gone. Have a nice motorcycle ride back to your church where you can have fun pretending to be some kind of saint we all know you aren't.”
“Stick them in the Blue Room. And no interruptions for the next couple of hours, please. My guest and I will be fucking. Two hours, Nora?”
“At least,” she agreed.
“Better make it three, Alfred.” Griffin shifted Nora higher on his shoulder and continued up the stairs.
“This is going to be a long summer, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Eight and a half inches long, if you’ll recall.”
“I have wonderful ideas. And terrible ideas. And terribly wonderful ideas.”
“No, it is actually. Life and death are less life-and-death than love is." -Nora”
“Captain,” I said after ten steps, without breaking stride. “I do understand that this is the Genitalia Festival. But when you say genitalia, doesn’t that usually mean genitals generally? Not just one kind?” For all the steps I’d taken, and as far down the corridor as I could see, the walls were hung with tiny penises. Bright green, hot pink, electric blue, and a particularly eye-searing orange.”
“I'd like to hold you in the mountains, like to kiss you by the sea. Take you far, far from here to a place where you feel free. Cause we are safe, we are true, we are going to make it through. Crashing worlds, falling stars, breaking all of who we are- I want infinity with you.”
“I want you to move in with me, man."
"Nah. I appreciate it, but I need to get a place of my own. I'm a grownup.”
“We come from goldfish, essentially, but that [doesn’t] mean we turned around and killed all the goldfish. Maybe [the AIs] will feed us once a week…. If you had a machine with a 10 to the 18th power IQ over humans, wouldn’t you want it to govern, or at least control your economy? —SETH SHOSTAK”
“Penso che sia importante sapere di essere desiderati, magari perfino di essere necessari, non credete? Ci dà qualcosa a cui aggrapparci quando siamo smarriti in un posto estraneo.”
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