“The candles illuminated the room and his murals of tattoos...There were muscles everywhere, protruding from his skin and framing him like armor; his body was long and wide, full of valleys, deep creases and ink. He looked like a deviant. A beautiful, dangerous deviant.”

“His fingernails and toenails were long and pointed,like little claws. His ears were pointed,too-and pierced with small stone hoops.He had two little hornlike nubs protruding from the top of a forehead that was fleshy and wrinkled. His large lips were pursed in a grimace that made him look like a very old baby.”

“Heart broken-he felt a deep ache in his chest, like that of a sore muscle, and each beat of his heart pained him”

“The night breathed through the apartment like a dark animal. The ticking of a clock. The groan of a floorboard as he slipped out of his room. All was drowned by its silence. But Jacob loved the night. He felt it on his skin like a promise. Like a cloak woven from freedom and danger.”

“He grabbed something off the floor and held it in front of his hips as he stood up. She drank in the sight of him: The tattooed slave bands around his wrists and neck, the plug in his left earlobe, his black eyes, his skull-trimmed hair. His body was as starkly lean as she remembered, all striated muscles and hard cut veins. And he threw off raw power like a scent.”

“The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.”