I smell fear, he said with a quiet intensity. But not nearly enough.

Fight, flight, and screw up royaly.

Roland glares at Connor and Connor glares back. Then he says what he always says at moments like this. "Nice socks." Although Roland doesn't look down right away, it derails him just enough for him to back off. He doesn't check to see if his socks match until he thinks Connor isn't looking. And the moment he does, Connor snickers. Small victories are bet­ter than none.

He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between - and while he's had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands that he'll never reach.

You'll feel a tingling in your chest," says a surgeon. "It's nothing to worry about.

The good thing about being explosive is that no one can beat you.

When you truly start to care about someone you become vulnerable to all sorts of things.