“I like to watch his hands as he works, making a blank page bloom with strokes of ink, adding touches of color to our previously black and yellowish book. His face takes on a special look when he concentrates. His usual easy expression is replaced by something more intense and removed that suggests an entire world locked away inside him. I've seen flashes of this before: in the arena, or when he speaks to a crowd, or that time he shoved the Peacekeepers' guns away from me in District 11. I don't know quite what to make of it. I also become a little fixated on his eyelashes, which ordinarily you don't notice much because they're so blond. But up close, in the sunlight slanting in from the window, they're a light golden color and so long I don't see how they keep from getting all tangled up when he blinks.”

“I know you're frustrated that he's keeping you locked up like this, but don't give him too bad a time when he gets back. He loves you more than you know. It terrifies him to be away from you.”

“He opens his window and motions for me to open mine. When I do, he tries to say something. His voice barely carries through the sound of the rain coming down hard between us.I lean out the car window. "What?" He leans out his window, meeting me halfway. We're both wet and soaked, but neither of us seems to care. "Don't run away from me when I need to tell you somethin' important.""What?" I say, hoping he doesn't notice the tears running down my face, and praying they're getting mixed up with the rain. "Tonight was . . . well, it was perfect for me, too. You've turned my world upside down. I've fallen in love with you, chica, and it scares the fuckin' shit outta me. I've been shakin' all night, because I knew it. I've tried to deny it, to make you think I wanted you as a fake girlfriend, but that was a lie." "I love you, Kiara," he says before his lips move forward and meet mine.”

“His face almost looked the way it did when he was a teenager, when there was the subtle expression of both confidence and mischief in his darkly handsome eyes. When I think of him now, though, I don’t picture his face the way it is. What I see is from a memory, from a moment when he must have been eleven or twelve years old and we were both in our backyard and it was summertime and I was drawing in a coloring book and he was there in the green grass and he didn’t know I was watching him. He was crawling around on all fours; he was practicing being a lion or a tiger or more probably a leopard and he was growling to himself, stalking the shadow of a bird, and he didn’t see me staring at him and I think my mother was there, looking at us from an upstairs window, watching us both and gently smiling, and what I remember most is that all of us were happy then with who we were at that moment; at that moment, all of us were quietly happy.”

“I open my mouth to, I don't know, apologize again maybe. But he takes my face in his hands and presses his forehead to mine. And he's so close that I can feel his little warm breaths, and all I know is that when he draws his next breath, I want to get sucked in.Our lips touched, almost as soft as not touching at all. Then they press closer to each other, draw back uncertainly, touch again. There is warmth shooting through my broken body where there should be pain, and I put my arms around the back of his neck and I hold on to him. I hold on because you never know in this place when something good will be taken away.”

“That's when I caught my first glimpse of Blaine Crabtree. He was sandwiched in between two guys that were laughing at who knows what. At first I didn't notice anything but a big mop of bleached blonde hair, then he looked up from his pack of cloves and I was locked into the bluest eyes that I had ever seen. His expression didn't change, he didn't smile and didn't blink. It seemed like I was lost in his eyes, like he was using them to do the most calculated math problem, and that math problem was me.”