“How did I know? Paul, I've known since you were eight and I caught you masturbating in front of the TV to Bo and Luke Duke.”

“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.”

“Louisa raised an eyebrow. "Is he—how shall I put it delicately—a simple man?”

“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.”

“He wondered if this, more than guilt, was what had been holding him back. It wasn't that he was punishing himself as much as it was that he didn't really want anything anymore. But was that true? Did he really not want anything? What did he want to do? What did he want, period?”

“You can't say that you need to burn witches and shun gay men but eat pork and wear all the mixed fibers you want!!”

“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?”