“But sometimes the males of the species brought home shiny, beautiful things, with hope burning in their hearts.”

“Sometimes limbs must be re-broken to set properly, her heart too needed to shatter anew before it could truly heal.”

“He was a god above her, powerful, beautiful, larger than life. The light brought out the latent gold of his hair. The shadows contoured the perfect form of his body. Light and shadows converged in his eyes, bright lust, dark anger, and something else. Something else entirely. She recognized it because she’d seen it in the mirror so many times: a bleak, austere loneliness.”

“Sometimes people change, said a voice inside him.And sometimes they don’t.”

“Despite all her strengths, there was a certain brittleness to her. Sometimes she retreated intoher keep. Sometimes she ran away. But she did not forgive and she did not forget.”

“The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she’d caught him staring.For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman’s beauty.She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.He could have lived with this if only he’d kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew.”

“A reflection of their story: imperfect, but to him the most beautiful of stories.”