“I love you more than I can say, than I can even think and what you give me takes my breath away, but breathing is overrated when I can kiss you.”

“What do you want from me?" "Own up to it. I can live with a cheater, but not with a coward.”

“When it got really bad, when nothing else got me through, I was thinking of you. How you tilt your head when you laugh; the way you eat your cereal really fast so that it doesn’t go soggy; how you squint your eyes and scrunch up your face into a grimace, every time anyone mentions eggs.” Hooch dropped his voice even more, until Matt had to lean closer to hear the whisper. “Your shit-eating grin when you wave your ass into my face, telling me to fuck you. The sound you make when you cum, going straight to my cock and blowing my mind. The smell of your sweat right after sex ..." Hooch paused, pulling in a breath. "And when I wasn't sure if I could make it through another hour, then I thought of your face that looks so damned young when you're asleep, and I remembered how you sometimes say my name, and how the sound of your voice makes me ache inside.”Hooch fell silent and Matt stared at him. Wide-eyed, frozen in shock. Insides churning, a pain he hadn't known before, travelling from his heart throughout his body, and it felt so fucking good. Understanding with every fibre of his being what Hooch had said in too many words. More than he’d ever used before, and without those three simple ones that would have sufficed.”

“You broke me up there in the mountains. You cracked something in my head, I don’t know. I have never been obsessed with another person before or after. You just drilled your way in and since then, I’ve been yours. You got to a place that I didn’t know existed ... and all that has changed me, taken the stuff away I thought was true about me. In some weird, weird way, started something that turned me into more than a goodlooking bastard.”

“For me, he can walk on water, dance in the clouds. I know he can’t, really, but what he can and can’t do pales into nothing when I look at him.”

“If I touched you, that’d be it.” Dan shook his head, “Damn, how the fuck am I going to make you understand?” Pleading, almost. “You are everything, don’t you get it? You are the Afghan mountains, the damned red dust, the endless sky. You were my home, and more often than not, also my reason. You are unlike all the others, unlike anyone I shag, because when I touch you, it’s not just a touch, it’s eleven years of heaven and hell.”

“You made me human. I stand by that. You made me into somebody I would have wanted to become, if I'd ever thought about what I wanted to be that wasn't about a record or power or a rank or some...delusion I was chasing. If all that was gone and stripped away, the man I am, I am because of what you did, what you made me feel all those years.”