You don’t want me to be sad.”“Never sad. Not you.” She kissed me. I tasted her mouth, sweet from the bird shell, and as I kissed her I yearned for more.

You’re beautiful,” I told her. The fountains’ jets bubbled around us.“You’re foxed,” she said.“You stare at me sometimes, too. I see you sneaking glances.

Sid—”“You have a pretty voice, did you know that? Soft but earnest. Warm, too. Like a steady candle flame.

Later, I wished that I had called to her, that I had said I missed her as soon as she turned to walk away. I wished she had seen how I brought my hand to my cheek. Her touch shivered down my back.

Sid rubbed the nape of her neck, studying me. Then she stuffed her hands into her pockets, hunching her shoulders. Quietly, she said, “You are my favorite impossible person.

This was not like the poem in Harvers’s book, where dawn came like a thief. Nothing had been stolen from me. Maybe it never would be.

You know, Mimosa,” Nadia says, the name beautiful in her mouth as it’s never been in anyone else’s, “I think we’ll manage,” and then she kisses her like she means it; like solid proof; like, finally, coming home.

I want you to stay in the city for a month.""Why?"Because I would miss you. Because I am not ready to let you go.

She will laugh. The sound is as strange, at Briar, as I imagine it must be in a prison or a church. Sometimes, she will sing. Once we talk of dancing. She rises and lifts her skirt, to show me a step. Then she pulls me to my feet, and turns and turns me; and I feel, where she presses against me, the quickening beat of her heart - I feel it pass from her to me and become mine.

I did not, in the end, want to share the truth, because the words of love inside me felt like the only part of her that could ever remain mine.