This time of year, I live and breathe the beach. My cheeks feel raw with the wind throwing sand against them. My thighs sting from the friction of the saddle. My arms ache from holding up two thousand pounds of horse. I have forgotten what it is like to be warm and what a full night’s sleep feels like and what my name sounds like spoken instead of shouted across yards of sand. I am so, so alive.

Get some money, buy a red coffeepot, move out. Find a new place to plug it in.

Sea does the sweep of his eyes that he does, the one that goes from my head to my toes and back again and makes me feel that he's scanning the depths of my soul and teasing out my motivations and sins. It's worse than confession with Father Mooneyham. At the end of it, he says, "If you help, this will go faster.

Corr stood here," Sean says wonderingly. "I would've died. He didn't have to stay." For a moment, I see that it doesn't matter that he didn't win. The fact of Corr's loyalty is a bigger thing than the ownership of him.

Don't give me that look. I'm not trying to find out who you are. I don't care who you are. I just want to know why it is you are the way you are.

His wife's a brand of Christian that forbids a gathering that involves young women dancing in the streets but not races where men die

This is about as comforting as a cold brick when you're lonely.