“Mol, it's not probably nothing if they fucking want you to go to Germany."She winced, and he turned to the people-mostly women- who were filling most of those waiting room seat."Excuse me. This doctor thinks my wife, whom I love more than life, has breast cancer, so I'm going to say fuck probably about ten more times. Is that okay with all of you?”

“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?”

“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.”

“I love quick,” Gina said. “And come on, I’m getting jealous here. Was it zero sex last year for you,too?”“Yes,” he admitted. “I love you, you weren’t there—what was I going to do?”“Are you actually embarrassed, ” she asked, “because you weren’t some kind of man-ho and—”“No,” Max said. “I’m embarrassed that it took me an entire fucking year and a half and the worst scareof my life to figure out that I can’t live without you.”

“But he didn’t seem surprised to see her. ‘Hey.’‘Hey, yourself.’ Okay, that was stupid. Her grandmother used to say Hey, yourself. Great, she was turning into her grandmother at the most inopportune time. She didn’t want to sound like a well-adjusted sixty-year-old.”

“If you want, I can carry you—” “I’m fine,” she said shortly. “Let’s go.”He’d said that wrong. He should have said, “I want to carry you.”

“Damn, this op has been like a fucking Love Boat episode.”