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The dedication: For all the women who choose the bear and all the men who do the work to understand why. May the forest be a little less scary one day.

“I’m dripping all over your kitchen.”
“I can get you a towel—” He peeled his wet shirt off instead. He balled it into his lap, completely oblivious. I stood there, gawking.
Ooooh, for fuck’s sake.
There were eight…
“You know, you shouldn’t just pull those out without letting people know they’re coming,” I said.
“I need to announce them? Like the abs are entering the building—”
“Stop.”
“I mean, the ladies did soft launch them, it’s not like you didn’t get a heads up—”
“STOP.”
He started laughing. “All day you’re trying to get my shirt off…”
“Well, I wasn’t as ready as I thought I was.”

“Sometimes the start of something good begins during something bad,” he said. “We don’t get to pick when these things happen… So I don’t really want to be that guy who always talks about trees…,” he said.
I snorted. “But…”
“Redwoods,” he said.
I wiped under my eyes. “The oldest trees in the world.”
“Yes. They get that way by supporting each other. They intertwine their roots with the roots of other redwoods and it gives them stability. A redwood tree alone would fall.” He paused. “You are not alone, Charlotte. Let me help.”

“Oh, I appreciate the male form too, trust me. Take Levi over there.” I point toward the ring, where Levi is helping Silas lace up his gloves. “He’s mine. I mean, I’ll share him with you, of course. Once you get a good look at that body, you’ll want more than just a peek.”

Sable Wilson, caught in the orbit of the infamous Four Horsemen. A pawn in their chess game. The truth is, I don’t know if I can trust them completely. Every moment with them is a delicious torment. I know, one day, this will end. No one wants something broken. They’ll see the cracks in me, the parts I’ve tried to hide, and when they do... they’ll leave. They’ll discard me.

He pulls me back into his space, and this time, I don’t fight it. My breath catches in my throat as I glance down at his hand encircling my wrist, his fingers large and strong, yet so gentle. “Silas didn’t know what he had back then,” Dayton murmurs... He leans in closer, his breath warm against my ear. “But I do.”

Every Valentine’s Day, I bought her a single red rose... until we turned thirteen. That was the year she crushed it—literally. She took my rose, threw it to the ground, and stomped on it... She glared at me, her eyes full of fire, and slammed the door in my face. No explanation... That moment—the rose, her rejection, the door slamming in my face—was the first time I felt her rip my heart out of my chest. But not the last. She’s done it again and again, without fail. And yet, I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t let her go... Because in a world without Sable Wilson, there is no Silas Morgan. She’s not just the girl next door. She’s my other half. The shadow and rival that complete me. But she never lets me explain. Never.

“Your love is a blade pressed against my throat, and I welcome it.” The words taste like blood on my tongue, like a promise carved in pain. I crave it—the edge of her affection, the cold, unforgiving slice of it. She’s not here to heal me, but to cut deeper, and I will bleed for her. Every drop, every wound, only makes me want her more..."Then let me carve you open," she murmurs... She doesn’t just want me—she wants to claim me, destroy me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What am I supposed to say to her? That from the moment Silas laid eyes on her again, we all felt it? That we’ve been drawn to her like moths to a flame, each of us craving a piece of her in our own way, unable to resist? That we’ve each pursued her, even Levi, though he’d never admit it? That she’s our property to protect. Ours to control. Ours to manipulate. She is our secret treasure. But how do I explain that to her? She’s crawled under our skin, digging her nails so far deep into our souls that her name burns inside of us. I am cursed by her mark, and all she did was say hello. “You’ve gotten to us, Sable,” I finally say, my voice rough. “It’s not something I can just explain away. You’ve burned yourself into us, and we’re not used to feeling that. None of us are.”

