You didn't have to take a punch for me, you know,' he said. 'I'm a lover, not a fighter.' 'You're a freak is what you are,' I said. He stuck out his hand. 'Come on, slugger. Walk with me. You know you want to.' And the thing was, despite everything I knew-that it was a mistake, that he was different from the others-I did. How he knew that, I had no idea. But I got up and did it anyway.

Please. She sighed. 'Can't a girl have high standards? I don't want an ordinary boy.

You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends.

This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.

Some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic.

“In Truth,” I said, “there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.” “How do you win?” he asked. “That,” I said, “is such a boy question.

But as was so often the case, it was the one person missing who you thought about more than the ones who were right in front of you.