Alexis Hall Quotes

Oh...I cant. I cant dance."
"What, not at all? Not even when you hear ABBA?"
"I do my very best not to hear ABBA.

As a general rule, I'm suspicious of unassuming men in their late fifties because they're usually terrifying supernatural monsters.

How can you like him? Even putting aside the fact you've spent the last five years telling me you're incapable of liking anyone, he makes Winnie-Pooh look like Kasparov."
"Well, I wasn't intending to play chess with him.

If he kissed Fen in London, would he still taste of the sea?

Shouldn't we have a safeword?"
Maybe this isn't the right thing to say because, at last, he replies, "I'm kneeling at your feet while you wank. If I don't like it, I can stand up and walk away.

He wasn't here to satisfy my idle curiosities. And it held its own fascinations: a man who talked like an innocent and fucked like a sybarite.

But I suppose it comes down to whether you think dominance and submission are about acts or about people.
Laurie, For Real

I crawl fully onto the bed and straddle him. It's not exactly something I've had much practice at. In my head, it's all graceful and natural and I sort of swing myself over like a cowboy into the saddle. But, basically, I kind of scrabble and then plop but, hey, it gets the job done.

Here lies Kate Kane, killed in a foreplay accident. Beloved daughter. Sorely missed.

When you say together . . ."
"It'll help if I'm close to you physically."
"I bet you say that to all the girls.

This is the story of my life: standing on the edges of things and worrying, when I'm supposed to just walk through them.

I'm not here because I'm broken. I'm here because I'm whole. Difficult, potentially undeserving, but whole. And I don't need you, I just want you. I want you" - my voice had gone embarrassingly husky - "so fucking much. And - " Another breath, another breath. " - maybe I love you. Or could love you. Or might love you. Or may come to love you." There was a dizzy rushing in my brain, as though I was about to faint or have a nosebleed. "Or whatever.

A soft pulse of desire went through me, not for sex or pain or humiliation or some other release, but for this, this quiet closeness. Someone to hold in the dark.

And Laurie looks exactly the same, but I'm kind of hazy, and my brain wants to substitute Daniel Craig, and what the fuck kind of fantasy is this, where I'm played - in my own head - by somebody else?

My heart, I think, turned tender in the untouched dark. I'm full of small, gathered hopes that, if I let them, will fly away from me, as fragile as dandelion seeds. The

The terrible powerlessness of being unable to do anything except wait for mercy you couldn't earn and didn't deserve.

I don't want fine. Fine isn't enough. Isn't not about the open fire or whatever other clichés you can conjure up, but yes, I want a connection. I want you to care as much as I care. I want you to need it and want it and mean it. I want it to matter/i>.

As ever, it was fifty percent fashion show, forty percent club, ten percent sex party, and one hundred percent annoying.

Clearly when you're immortal, life is no longer too short to stuff a mushroom.

He grinned, teeth and dimples and freckles moving like dust in a ray of sunlight. "Ayup, petal."

Oh

That's the plan then, is it?" Ashriel spread his hands despairingly. "We assemble an unlikely team of misfits, descend into the sewers, and learn important lessons about friendship while getting murdered by faeries.

What the hell are you implying? Yes, I've slept around but I'm not Alexander Fleming's petri dish.

God give me the serenity to accept angry young men being dickheads. Especially when they're ginger.

And now he smiled at me. All teeth. The way only people who hadn't learned self-consciousness
knew how to smile.

There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to open some of them.

You know you're wearing pyjamas wrong, right?"
He didn't look up. "Oh?"
"Yeah, you're supposed to just wear the bottoms, and have them hanging low on your hips, displaying your perfectly chiselled V-cut."
"Maybe next time."
I thought about this for a moment. "Are you saying you have a perfectly chiselled v-cut?"
"I'm not sure that's any of your business."
"What if someone asks? I should know for verisimilitude."
The corners of his mouth twitched slightly. "You can say I'm a gentleman and we haven't got that far."
"You" – I gave a thwarted sigh – "are a terrible fake boyfriend."
"I'm building fake anticipation."
"You'd better be fake worth it."
"I am.

The best thing, though, is when the falls land . . . the impact travels all the way from his body to mine, through the leather, then the handle, through my arm and to my heart. We're so . . . together. At

Love doesn't just go away when it becomes inconvenient.

The sight of him stirred a wanting that was starting to feel familiar, though it was less frantic tonight. It was a warm, steady thing, like a heartbeat.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was giving chase. I was dimly aware it was a really bad idea, but I just couldn't stop. Faery magic: fucking with people's heads since ten million BC.

Monster Fighting Rule Number Twelve: Never Assume It's Dead.

Monster Fighting Rule Number Thirteen: No, Really, Never Assume It's Dead.

This was another fossil of a joke. I couldn't remember where it'd come from, I had a horrible feeling it might have been me.

All sense, all judgement, overthrown by a h-dropping, glottal-stopping glitter pirate, and I didn't have to care.