Kai’s quiet strength, Levi’s broken intensity, Dayton’s possessive warmth, Silas’s wicked dominance. They each demand something from me—something that no one else ever has... Every nerve in my body screams at me to make a decision. To choose. But the truth is, I already have. Somewhere along the way, without even realizing it, I became theirs. Every one of them has marked me in their own way, claiming pieces of me until there was nothing left to give to anyone else.

She doesn’t get it. She’ll never get it. She thinks we’re trying to control her, to own her. Like this is some twisted power play. She’s wrong. It’s not about control. It’s never been about control. She owns me. I can’t breathe unless she lets me. I can’t think unless it’s about her. Every waking moment is consumed by her—her face, her voice, the way she looks at me like I’m the one who’s lost. She’s under my skin, in my blood, crawling through every part of me, and she doesn’t even know it. Hell, she doesn’t even know the half of it. We’re all tied to her, all of us, bound by something we can’t explain, something she’ll never understand.

Until the air itself is hung with soft glimmers, until it feels like the world is hung with stars. It is so simple a thing—fireflies in the cloister. And yet every time, I’m humbled by it. By the magic God so casually lets loose for us, by these sweet moments which are so freely given.

Funny how I love you could be enough for any other couple in the world. The beginning of a happily ever after. But for us, it’s like vinegar instead of wine—it stings and it sours and it only makes us thirstier for something we can never ever have.

"... And most importantly, you don’t have to compete with God... you could never compete with God, because the two of you magnify each other in my heart. I know God and I feel God more keenly and more deeply because of you.” I find his hand and press it over my heart, over the invisible scapular I’ll always wear for him... “You bring me closer to God, Elijah,” I tell him softly. “Simply by existing.”

There’s no instruction manual for falling in love with your best friend’s little brother. And there’s no manual for falling back in love with him when he’s a monk. There’s only the aching knowledge that you yourself are a kind of momentary prayer, uttered with reverence, spoken softly into the air, and then finished with a gentle and loving selah.

That is the cruelest thing about depression: it is at the edge of speech, at the very edge of what words can shape and describe... I’d sink down onto my bed and find myself literally unable to move... and it wouldn’t even be that I didn’t want to go, because often I did. It was more like my pilot light would suddenly go out, and there would be nothing left to animate me, no heat or energy or life at all. Like being sunk into liquid concrete, sunk into a substance where even the slightest movement required superhuman effort. But how do you explain that to a disappointed boyfriend and not have it sound like I chose to stare at a wall instead of come to the thing you explicitly told me was important to you? You don’t. You can’t. I know because I tried.

“You are beautiful, Zenny... Your face is stunning, your body is a work of art. But it’s you I can’t stop thinking about, how you ask for things and how you argue, how you tease and how you rant and how you glow when you talk about what matters to you. When I say the word beautiful, sweetheart, know I mean it.”

I’ll never be able to compete with her god. With her mission and vocation. I’m losing my mind over her, but for Zenny, I’m merely a stop on the road to sainthood.

... I see that she’s not just pretty. She’s stunning; she’s incredible. She’s the kind of beautiful that inspires songs and paintings and wars... Jesus Christ. Pretty. What a stupid word to have used for her, what a bland shadow of the truth. Cakes and throw pillows are pretty—this woman is something else entirely. Something that makes me blink and glance away for a moment, because looking at her does this weird thing to my throat and my chest. Looking at her gives me this feeling like my hand is on a veil shrouding some powerful mystery, the way I used to feel looking at the stained-glass windows of my church. The way I used to feel about God.

“I want to build a tower around you, and then build a castle around that tower, and then dig a moat around that castle, and then I want to guard you like a dragon. Burn anyone who tries to hurt you into ash and then scorch those ashes a second time.”

“I don’t want you to have any problems, not a single one, not even me. When I told you I wanted to be your dragon outside of the castle, I didn’t mean it like… like I’m the only one who gets to keep you hostage. I meant it like I wish I could burn everything bad away in your life so you can do whatever you want.”

