In the oh-my-God-this-has-to-be-Christmas silence that followed, he struggled to reorder the last six months, to catch up with this reality they'd somehow missed. He wanted her. She wanted him. Was it true?

Giving in to a shrill instinct, she ran around the side of the building. Butch was marching toward his car as if he were carrying an unstable load, and she rushed to catch up with them. “Wait. I need to ask him a question.” “You want to know his shoe size or something?” Butch snapped. “Fourteen,” Wrath drawled. “I’ll remember that at Christmas, asshole.

Vishous: "...we both would slaughter anything that so much as startled you." Jane: "I'm scared of mice and spiders. But you don't need to use that gun on your hip to blow a hole in a wall if I ran into one, okay? Havaheart traps and rolled newspapers work just as well. Plus, you don't need a Sheetrock patch and plaster job afterward. I'm just saying.

Trust me, true?" Butch barked a laugh. "Last time you said that i ended up with a vampire cocktail, remember?

God, he was probably too young to be this old, but life had a way of being about experience, rather than calendar days.

Just once" Blay said softly. "Do it just once. So I'll know what it's like.

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.