“Is it possible I’m not as sexy as I think I am?”

“I’m in trouble with this one, I thought. For the first time in my life, I had the thought that I was in over my head with a woman.”

“I want so much for this to last – for us to stay together. I’m desperate for it.”

“I want you to feel what I’m feeling, Bianca. I want you to feel this uncontrollable need. I can’t stand the thought that you’re indifferent to me.”

“Yes, you scare me,” I told him, after a very long silence, while I processed his answer. “But I’m irrevocably fucked up, so you excite me in equal measures. I find it liberating, to let someone control me…”

“You were this perfect, enchantingly beautiful girl that made the world brighter just by being in it, and you were ours. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that I drove you away.”

“I loved your eyes first,” I told him , repeating his words from a few weeks ago back to him, because it was true, and because we were two halves of a whole—we had been all along, and he’d been so clever to know it right away. I used to think it was insanity, but now I was beginning to think that it was pure brilliance. “I see it, too, James. I see the other half of my soul in you.”