He pulled my coat off my shoulders, looked at it with distaste, hung it on the back of one of the chairs pushed in under the kitchen table. "You are beautiful". No one had ever looked me in the eyes and said that. Eric to Sookie, Page 208.

The world seemed a bad and terrible place, all its denizens suspect, and I the lamb wandering through the valley of death with a bell around my neck.

I have lived one step away from losing my mind for years. I am quick and accurate in spotting unstable streaks in others.

We could go back to your house. I can stay with you always. We can know each others bodies in every way, night after night. I could love you. I could work, you would not be poor. I would help you.

I'd been blindsided with the most painful knowledge: the first man to ever say he loved me had never loved me at all. His passion had been artificial. His pursuit of me had been choreographed.

Anyone got X-ray visión?I asked, trying to smile. Where is Superman when you need him?

But there's a juicy artery in your groin," he said after a pause to regroup, his voice as slithery as a snake on a slide. "Don't you talk dirty," I told him. "I won't listen to that.