“You made me lose my appetite, Boomer.""My mom tells me that all the time. Your family must be just like mine!”

“It was the way your sweet, soft hands wiped away my tears, and the way your body just curved into mine when you let me hold you. It all made me feel, for just an instant, that everything really was going to be all right. No one has ever comforted me like that…except my mom.” What the fuck? Did I just say all that out loud? I shook my head furiously from side to side as the room started spinning me like a Tilt-a-Whirl at the county fair back home.Abby grabbed my shoulders to steady me. I blinked my eyes trying to focus on her blurry, but beautiful image. “Most of all, it’s that I want someone like you to want me—just for me, not for Jake Slater the singer of Runaway Train.” I smacked my hand hard against my chest. “For what’s really inside me.”

“And while my mind is telling me I'm flirting with her just to prove a point, my body wants to play "you show me your perky privates and I'll show you mine.”

“You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!”

“Love is not me being who you want. Your definition is a whirlpool trying to suck me in and I'm drowning. Don't you see?...It's time...Time you stop telling me who to be, how to live. This is my portrait. You chose your canvas. Let me choose mine.”

“I could stand on my head and flick the bean right there at the dinner table and my mom would be all, "Honey, Christmas is family time, we should be together" and make me finish in front of everyone.”