Queen of the Elves by Anne Rice
Arwen wound her arm about the velvet drapes, cooling her cheek against the marble. When Aragorn returned she sensed his presence at once — the scent of his hair, black and stringy as Spanish moss, sweet and warm as pine or the apples from her father’s orchard or a healthy patch of Centipede grass. She turned to him and noticed the silver tray he carried, aching under the weight of its load, which was substantial and also heavy.
“I brought you wine, my queen,” he said, resting the tray on her dresser.
“Thank you, my love,” said Arwen. “The weather, how it torments me.”
“The flesh of the Noldor was not meant for such days.” Aragorn poured the wine — new, and red — into a sparkling chalice for his love. She drew close to him and took it, aware now as keenly as their first meeting of his earthy horseman musk and earthy horseman flesh and earthy horseman dirt under his fingernails. She drank greedily, and her face once pale with ill-being flooded pink from it. A bead of wine trailed to her chin, unheeded.
“You are thirsty,” said Aragorn.
“Sewing standards is thirsty work,” said Arwen. “Was six stars not enough for the sons of Numenor? By Eru Ilúvatar, there were only three Silmarils.”
“You’ve got a little on your chin.”
“I care not.”
“Let me get that for you.”
Then Aragorn spanked her with the back of a silver mirror for the next 150 pages, because that’s erotic.
Kowloon Four: A Notebook to Remember by Nicholas Sparks
“Keep up, Padawan! You’re off your steps!” shouted Obi Wan as he thrust his light saber just under my arm. I knew he knew I was not at my best. He lunged at me impatiently, and I parried his jab away, skittering backwards. “You must learn to control your anger,” he said. “And if there’s something distracting you, you know I need you to tell me!”
I peered at my master through eyes clouded with tears. Suddenly I threw my arms about him. Hopefully he would understand, although hopefully is an adverb.
“Obi Wan,” I said, through a throat clouded with phlegm. “I have cancer.”
Obi Wan pressed his fingers to his temples and prayed for the strength I know he knows I know he will need. “Anakin, my Padawan,” he said tenderly. “I must tell you something as well. I have Alzheimer’s.”
“Oh, Obi Wan,” I said, grasping at my hair with my strong young hands. “I should tell you all of it: I have cancer of the Alzheimer’s.”
“And I have Alzheimer’s cancer.”
“Oh, master!”
Harry Potter and the Elevated Blood Sugar by David Sedaris
As soon as I hefted Fred and George’s first official batch of Weasley Wheezes candy in my hands and got a sense of it — I mean a real sense of it — I knew exactly what I had to do.
“Harry…” Ron could tell the wheels were turning, and his ruddy face went ruddier as he tried to compose exactly the right words to keep me from asking what we both knew I was going to ask. Ron was always one step forward mentally and two steps back verbally. I had to imagine that one day I was going to ask him what he wanted for lunch, and he was going to turn three shades of purple trying to express that he could go for a sandwich.
Anyway, it was too late:
“Do you suppose an engorgement charm…” I asked, unspooling the words as if the quivering bait at the end might slip away, “…could be applied… topically?”
Ron averted his eyes, but not before I could see the naked curiosity in them. There were names for boys who experimented in school, even a magic school, but as long as we conducted them separately and reconvened only afterward to compare our scientific findings, what could be the harm?
“If Hermione finds out,” started Ron, but the deal was all but made. He was a mark following a used car salesman into his office out of politeness, and instinct, and polite instinct. He took half the bag of Engorgement Charm candy, and I took the other. We separated.
Within twenty minutes each of us discovered why this experiment had not been tried before. Or, if it had been tried, why no one had brought it up.
We converged in the library later — much later — still scientists, but bruised, frightened, somewhat wiser scientists.
“Harry?”
“Yes, Ron?”
“Next time you have an idea,” he said, turning a shade of violet that was rather pretty. “Could you stuff it?”
“Shh, there’s Hermione.”
Hermione joined us with a flounce, jarring our bench and eliciting a strangled groan from Ron.
“What’s wrong with you two?” she asked. “You look like you had to fight a basilisk. Again. Oh, look, there’s Angelina Johnson.” She turned to wave at the brick house of a Griffindor chaser as she went by behind us.
For the first time in Hogwarts history, neither Ron nor I turned to look after her.
The Vampire Manifesto by Ayn Rand
Buffy turned to him in stark disbelief.
“You can’t be serious,” she said, like a child just informed that her family was moving to the Midwest and could not, no not even if she was very good, take their cat. “You’re the most powerful vampire that ever lived. The sire of all sires. You cannot… you simply must not go on strike! Why would you leave when Sunnydale needs you most?”
Angel crossed the room before her and leaned against the desk. The room was dark and silent as he withdrew from its pack a black cigarette with a foil gold band. He lit it deftly with a match, not flinching at the sulphur or the flame as it set in relief the gaunt angles of his face. The room filled with the smell of cloves.
He spread his palms, not with condescension, and not without pity, but with the mien of a periodontist whose patient’s surgery could have been avoided through regular flossing.
“Who is Anya Harris?” he said, a plume of smoke encircling his sculpted cheekbones.
Buffy coursed across the room on her shapely showgirl legs and struck Angel’s face.
“You’re nothing but a playboy!” she cried. “I thought you could change, but you’re no different from the man you were 250 years ago. I was an irrational fool to believe otherwise.”
Angel gripped the edge of the desk behind him. After a moment, he resumed his cigarette, her handprint burning as brightly as the embers.
Buffy drew back in horror and shame. “I see it is true,” she said. “Vampirism is the root of all evil.”
“You’ve always been a friend to me,” he said, not unkindly, and not sarcastically, but like a man who is telling a woman she’s always been a friend to him. “I hope soon you`ll understand that what I`m doing is the best. For you. For Sunnydale. But most importantly for me. For you see, a man cannot know his nature until he has known the evil in it.
“If a man says vampirism is evil, it is because it has exposed the evil in himself, and doubly so since that man, borrowing from the vampire, has obtained his evil dishonorably. But if a man knows vampirism and does not know evil, then this evil you assert with such righteous recklessness is not evil at all, and the vampire is no looter — his labors are honest, neither begged, seized, nor inherited, and worthy of their aim and their effects.
“Thus the endeavor of the vampire is the most moral of all men or demons, since it is industry for industry’s own sake. Like produces like, and moral produces moral, and nowhere more than the siring of vampires is this evident — where vampires make wealth, and wealth makes wealth by the fruit of our virtue.”
With this, Angel roused Buffy from where she had collapsed in slumber on the floor, and showed her to the door.
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