The prioress smiles. “Biblical metaphors for God include a laboring woman, a breastfeeding mother, even a mother hen. And man and woman were both created in God’s image, were they not? Why use Him and not Her? In fact, why even say God instead of Goddess? Both Him and Her are not enough to contain the fullness of God, who is outside the construct of gender, who is so much more than the human mind can conceive... Sean, faith and belief are the practices of committing a life in the face of no answers. God is and always will be outside of human comprehension. And loving Her is an act; it’s not stubbornly repeating creeds and trying to force Her into modern expectations or rational paradigms. She’ll never fit in the same boxes we apply to science and reason; She’s not meant to. And to try to force it only breeds spiritual violence in the end.”

Of all the ghosts that haunt me, it is the priest who stays the closest, who dogs my steps from dawn until dusk. It’s the priest who reminds me of my sins, of everything I’ve left behind, of every part of secular life that is flat and colorless and petty. It is the priest who tells me to be afraid of being punished. Like I’m not already afraid.

My guilt was my language, my sustenance, my pulse. And maybe Millie was right—I was letting it bleed into parts of my life where it didn’t belong... Today there was just me and my guilt, and God was nowhere to be found.

Life is a spiral. As long as we lived, we would keep moving forward. But on a spiral path, getting closer to your destination meant periodically passing the same things—emotions, issues, character flaws—over and over again... It applied to institutions too. Like churches... Because historically, the church had its own spiral, times where it had been forced to modernize or adapt, great leaps forward in humanitarianism and philosophy, and giant leaps back with dogma and persecution. The Church didn’t need me to tell it how to change. It already knew how, because it had done it so many times before.

I was supposed to be a shepherd of the flock, not the wolf. Not the wolf who had woken up this morning grinding his hips into the mattress because he’d had a very intense dream with Poppy and her carnal sins in a starring role. Guilt wormed through me at the memory. I’m going to hell, I thought. There’s no way I’m not going to hell.

Worry is a sin, even I know that, yet I am more than just a lily of the field. I’m a lily that’s been plucked from the ground and laid at your feet. When it comes to you, I’m rootless and helpless and at your mercy for sunshine and water. And I’m not even supposed to be yours. How can I not worry?

The Church said everything about her and me was wrong. It was lust and fornication. It was lying. It was betrayal. But the Church also talked about the kind of love that transcended any and all boundaries, and the Bible was filled with stories of people who carried out God’s will and had very human desires. I mean, what even was sin? Who was being hurt by Poppy and me loving each other? It’s a matter of trust, I reminded myself. Because while I wrestled with the epistemological nature of sin like the trained theologian I was, I was also a shepherd and shepherds had to be practical. The issue was that I had come here to build up trust in the church, to undo another man’s wrongs. And no matter how consensual and otherwise unremarkable my relationship was with Poppy, it would still ruin that. My work, my goals, my memorial to Lizzy’s death.

"... I like the rituals themselves too... I like the incense and the wine and the chants. It feels ancient and holy. And there’s something about the rituals that brings me back to God every time, no matter how foul my mood is, no matter how badly I’ve sinned. Once I start, it all sort of fades away, like it’s not important. Which it isn’t. Because while Catholicism can be macabre, it’s also a religion of joy and connection, of remembering that sorrow and sin can’t hold on to us any longer.”

... real people were both good and bad, all mixed up together, only the screen made everyone into basic silhouettes. The resulting image could appear either way depending on which way you turned it, which details you showed.

Was Bodhi Mark’s kid too? Mark had not risked his life to bring him into the world, literally split himself open and been stitched back together. Mark had not stayed up nights nursing, lying in bed, tiny pinching hands kneading sore breasts. Mark had not been puked on, had not, once, miraculously caught spit-up midair with a burp cloth. Mark had not trimmed Bodhi’s nails or given him a bath or kissed his tiny feet or made him laugh. How on earth could Bodhi be his?

