“Eventually Gray came in to interview me, and I gave him my official statement. "I met him at Quest. We were both looking for sex, and he invited me to join him in his motel room. I did, and we had sexual relations.""What kind of sexual relations?""I performed oral sex on him, and he did the same to me. Then we had anal intercourse.""Were you the...?" he paused, looking for the right words. "I was on the receiving end," I answered to spare him further embarrassment.(...)"And what happened this morning?""I wanted to visit him again.""Why?"I looked at Gray like he had just asked the stupidest question ever. "Why? Because I wanted to be on the receiving end of anal intercourse again.”

“I hoped I never saw him again. If I ever had to look at him again, if he looked at me the way he did that day, it would break me.”

“I was born without the flirt gene. It's truly awful for me." That was no exaggeration. " I mean, look at how I screwed up last night with Ty. He was flirting and tossing off sexual innuendos, and I just looked at him and said I would not have anal sex with him.""You what?" Suzanne shrieked so loud that Imogen saw half a dozen other fitness patrons swivel their heads to look at them. "Did he ask you to? At the party?""No, of course not." Which was what made it all the more ridiculous. "We were in the car and he was hinting about positions, what was to come, etc., and I just blurted out that I wasn't doing that with him.""Girl..." was Suzanne's though on the matter, her expression one of total horror. "Do not bring up the back door unless he's knocking on it.”

“How did I look at you? I asked thickly. Like you had to, like I was a magnet you were pulled to. There was no choice, he said. And when you look at Jack, it's because when he's around, why would you want to look at anything else? You love him the way you could never love me.”

“Why do you pray?" he asked me, after a moment. Why did I pray? A strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?"I don't know why," I said, even more disturbed and ill at ease. "I don't know why."After that day I saw him often. He explained to me with great insistence that every question possessed a power that did not lie in the answer. "Man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks Him," he was fond of repeating. "That is the true dialogue. Man questions God and God answers. But we don't understand His answers. We can't understand them. Because they come from the depths of the soul, and they stay there until death. You will find the true answers, Eliezer, only within yourself!" "And why do you pray, Moshe?" I asked him. "I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.”

“Did we have sex?" he asked directly.For about two minutes, this might actually be fun. "Eric," I said, "we had sex in every position I could imagine, and some I couldn’t. We had sex in every room in my house, and we had sex outdoors. You told me it was the best you’d ever had." (At the time he couldn’t recall all the sex he’d ever had. But he’d paid me a compliment.) "Too bad you can’t remember it," I concluded with a modest smile.Eric looked like I’d hit him in the forehead with a mallet. For all of thirty seconds his reaction was completely gratifying.”