“What do you mean, is that it? I just saved his career and the CIA from ruin and he calls me a perfidious ass.""What's perfidious mean?" Ace asked from the driver's seat."You deceived him and stole his girlfriend out from under his nose," Julia said to Conrad. "I think technically 'ass' is a pretty mild revilement.""Revilement?" Ace looked at one and then the other in his rearview. "This is some kind of spy talk, isn't it? Okay, I'm down with it. Just tell me what it means.”

“At least Lester had the decency to weep at his act of perfidy. Reader, do you know what 'perfidy' means? I have a feeling you do, based on the scene that unfolded here. But you should look up the word in your dictionary, just to be sure.”

“You know, sometimes I think this is just not it,” he said, his glasses flashing from the early night’s light. He turned toward me in a thoughtful pause.“You know what I mean, Tom?” he asked. “It’s just not.”

“An orgasm is not what I want and I know it. What I want, need, is so much more than that. It's the connection.The exhilarating contact with this human being, a being that compels me like no other. I miss his touch, his kiss. I don't care if he gives me just a little kernel of what he can give; I'm just starving to be fed, and my body has never been like this hungry.”

“And you should warn him that if he hurts you, I will scissor kick him in the nuts.  Tell him, okay? You tell him that.  Because I mean it.  I’ll go all kinds of Bruce Lee on his tasty ass.”

“We won't be having an affair." I stare dumbly, certain I just heard an organ in my body crack in my chest. His hands clamp around me, and he crushes me to his body as he slides his nose along the shell of my ear. "When I take you, you'll be mine," he says, a soft promise in my ear.”

“I let myself think, I hope he loves me, and then I wonder if I've said it out loud. I try hard to remember if I'd formed the words with my lips. No. I didn't. I'm sure I didn't. I'm convinced of it, until he murmurs back, "Don't worry. He does.”