Heidi Cullinan

“What if his advisor found out? Would getting caught having public sex do something to his teaching assistantship? Would he still be able to get a job? Would getting felt up in a laundromat inadvertently lead to him living on the streets, starving and exposed, selling his body for sex, which meant he would contract a disease and die?”

“Adam could imagine what he looked like: a debauched nerd.”

“Louisa raised an eyebrow. "Is he—how shall I put it delicately—a simple man?”

“How did I know? Paul, I've known since you were eight and I caught you masturbating in front of the TV to Bo and Luke Duke.”

“That's it, he rasped. Hump me. Are you a dog? Are you a dog in heat? You my dog? He slapped me again. Speak, puppy.”

“Ride, authors. Write a ride. Figure out what yours is, and then pimp the ever-living shit out of it.”

“After several minutes, Ed said, his voice raspy and spent, "You okay, Laur?"Laurie, his bones melted, his muscles slack, his heart pounding like a happy caged beast against the wall of his chest, his backside throbbing and still half-full of Ed, let out his breath. With great effort, he nodded.”

“This was something he'd done a great deal of when he was very young, so young the memory was washed to sepia with age.”

“Absolutely no slouching, Ed. You're the frame. You're the stem to my flower. Quit giving me crooked pictures and wilted flowers.”

“I was feeling like all that crazy sea inside me was settling into a calm. He had drawn it all out of the bottle I kept it in, but when I looked up at him like that, it settled, because if my wild insides were a sea, those gray eyes were the world's biggest fucking bowl, and they held me. Caught me and held me and bore me up.”

“I can win anytime. Kevin's going to go back to Burbank and tell everybody in his cubicle how he won at the Golden Nugget. Sometimes the pot isn't the money.”

“In the deserted men's restroom at the back of Middleton Community College, Sam Keller knelt on the tile, braced his hands against Keith Jameson's thighs, and broke his mother's heart.”

“He wondered if this, more than guilt, was what had been holding him back. It wasn't that he was punishing himself as much as it was that he didn't really want anything anymore. But was that true? Did he really not want anything? What did he want to do? What did he want, period?”

“Sit. I can't flirt standing up, and you're freakishly tall.”

“It was a full Spears album, apparently, and each song was as ridiculous as the one before. They were catchy, yes, but so was the plague.”

“He wondered...if the journey of a life with pain was simply finding more and more layers of acceptance, that at best the most constant tether would be that he would never really find the bottom, that the bottom had different levels, and that no matter how good he tried to be, sometimes he would sink into a hole.”

“You can't say that you need to burn witches and shun gay men but eat pork and wear all the mixed fibers you want!!”