CJ Roberts

“Someone will love you, Miss Ruiz. Even if you’re a jerk.” “Fuck you, Reed,” she sobbed.”

“There isn’t a permanent mark on me, Reed, not one. And you don’t know how many times he was there to hold me together when I was sure I was going to fall apart. He’s a monster,” she sobbed, “I know he is. I know, and…it doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

“Dealing with Caleb was all about perspective. You couldn’t appreciate his kindness until you’d felt his cruelty.”

“I know what I want, Reed, and if you can’t give it to me…you’re shit out of luck. After what I’ve been through, I don’t care what you think you can do to me.”

“I wish I could trust you, Reed, but I know I can’t.” His brow furrows in confusion, but there is a wry tilt to his lips, “Why?” I give him a small smile of my own, “You think you’re different from men like Caleb. You see everything in black and white, you don’t care about the whole story; you don’t care about the gray. Some stories aren’t black and white, Agent Reed.”

“Under the damage, he could still see Kitten, surviving despite it all.”

“You’re worse than those bikers,” she spat, her body tense and coiling, ready to attack. “At least they knew they were monsters. You’re pathetic! You’re a monster who imagines he’s something else.”

“I"ve heard it said, time heals all wounds, but if a dream can pull you so deeply into your past you can't remember the present, I'm not sure my wounds will ever heal. Caleb lives in my dreams.”

“I shut my eyes tightly, willing myself to go back to sleep. I want to go back to my dream, back to Caleb. I can't fucking breathe ! I can't breathe without him. I don't want to.”

“What are you doing ?" She said and laughed. "I was curious," he whispered. "About what ?""If happy tears taste the same as the sad ones," he said.”

“I was insanely jealous.""I know. It should make me happy, but it doesn't.""Why ?""I'd rather make you happy, Caleb. I'd rather see you smile.”

“When the initial pain of shock wore off, I thought it strange I should feel the pain of his slap in my chest, but I did, and it hurt more than I ever thought possible.”

“Thinking about Caleb hurts, but trying to move beyond my love for him, hurts more. There's no getting past the pain. There is only a different brand of pain available for my eager consumption.”

“She kisses my scars and I create new ones for her.”

“It wasn't the forgetting Caleb didn't like, it was the remembering”

“When he touched me, he made things feel better that i wasn't aware felt so bad”

“Sometimes a gentle lie was enough to remove the weight of a harsh truth”

“All of the tears i made her made her shed, these were his favorite. "If happy tears taste the same as the sad ones, he said.I think they're sweeter.”

“But, I'm telling you, monsters aren't born, they're made, and someone made Caleb." --Olivia”

“Mine.The word was a declaration. It rocked him to his very foundation. It was a truth he’d kept hidden for far too long. Caleb didn’t know anything about love, or loving anyone, but he knew… Livvie was his.”

“In the dark, my master let down his guard and he was Caleb again. He didn’t correct me. He didn’t punish me. He didn’t push me away emotionally. Caleb was there to hold me until the nightmares passed. He was there to tell me I was beautiful. He was there to tell me I was going to be okay. In the dark, he seduced me. I didn’t want the seduction to end.”

“I can’t keep you, Livvie. Stop trying to make me.”

“I can’t have everything I feel reduced to a textbook description that fits me, and millions of other broken idiots.”

“The naïve girl in me had been bitch-slapped into womanhood. I’d been razed by pain, grief, loss and suffering, and honed by lust, rage and an acute awareness of my need to survive.”

“He had told her he wasn’t Prince Charming, but what he hadn’t said, was he wished he could be.”

“Once again, I am a fragmented person. I am divided between the soft, sentimental girl who loves Caleb at all costs and the hard, logical version of me determined to survive – even at the cost of pushing Caleb from my heart.”

“For the love of Christ, shut-up! Let a bitch enjoy you mental breakdown in peace.”

“I miss the restraints. In a way, they allowed me the freedom to writhe and flail. They gave me something and someone to fight against. Without them… I feel like a traitor. No longer a prisoner, I seem to be allowing them to keep me here.”

“No more movie references. No more fictional characters to relate to. This was real. It was destiny. I was…a thing, a commodity.”

“There is a moment, in all my studying of movies and scripts, that I’d realized something elemental about human beings and why I’d been attracted to that imaginary world. Each piece of work was attempting to describe the human condition, in all its good, bad and ugly glory. At first, it’d been an extension of my own life, strangely mirrored in this world of ‘fiction’. Each story wanted, no— needed—to reveal a human fragility, a human bondage which tied people to the things they did and to be the person they held in their heads. Those stories were something true and sometimes horrific but people were people and the parts didn’t just tell the whole story.”

“I was as real to him as he was to me and it struck me just then that I meant something to him. In whatever capacity he was able, I meant something. The irony of that epiphany made my gut twist.”

“The only way to truly be safer, was to accept the dark, to walk in it with eyes wide open, to be a part of it. To keep your enemies close.”

“Everybody is fucked up and we are all freaks in our own ways"-Agent Reed”

“Softly, he inhales and exhales as we kiss. He never stops kissing me; he simply continues to steal my breath, returning it to me only when he’s infused it with his essence. Pure lust lives inside him. Every breath I take should come from his lungs.”

“I guess ,you want revenge," Ruthless Me, whispered. You bet your sweet ass, I do.”

“If I survive this, I can't go back. I'll have to move forward and I don't know what that means.”

“I blinked once, "if it's anywhere near as bad as what those assholes did to me... I'm tired of living through this shit just to step into deeper fucking shit. So if all you have planned for me is more torture, I think I'd rather die. Just do me one favor and don't... I don't want to die slow.”

“I had a weapon of my own and I wasn't afraid to fucking use it. And if I died? Who the fuck cared? I put the gun to my head and demanded to be let through. The fucktards shot me.”

“People often believed they were safer in the light, thinking monsters only came out at night. But safety – like light – is a façade.”

“Like a Falcon, she needed the dark to understand who her master was. She would learn to trust him, to rely upon him, to anticipate what he wanted from her. And like any master with his salt, he would reward her for her obedience. He would be exceedingly firm, but he would also be as fair as he could be. He had notchosen the instrument of his revenge at random. He had chosen a beautiful submissive. And what was a submissive if not adaptable -if not a survivor?”

“Once upon a time, Caleb held me captive in the dark, now he used it to seduce me.”

“I'm done being the damsel in distress. I don't need anyone to save me.”

“I'm fucked in the head, too. Even before I met you.”

“Some stories aren't black and white.”

“His touch was simple, but specific, meant to show me he could be like a lover, gentle, intimate, but also that he was a man unaccustomed to hearing the word no. Yes. I understood. He was a man, and I? I was nothing but a girl, not even a woman. I was meant to fall at his feet and worship at the altar of his masculinity, grateful that he’d deigned to acknowledge me. All this, from a simple touch.”

“ So, that's it? You think I'm just some idiot that fell for your bullshit! Well you're wrong! I fell in love with you, Caleb. I fell in love with your sick sense of humor. I fell in love with the way you protected me. You saved my life!" - Livvie/Kitten”

“ You don't know what you want Livvie, and what you think you want, you've been brain-washed into wanting”

“ We'll take care of each other. I'm stronger now, Caleb. Whatever happens.... whatever happened, we can handle it together. Okay?”

“You don't have to call me Livvie if you don't want to, Caleb. To be honest, it's kinda scaring me. You're scaring me”

“It seemed to Caleb, the nature of human being revolved around one empirical truth: we want what we cannot have. For Eve, it was the fruit of the forbidden tree. For Caleb, it was Livvie.”