#been.

—the lady who told Todd Hardy made her feel like a cheap whore and it was the best night of her life, braver than a US marine

—genuinely heartbreaking, but the way Lisa starts with a near-miss between Hardy and Haven, THEN goes into the trauma, THEN has them reconnect? that is a WRITER! the headiness! the melancholy of what could've been! the rebirth!

—listening to a man erotically describe fossil fuels as he kills the planet, it is what it is

—insane that he compared her eyes to dr. pepper and it worked

—one thing I think this book underscores that I do feel is missing from a lot of more recent contemporaries I've read is... eroticism? like, Hardy wiping the rain from Haven's face and the way they discuss wine and the way she so clearly WANTS him but doesn't know what to do about it...

deeeeply erotic, and I do feel like we've more recently been in kind of... a sea of slot A into tab B in contemporaries, which DOES NOT mean I don't love a fucking crazy explicit sex scene... I do.... Sierra Simone is one of my favorite authors

BUT Sierra Simone also makes sure to get into the psyche of her characters so deeply that there is an eroticism that is separate from the physicality of the sex she writes

and while the sex in these books is not as explicit, it's present, and the eroticism both SERVES the sex scenes and exists SEPARATELY from them

anyway

That do not mean that they can't be Black.