Doctors put a wall up between themselves and their patients; nurses broke it down.

If you didn't remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn't?

Ross held her face between his hands and kissed her. He tasted doubt on her tongue and pain on the roof of her mouth. He swallowed these, and drank again. Consumed, she had no choice but to see how empty he was inside, and how, sip by sip, she filled him.

You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?

He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat.

Things break all the time. Glass and dishes and fingernails. Cars and contracts and potato chips. You can break a record, a horse, a dollar. You can break the ice. There are coffee breaks and lunch breaks and prison breaks. Day breaks, waves break, voices break. Chains can be broken. So can silence, and fever... promises break. Hearts break.

Bleeding heart, he’d called her. Well. He should know. He’d been the first to rip it to pieces.