“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”