Jemma Blackburn Quotes

“The life I knew and loved was gone, and so was my father. No matter how many words I chose to reject.”

“There was something about him—about those eyes and that stare—something familiar. It was the kind of something that made everyone else in the room fade away into the dark recess of my mind until there was no one left but me and him. He was the picture. Everything else around him was just white noise.”

“A calling implies I have a choice, doesn’t it? That I could answer the call, or not. That I have a choice in whether or not I accept this as my destiny? Well, I don’t. I don’t want anything to do with it. And I don’t accept the call. Matter of fact, this line is no longer in service. ”

“This was what my seventeen years of life had been reduced to: one duffel bag and a hideous valise. How ironic since I used to be the kind of girl who shopped every week-end and worried about what so and so thought about my outfit or if what’s his face noticed me that day.”

“It was false hope, and I didn’t want any part of it.”

“I could easily fall in love with the way he was looking at me. Like I was something special; something worth fighting for.”

“Whatever,” he said and tipped his head back as he polished off the remnants of whatever it was he was drinking. “It’s not like she’s the only game in town.” He took a step towards me but I was too consumed with my own thoughts to pay it any attention.

“The cruel world slipped away from me, and with it went all the other bad things in my life;”

“The blur of looming evergreens zipped by me so quickly it was as though they were never really there at all. Sometimes I felt just like those trees, rooted in mud with no escape, while my life sat in a car and passed me by.”

“ ‘So you don’t care that she’s just using you? Why don’t you go over there and tell Trace.’ He laughed as though I’d just dropped the punchline to some silly, little kid’s joke.”

“And I didn’t want to think about that. I didn’t want to exist inside that hopelessness. I just wanted to sink into this stolen moment with him and keep our doomed reality at bay.”

“I’m bonded to Dominic.”

“And when we were alone, I…I asked him to kiss—” “Stop. Stop.” His hands came out in front of him. “I’ve heard enough.”

″ ‘I’m not letting go’. He lowered his head to mine, bringing our faces within a dangerous whisper. ‘Come home with me.’ ”

″ ‘Come on, Blackburn. I’m not as dumb as I look.’ He took another sip of his drink and focused back in on Nikki and Trace. ‘One minute I’m getting you a drink at Spring Fling and the next you’re on the dance-floor with Trace. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out why you both disappeared.’ ”

“I don’t like him,” I said, watching Trace as he leaned into Nikki and whispered something in her ear. My heart sank all the way down to my feet. “Not anymore anyway.”

“I could live inside my books, each one taking me further and further away from the barred windows that held me prisoner.”

“So much of who I was had become lost, diluted, fragmented. I was being pulled and stretched in every which way, dragged in a million directions with the expectations of the world sitting heavy on my center like a concrete paperweight I couldn’t shake off.”

“I shook my head, still staring forward at the real-life nightmare unfolding before me. I felt Caleb’s eyes on me, assessing me as I watched them. ‘You really like him, don’t you?’ It came out like an afterthought; a passing observation that had just occurred to him.”

“I was going to live my life my way, however short-lived it may be, and I wasn’t asking for permission anymore.”

“It quickly became my way out; my escape from captivity. I didn’t have to live inside my pain anymore.”

″‘Let me go,’ I demanded, though it lacked punch. Being this close to Trace was no good for me, and I knew that, but the room was definitely spinning now and I wasn’t even sure I could stand upright anymore.

“My stomach bottomed out as I watched them from the doorway. He was leaning back against the wall, wearing jeans and a fitted white t-shirt that hugged him in all the right places, while Nikki was tipping into him, wolfing up all his personal space with her runway-ready body. She was all dolled up with a skin-tight pink dress and a pair of matching heels that looked like they belonged on a stage. And not the theater kind.”

“I could handle the truth. I would listen to its heartbreaks and I would mourn the world as I knew it because that’s the kind of girl I was, and then I would pick my pretty self off the floor and do what I was supposed to do. Just like I always did.”

“But there was no end in sight. No peace to be found. The end was only the beginning.”

“There was nothing innocent about that man, and every one in the room knew it.”

“There was a distinct method to the madness, every move propagated to force my hand, to lure me out of hiding with the sweet promise of finality.”

“I imagined the waiting was just part of their game. A way to break me down before the real torture began.”

“The suffocating darkness had already descended on me and was infesting every inch of my soul as I feared never seeing him again. Nothing they could do to me would be worse than that, worse than the crippling ache that was already in my heart, killing me from the inside out.”

“Dumbfounded, I stared at him like an apparition from a past life. He wasn’t supposed to be here, couldn’t be, and yet he was. The wind howled around me, ruffling my hair as it hissed its warnings to tread ever so carefully.”

“Welcome to your final resting place, I thought to myself dryly and then slammed my lids shut to chase away the terrifying thought.”

“In my dreams, I was always free. I was happy, and I was with him. (...) It was always heaven like this with Trace. My own piece of paradise within the burning inferno.”

“I wasn’t the same scared little girl he met that night in the church, and I was going to make sure that he knew it.”

“It was no secret that I should have been dead on more than one occasion. There had to be a reason why I wasn’t. And I prayed it was a good reason. I needed it to be a good reason.”

“There is no road so long and winding as the one that lead you to the finish line. Every bend is meant to test you, every junction made to bring you closer to that place where love and sacrifice meet.”

“The death of my childhood naivety had come to pass. I trusted no one and I feared nothing, not even death itself, for everything I loved in this world had already been taken away from me. Ripped from my heart like a bandage. There was nothing left inside but darkness... darkness breeding darkness, and I was at one with it now.”

“I know that my life will only ever be a battle against the darkness - a darkness that is infinite and eternal in its very nature - and it will remain that way until the inevitable day when the darkness takes my last breath.”

“Hell on earth had come, and Trace was really gone.”

“The pain of it slashed through my body in nauseating waves before settling heavily in the pit of my belly. I tried to hold it together, to hold it down, but I couldn’t.”

“As hard as it was for me to digest the very concept of a family, the notion of it still tugged on something inside of me, because deep down in the gallows of my truth, I still longed for exactly that. Family. Love.”

“The truth was I craved our exchanges and I calmed in his mere presence, and there wasn’t anything I could do to change that. Dominic and I were blood bonded - looming apocalypse or not.”

“What I needed was a way to undo this mess and get Trace back. Better yet, I needed someone to tell me none of this was happening. That it was all just some twisted nightmare I’d dreamed up from years of watching too many horror movies. And most of all, I needed Dominic to stop staring at me that way.”

“He could make me feel better and, for a second, I seriously contemplated it. But I knew that taking the easy way out - escaping into Dominic and leaving this unbearable pain and darkness behind me - was only a temporary fix.”

“His words replayed in my mind like the music score to Shakespearean tragedy. I decided I wasn’t going to focus on the big, fat it. I was going to dig through the smothering darkness and hold onto that tiny fragment of light.”

“You’re letting your emotions cloud your judgement, and it’s going to get you killed.”

“This was exactly the reason I needed space from him. I couldn’t think straight when he was this close, nor did I have the energy to keep pushing him away, especially when his proximity was the only thing that quelled the growing volcano inside of me.”

“It was the kind of separation anxiety that made my skin crawl and my head pound from the inside out. I immediately tried to shake it away, forcing myself to stay focused on what was most important.”

″ ‘Well, what would you have me do instead, Gabriel? The more I give in to him, the more I want him.’ My confession appeared to surprise him, but not as much as it surprised me.”

″ ‘I never let the truth break me before, and I’m not about to start now.’ As awful as it was, as difficult to swallow as it might be, knowing was always better than not knowing.”