She’d thought, somehow, that keeping the baby would make people regard her with more kindness. But women frowned at her and Bodhi in the grocery store. The eyes of men skittered over her like she was invisible. She seemed to walk everywhere in a cloud of shame. She was a stupid slut for having a baby, and if she’d had an abortion, she also would have been a stupid slut. It was a game you could not win. They had tried to warn her: her mother, Mark, even Becca. But when they talked about the opportunities she would be missing, she’d thought they meant a four-year college. She hadn’t understood they meant that every single person she met, every new friend, every love interest, every employer, every landlord, would judge her for having made what they all claimed was the “right” choice.

Before she'd had Bodhi, she'd known her mother loved her, but she hadn't understood how expensive that love was, how much a mother paid for it.

But I also knew, nursing Bodhi to sleep each night, that my world would never be without love again. Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. I didn’t know the love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.

“You fell in love with me through your own free will,” [they] continued. “You so desperately wanted it that you talked yourself into it. You can’t blame your DNA for getting you into this mess—you can only blame yourself.”

"[It felt] like a thousand small explosions going off inside me all at once, but not in a bad way... It was like they woke me up. I suddenly felt more alive than I’ve ever been before, and that’s the only way I can describe it, as lame as it sounds."
... "So why am I sitting here with butterflies the size of eagles circling my stomach, and I can barely look at you, and then when I do, I can’t take my eyes off you?”

They’d shared so many intense conversations by phone that she’d come to see him as a best friend as well as her Match. Maybe that was more important than anything else, she thought. Maybe when you took it back to basics, that’s what love really was: just being there for someone when the sun rises and sets.

"... If you’ve got the opportunity to love someone as much as they love you, then grab it with both hands and hold on to it for dear life.”

She must have sensed my presence because she turned in my direction with the most breathtaking smile. My steps faltered and I could hear the thunderous sound of my heart ramming against my chest. She’s so beautiful. I can’t help but think about that feeling I experienced earlier today. What was the word for it? Crush. I couldn’t have a crush on my best friend—that would fuck everything up.

"... I’m impressed and touched that you’d go through all this trouble for someone like me.”
“Avery, you don't get it. I would do whatever it takes for you. It's not because it's someone like you. It's because it's you,” he admits... "Seeing you smile does something to me. I'm not sure I can explain it yet. It's the best feeling in the world, making you happy."

“Avery, you’re so damn beautiful. You take my breath away whenever I look at you. You’re my safety net, and I feel so seen when looking into your sparkling green eyes. You see through all the walls I put up and through all my bullshit. You see me. You make me feel like I deserve to be loved and, more importantly, to be loved by you.”

“The prevailing of injustice is maintained by the apathy of many. One man, one child, one king …can alter the outcome of entire worlds...”

“Henri, I am yours. There is no span of time or plane of existence where I do not love you. Love itself is inadequate to describe how I feel about you. You are everything. My whole heart. My one desire. My reason for drawing breath—” Henri kissed him vehemently. He didn’t ever want to let go. If death was lurking in every shadow, then let it witness this and envy the one thing it could not touch. Love. A force so strong that it would tether them together no matter what drove them apart.

The kiss was slow and soft and sensual, conveying what words never could. That no matter what torture Henri had endured, they would never let it happen again. Because he was their king. Their lover. And they would fight for him until the last drop of blood was spilled.

"...I will stand between divinity and death to keep you by my side. You are mine. No force of heaven or earth will take you from me.”

Life was a divine tapestry of infinite threads. Each fiber a person, a choice, a moment, a memory. A collection of endless possibilities, experiences, and alternative endings. As each thread intertwined, the story would shift, shaping one’s identity and defining the purpose of the design. With each stitch, the pattern would evolve through joy and sorrows, love and loss. The gods loved nothing more than to create tension and tug on threads until they snapped. In this moment, it felt as if she were being given a taste of what it meant to play god.