Jessa Hastings

She is a beautiful, affluent, self-involved and mildly neurotic London socialite. He is Britain's most photographed bad-boy lothario who broke her heart. But Magnolia Parks and BJ Ballentine are meant to be, and everyone knows it. They're in the stars... just suspended in a strange kind of love that looks like hurting each other a lot of the time: She dates other people to keep him at bay; he sleeps with other girls to get back at her for it. But at the end of their every sad endeavour to get over one another, it's still each other they crawl back to. But their dysfunction is catching up with them, pulling at their seams and fraying the world they've built; a world where neither has to ever let the other go completely. As the cracks start to show and secrets begin to surface, Magnolia and BJ are finally forced to face the formidable question they've been avoiding all their lives: how many loves do you really get in a lifetime?

Magnolia Parks

grayson gruber

“He’ll hurt me. He’ll always hurt me. I’ll never be safe with him, even if i’m always safe next to him.”

taylor

I don’t just hate his eyes but all of him for a second—for knowing me how he knows me, for seeing through everything I say, for doing that with anyone but me. 

Sophia

The physical distance between us is meagre, but somehow still a forest grows between. Pine trees of mistakes so tall we can’t see over them and rivers of things we didn’t say so wide we can’t get around.

We walk through those heavy black front doors I’ve kissed her up against a million times and I can’t help it— what this house does to me— I’ve loved her in every corner of it.

I think it’s just that how much I love him mattered more.

I remember wondering if this was it, if that was the last time ever I’d see him. Him with the starry eyes and the hair I loved to knot my hands up in.

The most beautiful boy in every room, the great love of my life— how many loves do you get in a lifetime? I remember wondering that.

 many people will look at me like he does, not just like I’m the sun but like I’m the whole god damn universe.

That’s where we’re constantly trying to revert to, I think. To a place from before we began killing each other for our hearts to stay alive.

he's such an asshole for not dealing with his shit and instead hurting her 24/7

When all that’s left of loving each other is hating each other.

I hate fighting with her. We do it too well, better than anyone I’ve ever seen. We weren’t like that when we were together, barely ever fought when we were together.

Marsaili used to say something about how love can go sour like milk and then it turns to hate. Maybe we left our love out.

The problem with me and Parks is, I think we love each other more than ourselves.

Again, that sounds romantic but it’s not— Because if she loved herself more than she loves me, she’d have fucked off years ago. I don’t deserve all the chances she half-tries to give me.

And if I loved myself more than I love her, I would have cut the ties between us as soon as she started to strangle me with them. If I loved me more I would have let me drift away, into the dark, out of her light but I didn’t, and I couldn’t and I won’t because when it comes to her, I have zero instinct for self-preservation.

I’ll die in her arms or at her doorstep trying to get back into them, I don’t give a fuck.

Magnolia Parks quotes

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