“I'll be careful."He looked at her."I promise.""Call me if you need me.""Cosmo."He turned to look at her."It does go both ways. I don't want to get a call from Tom Paoletti and Decker every Memorial Day.”

“She was looking at the cab, looking right through me, and I knew that she was curious because she’d seen A.J. talking to me. Which, to her, looked an awful lot like A.J. was talking to himself. “Say, I gotta run, mom, I’ll call you later,” I instructed the kid, and then pretend to hang up your phone.”

“You love me,” he said. “That’s all I need to know.” “You always say the right thing,” Savannah told him, her eyes so filled with love that he almost wept. “Sometimes it takes you awhile to get to it, but you always get there, and what you say is always worth waiting for.”

“When you sit that way, you look kind of like a beach ball with a head,” he continued. “Your haircut is really, really bad, I’m probably going to lose my job for helping you this way, and I’m dying to fuck you.” He glanced at her. “That honest enough for you?”

“Ah, God, Lys" he breathed, and she opened her eyes to look up at him. She was the love of his heart, his true partner in both work and life, and the idea of losing her to the violence of the world they lived in scared the living shit out of him.But her smile lit her eyes, her face, and he pushed the darkness away and let himself grin back at her like the damn fool that he was. This moment-now-was perfect, and he wasn't going to let his fears interfere.”

“I know the M-word makes you nervous, but yeah. I'm talking about the big, permanent friendship. A little different from what Joe and Charles had, though. See, I want to be the kind of best friends who make love every night, who share all their darkest secrets and favorite jokes, and maybe even someday make babies together. I know that kind of friendship requires hard work, but you know, I'm pretty good at hard work.~ Tom Paoletti, "The Unsung Hero”

“He wanted to wake up to her smile every day for the rest of his life, like some stupid coffee commercial on TV.”