“I would like to be soft and warm. I would be terrified to be that way. I could be hurt if I were soft and warm. I could be hurt by something other than myself. It is harder to be soft than it is to be hard. I could be hurt by something other than myself.”

“His lips were soft, warm and felt overwhelmingly right against mine. I fell into it, oblivious to anything other than the safety in his touch. One by one, the senses flowed from me as he pulled them away and set them free. It must have hurt him. The senses hurt the hell out of me..”

“I can bear pain myself, he said softly, but I couldna bear yours. That would take more strength than I have.”

“The ways I could hurt her and hurt myself. Those two things were intertwined somehow. It's hard to explain, but when you were as closed off as I was the past few months, opening felt as wrong as stripping naked in church.”

“She had this uncanny sense of seeing things the way they were instead of the way you'd want them to be, of knowing me better than I knew myself. She could sniff out the truth even if it hurt.”

“I zipped myself all the way into the sleeping bag of myself, not because I was hurt, and not because I had broken something, but because they were cracking up.”