“I shot him an unimpressed look. “Do you really think you’ll win me over by having sex with me?”He scratched at the side of his chin. “Well, they say the way to a woman’s heart is through her vagina.”

“And, Momma, if there is a separate heaven for gay people,” Danny continued with a smile, “well, you’ll just have to come visit.” He raised his mother’s chin gently with the side of his index finger, forcing her to look at him. “I hear it’s on a rainbow, not a cloud, so at least you’ll get some color.”

“The way he looked at me? Sam, you need to understand. Josh and I are friends. That’s it. He might have feelings for me – though I don’t think he does – but I do and always will, view him as a friend.” She put one small finger under his chin and lifted his face up to hers. “Besides, there’s room for only one man in my heart.”

“Before she realized he was next to her, he had placed his hands over hers on the countertop, then hooped his fingers through hers. Gretel looked up at him, so startled she might as well have been shot.'I just wanted to wake you up', he said.Which is exactly what he did. One look at him and her heart was racing. One look, and whatever had been before was all over.”

“Dan instantly recognized the angry scratch that stretched from the corner of Ian's eye all the way along the olive skin to his chin. "Have you been messing with Saladin?""No. Saladin has been messing with me," Ian shot back."He isn't big on Lucians," Dan explained. "Animals are really good judges of character.”

“People say that rape is not sex, that it's violence," Lucy says, bitterly. "But it's also sex. You can't get around that," she says. "he didn't run me over with a car. He had sex with me. You're not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to have sex with an eighth-grader. You're not supposed to have sex when you're in eighth grade. It was very intimate. You can't get around it. This part of the body," she says, gesturing from her heart to her lower abdomen, though I understand she means to indicate her vagina. "If you're sitting around with a group of women, talking about various traumas, someone will say, I got beaten by my mother. But if you say, I got raped, it's a different thing."I wonder if that is true. Is rape really the worst sort of violation? I'm not sure. I often wonder why it matters whether we're penetrated or not. There is the pain, but the pain doesn't last. The shame does.”