And bottom line, without John by her side, everything seemed to be just a big, resounding meh.

She was staying. A little longer. V smiled to himself. So this was what winning the lottery felt like.

This was the gift of recovery, he thought. The ability to be here in this moment with the female he loved and be fully aware, fully awake, fully present. Undiluted.

This place is just too frickin precious," the cop said, eyeing a guy dressed in a hot pink leisure suit with makeup to match. "Give me rednecks and home-grown beer any day of the week over this X-culture bullshit.

Among the problems with shame was that it in fact did not make you shorter or quieter or less visible. You just felt like you were.

With his fantastic mane of multicoloured hair, Phury should have been in Hollywood's league with the ladies, but he'd stuck with his vow of celibacy. There was room for one and only one love in his life, and it had been slowly killing him for years.

But looking at this closet, so nice and arranged with their crazy lives at rest among these carefully placed clothes and footwear, she felt good about where they were. "Normal" was not a bad things in this lunatic world; it really was. No matter how it happened to be defined.