“Charlotte leveled him with a glare the likes of which he had never seen in synthetic women. It seemed to penetrate his every cell, as though she were watching him decay one picosecond at a time”

“She looked up and he was looking at her, too, and it was like kissing - or perhaps the moment just before kissing, or maybe a long time after.”

“She belongs with me, not to me.”

“It wasn't a hug - hugs ended quickly, even long ones, but this one persisted into something else entirely.”

“It always takes Ignacio a minute to put his sexy together.”

“We walked into the arena together with him reaching out his arm and wrapping it around my waist. He pulled me into him, smelling the aroma around him. The scent was familiar like I was with him before. Although I was positive that I’d never seen this man, something still ached at me. Was it a longing of a piece of my past starting to take effect?”

“I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.“Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.”