J.A. Ironside Quotes

How did you get so scratched up then, Emlynn?" He looked at me uncertainly again.

I felt wildly like laughing. Too many swooping highs and plummeting lows. What a weird few
days. Weird being a massive understatement.

"Cr-Crawling through gorse bushes." I took a perverse delight in answering his questions in a way that told him nothing at all. I'd never paid much attention to boys before. Maybe Grace was onto something after all.

"Crawling through gorse," he repeated. "Part of your action-girl antics, no doubt?"

"N-no doubt." I smirked again.

Dad looked more sheepish than I had ever seen him look in his life. It made him appear younger.

"A scent. Your mother's shampoo.

Hey now, wait a second. When will I see you again? You can't leave a poor lad dangling like that!"

His look of bewilderment made me bite my lip to keep from laughing.

"Why would you w-want to?" The words were out before I could stop them. A rare occurrence for me. And now I seemed pathetically needy. Very attractive.

"Because I love a pair of pretty green eyes." He grinned.

Oh r-really? Do t-tell?" I quirked an eyebrow back at him.

"Well, usually it's best to take your shoes and socks off before you step in the stream, better balance on an uneven surface. Also, you avoid that unpleasant squelchy feeling when you wear the shoes againlater." He paused, smirking. "Also, if
I was going to paddle barefoot "I was going to paddle barefoot upstream in Yorkshire, I'd wait until at least May before I tried it. But you go ahead, love. You're clearly a Spartan lass.

This is m-me." I indicated the lonely track.

"Really? What's up there?" He peered over my shoulder in genuine curiosity. "Is there a house up there? You're not a sylph or something that really does live wild, are you?

Every time I had things straight in my head about
him, I saw him smile or crook an eyebrow, and all my sensible reasons on why I couldn't have feelings for him seemed redundant.

Tangled onto the shuttle, we were being woven back and forth to create the same tapestry of despair and heartbreak and loss. It was so much
bigger than I could see before, and all I had done was stand at the centre of the web and feed it my anger and frustration and jealousy.

She was everywhere. She was screaming in her tortured body. She was watching from cameras in every room. She was the false weather system and the storage devices. She was the gate keeper, throwing six shirts over her swan-brothers necks...opening six doors for her brothers to step through as young men, though their bodies were long gone, used up by the organ banks of the upper castes.

A Lamentation of Swans