Was it wrong that I kind of wanted to do her right there? Okay, Kate. Be professional about this. Also you have a girlfriend. A girlfriend who can juggle cars.

I want to give him everything, and the things I can't give, I want him to take.

Sometimes I think that's all love is. Understanding, smoothing away your strangeness. Making you part of the world, not separate from it.

That's sort of what love is, I guess. A perpetual state of semideranged partiality.

It's not something you can put your finger on, like height (though he's taller than me) or strength (though he's stronger than me), but there's something there. This power. Like being ordinary is just a mask he wears.

I half imagined I could taste the silver on his nails, as sharp as glitter in my mouth. Maybe when he touched me, colour would spill from his hands like heat.

Beneath his hands, my skin is so light and tight I half imagine I'm transparent. I'm glass for him, all the way to my blood-red, shining heart.

All these still places in his soul that he disturbs for me. When

but seeing as I ain't so flush right now, I'm afraid your quids'll have to come pro quo.

I'm not trying to upset you. I just think it's about time you moved on."

"I have moved on."

"Have you? Because it looks a lot like standing around to me.

Whats the name you Poms have for that thing where you jump up and down and hit each other with sticks?"
"Sex?"
"Gardening?"
He snapped his fingers. "Morris dancing.

I don't need you to take care of me."

"No, you need a kick up the arse.

If it wasn't for werewolf cousins, there'd be far fewer fashion interns, It boys, graphic novelists, bespoke shoe boutiques, and sushi-haggis fusion restaurants in the world.

I just don't fucking know, okay? I've never known. My entire life is just me pretending - not very well - that I have a clue what I'm doing. But I don't. I just don't. I don't have . . . like . . . a dream or a goal, and I don't know how to get one, or what's wrong with me that I don't.

It's not what you do, it's what it means.

I fended them off as best I could while trying to shield my eyes but, tragically, I'd left my flamethrower in my other suit.

The Dream is the city, and if we find it's heart in the Dream, then we find it's heart in the world.

Oh, you fuckguzzling shitweasel.

Let me down right now, you impotent angst puppy.

Pain was simply an inevitability of living, and I had to learn how to trust him with his own, as I trusted him with mine.

He was gorgeous yesterday, kneeling and burnished and kind of a fantasy. And he's still gorgeous this morning, rumpled and tired and real.

Days passed in a grey fog. I was becalmed. Without energy, without hope, with no sight of land, I could remember feeling better but I somehow couldn't believe in it. There was nothing but this.

Across the moon-pale scar that marred my forearm, Darian danced in dark ink, the gracefully curving edges of his name unravelling into a spill of colour as joyful and haphazard as the promise of stars.

It's still the second nicest fing anyone has evva done for me"
"The second nicest? What's the first?"
He kissed my arm, right over the worst of the scarring, where his name began "Well, there was this boy who was like just a boy and he stood in front of me, asking me to love 'im

I don't have many friends, but I think you're one of them. And friends don't send friends to get their souls sucked out.

It's my responsibility to communicate to you what I'm feeling and what's too much, and it's your responsibility to be receptive to that communication. I don't necessarily believe the best way for that to happen is me saying 'banoffee pie.

You do know you're one of the hot ones, right? You could have any dom in this room if you looked marginally more approachable than an underfed piranha having a bad day.

The nice thing about having a deeply weird, highly opinionated friend was that you never had to be the centre of attention if you didn't want to be. The

London was a hodgepodge of centuries, banging elbows like drunks at a bar

Thank you," was all I could think to say. But it wasn't just a dominance game. I meant it. Thank you for the pain. Thank you for letting it mean so much to you. Thank you for believing I'm beautiful. Thank you for making me feel so powerful. Thank you for loving me. Thank you. Thank you.

I couldn't afford to tangle myself up in other people's expectations and inevitable disappointment. It would be awful. An ever-expanding cycle of everyone feeling bad, like a bulimic serpent eating its own tail.

But I would fight for Darian. Sacrifice be damned, selfish or not, hopeless or not, I would fight for Darian.
I had not expectations of success, but I would try anyway, with all my meagre strength.
For Darian and for me, for my right to try, and his right to have me, and because I wanted him.

I reckon they'd taste of stars.

But that was the strange comfort of long-standing friendship - ribbons of familiarity and old love woven through your life.

You smell of cheap cigarettes and dirty sex.

In the past, I walk between green lawns, surrounded by golden stone.
In the past, I am brilliant and I am happy and my every tomorrow is madness.
In the past, words shimmer around me on silver threads and I pluck them like summer peaches.
In the past, the universe is a glitterball I hold in the palm of my hand. I am the axis of the world.
In the past, I am soaring, and falling, and breaking, and lost.

Thank you," I said bravely, dropping the syllables cleanly, like marbles, and secretly full of the most pathetic pride imaginable. I had spoken to strangers.

Not at all. You just have to teach people to value someone else's access to spoons as much as they value their own."

