“How is it that I could run into a gunfight against overwhelming odds and put myself between bullets and civilians, but I couldn't scrape together enough courage to speak to the one person who mattered the most to me?”

“May I say that I am delighted that my favorite alpha is feeling better. Why, you'll be running recklessly into danger against overwhelming odds anytime now.”

“When I'm with him, I can feel myself getting better. It's like he's picking up broken pieces of me and putting me back together, and I don't even know he's doing it. We never talk about it. We don't go to therapy. He just loves me and that's enough.”

“His training had a fatal flaw: he cared. He asked me what I wanted to eat for dinner. He knew I liked green, and if he had a choice between a blue sweater and a green one, he’d buy the green one for me even if it cost more. I like swimming, and when we traveled, he made it a point to lay our route so it would go past a lake or a river. He let me speak my mind. My opinion mattered. I was a person to him and I was important. I saw him treat others as if they were important. For all of his supposed indifference, there is a town in Oklahoma that worships him and a little village in Guatemala that put a wooden statue of him at the gates to protect them from evil spirits. He helped people, when he thought it was right.”

“I chuckled to myself and kept walking. The Universe had proven Curran wrong: a person who aggravated him more than me did, in fact, exist.”

“Is there anything else you need to tell me?”Every time I look at you, I have to put a leash on myself. “No.”

“But then I didn't run from my challenges. I met them straight on and bashed my head against them, until it left me hurt, bloody, and dazed.”