Quotes About Vulnerability

The salt and blood of him filled her mouth, and now her flaws were tingling, itching too. She leaned in, purring, and he backed up a step.

Chalcedony wasn't built for crying. She didn't have it in her, not unless her tears were cold tapered glass droplets annealed by the inferno heat that had crippled her.

Abby Irene ran both hands through her hair, strands pulling between the fingers, the insides of her wrist pale as skimmed milk and veined with blue.

A companionable hand on his shoulder made him shiver.

I let the darkness and the cold within show in my eyes.

I think I'd actually worried her. At least she'd acted concerned. Which was either a glimpse of a softer side of her, or a symptom that the Stockholmification was working. Or maybe just the recognition that she couldn't reach the food without me.

She reined her mare in close enough that Gin could lean a shoulder on her to be comforted, and slid her own arm around Kit's waist, seeming not to notice that it took all of his flickering strength of heart not to shy and buck.

You manage to disentangle yourself, but then you're out in the hard, cold universe, and suddenly everybody is disagreeing with you-and you have no idea how to manage disagreement and how awful it makes you feel, having never experienced it at all.

I was asking a sick plant for emotional labor so I could find the courage to ask them things I knew would hurt them greatly. But I was a sick mammal, so I suppose it evened out.

A warm hand rested on Rien's nape. It was comforting, and it sent a shiver between her shoulders. She swallowed and licked salt from her lip and tried to think of what to say.

She had to turn away from his eyes before she found her voice. He put a lump in her throat too big to talk around.

Mingan smiled and set Cathoair down, deceptively gentle. The Wolf leaned him against the wall, barely upright…and grabbed his chin in one hand, and the nape of his neck in the other.

Kit stepped close enough for Oxford to feel the heat of his breath, Will imagined, the naked blade angled between them as if laid down the center of a bed.

Whatever confidence came to her when she gripped a knife didn't serve her here.

They stripped him only to the waist, and left his feet free when they bound him standing between two pillars, and not helplessly prone on some clammy altar.

He was distantly aware that he whined like a child and fussed at the tender hands restraining him, while voices gentle, cajoling, and bitterly frustrated by turns spoke over him.

Somehow, Kit got the cup to his mouth. Perhaps even the steam was fortifying. It tasted of bitter earth and summer sun and the unshed tears still clogging his throat.

You let your guard down to one person, pretty soon other people started creeping in over the razor wire and around the force fields, too. And then they inevitably hurt you, and what might have been a few chips and dents of your deflectors were working turned, instead into a full-sledged meteor storm, leaving behind cracked bones and big meaty gauges.

A voice for a moment he mistook for his own defiant tones, the spiked irony he saved for moments of abject vulnerability.

It takes more than blood and iron to wound me.

I could mess up the gravity and get squished. I could get sealed in and spend the rest of my objectively quite short but subjectively probably very long and unhappy existence like a jellyfish in the tubes, drifting along, unable to get out. And both of these seemed preferable in my head to the idea that I was going to have to climb out of this accessway and go get into a physical confrontation with somebody who was armed and didn't mind conflict in the slightest.

The red wolf blurred and retreated, a smooth, reshaping of form that left him standing, nude, facing her. Seeker bit her lip and kept her gaze an his eyes, telling herself the breathless pain she felt was nothing but nervousness.

Whatever he was before, he's but a candle-flicker now. A beautiful one, polished and glossy, all the more perfect for the terrible, disfiguring scar that puckers and knots the right side of his face when he smiles. It doesn't seem to bother the young man's admirers; if anything, the wolf thinks some of them find it erotic. The boy shies away like a startled horse, an animal he will never see when women and men wonderingly brush the raw-lipped pink line.

Maybe that was the trade: Stay erased and still and quiet and be invisible and safe. Take an action, claim space, be noticed-and open yourself up to attack by everyone and everything.