“Patrick was the living embodiment of naughty. He sweat for a living—he worked on houses while his slick, polished brother sold them—and his swagger served as a convincing argument that he knew how to make a woman sweat when the lights were off, too.”

“I swear that man swaggers in his sleep,”“Yeah, but Jude’s swagger is justified, not manipulated. He moves with that strut because he knows how to make a woman throw her head back in bed. And he knows it.”

“You just don’t want to go to the barn in sweats with Elle there.Well, he hated to admit it, but that was probably the reason he was tottering back and forth on one foot and two sore armpits here in this insane closet that seemed about the same size as the house he and his dad used to live in.”

“He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.”

“That evening, as he got ready for bed, he heard his mother and father talking in their bedroom, and that was how he learned that Billy had been naked when he was discovered and that the police had arrested a man who lived with his mother in a clean little house not far from where the body was found. David knew from the way they were talking that something very bad had happened to Billy before he died, something to do with the man from the clean little house....Now, in another bedroom, he thought of Jonathan Tulvey and Anna, and wondered if a man from a clean little house, a man who lived with his mother and kept sweets in his pockets, had made them go down with him to the railroad tracks.And there, in the darkness, he had played with them, in his way.”

“The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree".”