“If Mrs. Morton would stop verbally jacking off her husband and son, this would all be done so much more quickly, but then Chess figured it was just about the only sex the woman got.”

“Just what she needed. More filth in her soul. Someday, maybe, she would explode from it, someday maybe, every rotten thing that had every been done to her and every rotten thing she’d ever done would erupt from her in a fountain of sewage and sorrow, all those secrets she kept even from herself spilling out and adding to the muck she could never wash off no matter how hard she tried.She’d never been bound by magic to keep those secrets. Just by her own shame.”

“Chess lied to herself every day; it was just something she did, like taking her pills or making sure she had a pen in her bag. Little lies, mostly. Insignificant. Of course there were big ones there, too, like telling herself that she was more than just a junkie who got lucky enough to possess a talent not everyone had. That she was alone by choice and that she was not terrified of other people because they couldn’t be trusted, because they carried filth in their minds and pain in their hands and they would smear both all over her given half the chance.”

“Shit. Well, maybe taking her jeans off would make him more inclined to say she could check out his tunnels.Of course, he was pretty much guaranteed to say yes if she let him check out her tunnel again, but ... no.”

“Thou mutters, Miss Putnam. Speak up.”Like she couldn’t hear. She’d hear Chess if Chess ran to the other end of the room, covered her mouth with her hands, and whispered “Fuck you,” but she couldn’t hear Chess standing four feet away from her.”

“Oh shit, she'd done that wrong, hadn't she? She'd said that wrong, he didn't understand what she meant. She'd thought he would know, that he'd be able to read between the lines and understand, but what if he hadn't? SHould she say more? But how much more?”

“Looking at dead bodies wasn’t really very high on her Things-Chess-Enjoys list. And yeah, her total knowledge on what people in relationships did might fill a shot glass—especially if she used extra-large letters to write SEX—but something told her “looking at dead bodies” wasn’t a generally accepted togetherness-type activity, either.”