I tried not to stare at him. How did someone like this just . . . happen? Random act of atoms? Or was there a god somewhere who, thirty years or so ago, had woken up one morning and thought, What the universe needs right now is someone to think deeply about teaspoons.

The smart thing to do was quit while I was ahead, but I wasn't really ahead and I've never been a quitter

...he wails and protests and loves me even more. And I'm humbled and honoured and touched and so fucking happy he can find this thing in me to love.

I had no idea it would be like this. That having someone on their knees for you would make you so vulnerable.

Well, isn't this cosy." Alex beamed at me. "Would you like anything else while we wait for the ladies? I mean my lady and your boylady."
"I'm not sure 'boylady' is the correct term."
"Terribly sorry. Still a bit of a novel sitch. Not that isn't fearfully nice that you're a homosexual. Just never brought one to the club before.

I couldn't believe that lack of fear. It gave me vertigo, as though he was the edge of a cliff and I
couldn't bear the view.

Alfie watched the wavering shadows from the street moving across the sky like an upside-down reflection. There was a little piece of fading moon tucked between the clouds like it was falling out of someone's pocket.

You smell of shadows and dreams. And dead things.

Okay." He popped everything into the fridge. "Now I just need to grab some things from upstairs."
"For the pie?"
"For you. Give me like...five minutes. And--" he flashed his toothiest grin "--take you clothes off."
I froze. "When you said you wanted lemon meringue pie and filthy sex, I didn't think you meant together."
"That's what you get for underestimating me.

I have a sort of . . . thing, I suppose, for certain words. They spark inside me, somehow, turning me to touchpaper, but I don't know what they are until someone says them.

Who the fuck keeps worms in cans?"
"Fishermen?

I tried to go back to sleep, but knowing somebody had been watching took all the fun out of being unconscious.

It was barely evening, but I crawled into bed. Depression-stupefied, weary and hopeless, I should have slept.
But I was strangely restless. Slightly tearful. And troubled by wayward thoughts.
Depression was thoughtless, tearless, an animal's pain.
Some hours later, I realised.
I wasn't depressed. I was sad.

So, lemme get this right. We're gonna make a go of it. You and me? Togevver? Even though I'm orange and you're mental?

Why, in all the vastness of the world, did a sparkly idiot from Essex make me feel alive?

And Dad. But what would he say? How would he stop me, how would he help me, now he can't sneak his love in next to yours as if I wouldn't notice, and say "your mother thinks" or "your mother wants"?

Kink crowds are the same the world over. The good ones are already taken, the hot ones only talk to each other, and everyone else is desperate.

Will you stop comparing me to your grandparents? Or I'm going to think there's something peculiar in your continued interest in sleeping with me

I was playing games with myself, putting up a show of resistance, as if I could take it or leave it. But the truth was, whatever the price, I would gladly pay it just to feel...better. Connected. Human. Alive. Anything at all.

It's d-d-dishonourable to peek at someone else's cards."

"Cribbage is cutthroat.

I think I must be exceptionally drunk. Inebriation is like the sea - even the bed is not the bottom, and I am floating gently in some bio-luminescent trench among the anglerfish and the vampire squid. But I like it down here. I've never seen well by sunlight and I prefer the company of eyeless things.

The cottage pie was about as wholesome and straightforward as you could get. It was food for winter evenings and happy days. And the salad was rich, complicated, a little bit sweet, and seemed to be trying way too hard to be impressive. We'd both served each other a metaphor.

He smiled. "Yeah. Reckon you could read the phone book and make it dirty.

This isn't submission." "Isn't it?" "No." He looks up at me, tired as well, but he's never looked more beautiful to me than in this moment, strong and open and unafraid like when he surrenders his body. "It's love.

I was the climber of a sheer cliff, dragging myself on bleeding hands towards a summit that I'd never reach and sometimes didn't want to reach. The things I cared about were the hooks I'd driven into the rock face. Depression snapped them, one by one, one by one. My only certainty was the fall.

I thought crocodiles lived under my bed and if my feet hung over the side, they'd get bitten off. So I slept in a ball. I think I still do actually." Oh God. Shut up. Shut up. "Out of habit, I mean, not crocodiles. I d-don't think that anymore. Obviously."

He was quiet a moment. And then, faintly accusingly, "You know that's adorable, don't you?"

I tripped hard over adorable and couldn't think how to answer. So I said nothing at all, and merely enjoyed my few minutes in a dangerous puddle with a man who maybe thought I was adorable.

The future is terrifying because it's full of stuff, not because it's empty.

Behind my eyelids, I saw him dancing in spirals of coloured light, emerald, blue, and brilliant purple, enfolding him like the wings of an electric angel.

Tonight there was something different. Something both deeper and shallower than friendship. Familiarity, perhaps, the sudden realisation that we lived our sealed-up little lives in closeness to each other. That we had something to share and something to lose. Something to protect together.

But my mind has always been its own enemy.