He smiled and squinted at me again, tilting his head up and to the right as he stared. “Maybe what I’m attracted to in you is more than your looks and your brain and your humor.” He leaned closer like he had a secret. “It could be your soul,” he whispered. I pushed his cheek until he was squinting at the door to the kitchen instead. “Is this when you tell me I’m your soul mate, O’Neill?

— Laura Anderson Kurk

He was taking a leap here, negotiating with a crackhead, under the table, in a dark cantina. The courage etched on his face came from loving Aida so much he’d close his eyes and walk through fire to see her safe.

— Laura Anderson Kurk

His room was dark until he switched on his desk lamp. I sat on the floor next to his bed and watched him counting clothes and considering shoes. He seemed so boyish right then—like he wished his mom would just come in and pack for him. I couldn’t possibly love him any more than I did at that moment.

— Laura Anderson Kurk

Hold still, Meg, you’re dripping blood on my car seats.” I reached behind the passenger seat of Tennyson’s car looking for the white sheet she’d thrown in for mopping up bodily fluids. Quinn, sitting in the back seat, read my mind and handed it to me. “Thank you.”“No problem.” He leaned forward, pulling a corner of the sheet up to wipe off a small stream of blood on my neck. “Are you okay?

— Laura Anderson Kurk

I couldn’t stop crying because it was so intimate, in that way I always thought being physical with him would feel. If someone had walked in they might have thought Henry was barely touching me. I knew the truth of it. He was laying me open and bare to him and to God. There wasn’t a more intimate act. I would never recover from this.

— Laura Anderson Kurk

I could’ve gone on and on, but the truth was all that mattered. “My brother died because someone was jealous.

— Laura Anderson Kurk

I’d felt this before, when my granddad was in the hospital before he died. We all camped out in the waiting room, eating our meals together, most of us sleeping in the chairs every night. Family from far-flung places would arrive at odd hours, and we’d all stand and stretch, hug, get reacquainted, and pass the babies around. A faint, pale stream of beauty and joy flowed through the heavy sludge of fear and grief. It was kind of like those puddles of oil you see in parking lots that look ugly until the sun hits them, and you see rainbows pulling together in the middle of the mess. And wasn’t that just how life usually felt—a confusing swirl of ugly and rainbow?

— Laura Anderson Kurk

I didn’t look at Thant. I couldn’t because he would see the hurt on my face.“He loves you,” Thant said. “He’s hurting, and it’s not just the Quinn thing. It’s being away from you and wondering if you’re hurting, too. Or if you’re having too much fun to hurt. What he really needed was to laugh, though. So we laughed…until he cried.” That undid me. I looked at Thant with so many questions on my lips.

— Laura Anderson Kurk

I’d known cruelty in a school—cruelty that would keep these amateurs up all night. But this kind of scene—crowds batting around a person because they thought he was weak—happened to be my personal trigger.

— Laura Anderson Kurk

I’d never seen him bare-chested. For the first time, he seemed vulnerable to me. His smooth, tight skin wrapped around the long muscles he’d developed over a lifetime of hard work. He found a shallow spot and sat, settling me onto his lap, holding my back to his chest. I couldn’t stop shaking, and it had nothing to do with the water or with being half dressed in a cave with a boy.“Nothing else matters,” Henry said in my ear. “I’m here. Start at the beginning.

— Laura Anderson Kurk