thanks so much to Mila for buddy reading this with me, you can find her review here ♡
please check trigger warnings before going into this, ✰ 5 stars ✰
thanks so much to Mila for buddy reading this with me, you can find her review here ♡
please check trigger warnings before going into this, they are on marley's website and in the author's note of this book!
I want to believe our love is a great love, a true love, but unfortunately, the hard lesson to learn is that it doesn’t actually matter which one of those it is. Because with great love comes great loss, and with true love comes true pain. And no love is invincible.
i knew this story would be absolutely soul crushing (which it was) and i'm not a person who reads a lot of medium-high angst stories. i thrive in my low angst stories but i had to read this because i want more books with established couples/marriage in crisis. we always get the happy epilogue phase in books, but i want to see what comes after that. just like the quote above, no love is invincible and i want to see how true love will prevail even after the honeymoon phase. this book is exactly that, leo and jesse are the definition of soulmates.
We aren’t just bound together by marriage vows, we are tethered. Like magnets, my soul couldn’t detach itself from his no matter how hard I tried. And I’m fucking trying. — Leo
✦ leonardo ricci-hunt (leo) ✦ leo was doing whatever he could to push jesse and everyone else away in his life. after what happened to him, he sees no way out. even though he has his husband, his daughter, and his bestfriend, he is suffering deeply and so consumed with pain and grief that he only sees and feels that, nothing else. he doesn't want to bring jesse down with him which is why he wants a divorce, not because their love had faded between them, because it hadn’t. i feel some may be put off by leo's character because of the choices he made. but i understood him and sympathized with him greatly. i've never experienced what he has but we all deal with grief differently and we all have different coping mechanisms. yes, what he was doing was hurting those around him but an absolute unimaginable loss happened to him and jesse.
Logic told me he was spiraling. We were spiraling. We had been all year. But my heart didn’t care. My heart was his and had been since the moment I laid eyes on him. To have and to hold. To love and protect. But there were also the unspoken vows. Like how my heart was his to wreck and to ruin. To damage and destroy. — Jesse
✦ jesse ricci-hunt ✦ jesse was the glue in his family. he was always the one to put on the strong front when everything else around him was crumbling. he never ever would give up on leo. as soon as he saw leo, he knew he was it for him. so even when the most unthinkable happened, he still tried to remain to be what was holding everything together, but everyone has their breaking point. he never had the proper time to grieve their loss because he was trying to keep his family together. he is someone who will always set aside his feelings and needs first for those he loves. he was the only one fighting for his marriage, and seeing leo through his eyes and what it was doing to jesse was devastating. i cried so hard for him.
“You’re mine,” he says with such finality. “You’re my worry, my heartache, my burden. Whatever you think you are, whatever season it is for us, you’re fucking mine, Leo.”
this story takes place in the then and now so while we get the crippling angst in the now chapters, we get how they fell in love in the then chapters. i can't express how grateful i am for those chapters, they helped balance out the angst. it showed how precious and one of a kind their love is. marley's writing absolutely captivated me, how she portrayed their feelings broke me.
Merged review:
✰ 5 stars ✰
thanks so much to Mila for buddy reading this with me, you can find her review here ♡
please check trigger warnings before going into this, they are on marley's website and in the author's note of this book!
I want to believe our love is a great love, a true love, but unfortunately, the hard lesson to learn is that it doesn’t actually matter which one of those it is. Because with great love comes great loss, and with true love comes true pain. And no love is invincible.
i knew this story would be absolutely soul crushing (which it was) and i'm not a person who reads a lot of medium-high angst stories. i thrive in my low angst stories but i had to read this because i want more books with established couples/marriage in crisis. we always get the happy epilogue phase in books, but i want to see what comes after that. just like the quote above, no love is invincible and i want to see how true love will prevail even after the honeymoon phase. this book is exactly that, leo and jesse are the definition of soulmates.
We aren’t just bound together by marriage vows, we are tethered. Like magnets, my soul couldn’t detach itself from his no matter how hard I tried. And I’m fucking trying. — Leo
✦ leonardo ricci-hunt (leo) ✦ leo was doing whatever he could to push jesse and everyone else away in his life. after what happened to him, he sees no way out. even though he has his husband, his daughter, and his bestfriend, he is suffering deeply and so consumed with pain and grief that he only sees and feels that, nothing else. he doesn't want to bring jesse down with him which is why he wants a divorce, not because their love had faded between them, because it hadn’t. i feel some may be put off by leo's character because of the choices he made. but i understood him and sympathized with him greatly. i've never experienced what he has but we all deal with grief differently and we all have different coping mechanisms. yes, what he was doing was hurting those around him but an absolute unimaginable loss happened to him and jesse.
Logic told me he was spiraling. We were spiraling. We had been all year. But my heart didn’t care. My heart was his and had been since the moment I laid eyes on him. To have and to hold. To love and protect. But there were also the unspoken vows. Like how my heart was his to wreck and to ruin. To damage and destroy. — Jesse
✦ jesse ricci-hunt ✦ jesse was the glue in his family. he was always the one to put on the strong front when everything else around him was crumbling. he never ever would give up on leo. as soon as he saw leo, he knew he was it for him. so even when the most unthinkable happened, he still tried to remain to be what was holding everything together, but everyone has their breaking point. he never had the proper time to grieve their loss because he was trying to keep his family together. he is someone who will always set aside his feelings and needs first for those he loves. he was the only one fighting for his marriage, and seeing leo through his eyes and what it was doing to jesse was devastating. i cried so hard for him.
“You’re mine,” he says with such finality. “You’re my worry, my heartache, my burden. Whatever you think you are, whatever season it is for us, you’re fucking mine, Leo.”
this story takes place in the then and now so while we get the crippling angst in the now chapters, we get how they fell in love in the then chapters. i can't express how grateful i am for those chapters, they helped balance out the angst. it showed how precious and one of a kind their love is. marley's writing absolutely captivated me, how she portrayed their feelings broke me....more
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