“I could only stare, any sense that maybe I understood him evaporating as it always did. I'd glimpse something underneath, and he'd snatched it away so fast it left bruises that called me a fool for hoping for more.”

“Maybe, in the final analysis, they saw me as something I wasn't and I tried to turn them into something they could never be. I loved them all but maybe I never understood any of them. I don't think they understood me.”

“I couldn't even be mad at him, because this was who he was. This was who he'd always been. He'd never lied about that. He gave and then he took away. I felt it in the pit of my stomach, the familiar ache, that lost, regretful feeling only he could give me. I never wanted to feel it again. Never, ever. Maybe this was why I came, so I could really know. So I could say good-bye.”

“He could sense Kshar underneath, and he knew he'd be able to sense him in whatever body. Unchanged, genuinely him.”

“I spent the weekend after our date wishing I could stab him with my fluffy-duck pen and staring at the phone hoping he'd call. Dating is a very tricky business.”

“There was something so . . . stalwart about Ben. I'd only known him two days and he'd managed to infuriate me most of that time. But there I was, protected by the curve of his arm, and grateful for it. And not just because it for nice, though it did.”