“oh shit, i think. my cheeks are on fire; my heart starts to pound.”

“His hand is cool on my cheek as he paints a tear beneath my left eye, dark blue and swollen with sorrow.”

“When I was little I bragged about my firefighting father: my father would go to heaven, because if he went to hell he would put out all the fires”

“Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.”

“But I wouldn't get him close, and I would never show him my heart.”

“I always hated when my scars started to fade, because as long as I could still see them, I knew why I was hurting.”

“I close my eyes, thinking that there is nothing like an embrace after an absence, nothing like fitting my face into the curve of his shoulder and filling my lungs with the scent of him.”