I wondered if it was really because he cared about me, or if now I was just another challenge.

This thought was interrupted, suddenly, by a crash from the front entrance. We all looked over just in time to see Adam bending back from the glass, rubbing his arm. "Pull open," Maggie called out. As Leah rolled her eyes, she said, "He never remembers. It's so weird.

Holding people away from you, and denying yourself love, that doesn't make you strong. if anything, it makes you weaker. Because you're doing it out of fear.

Really, it had been stupid to expect anything anyway. A few late nights does not a habit, or a relationship, make.

This is personal, she'd said. Real. This moment was too, even if you couldn't see it at first glance. It was fake on the outside, but so true within. You only had to look, really look to tell.

Very quietly, I heard a voice in my ear.It said, in a weird, cheesy, right-out-of-one-of-my-mother's-novels way, "Ah. Wemeet again." I turned my head, just slightly, and right there, practically on top of me, was theguy from the car dealership. He was wearing a red Mountain Fresh Detergent T-shirt - not just fresh: mountain fresh! - it proclaimed, and was smiling at me. "Oh,God," I said. "No, it's Dexter.

It was always late at night, when everything and everyone else was quiet, that those voices would rise like ghosts, soft and haunting, filling your mind until sleep finally came.