He pulls me around and kisses me. "You're Mac," he says. "And I'm Jericho. And nothing else matters. Never will. You exist in a place that is beyond all rules for me. Do you understand that?"
I do.
Jericho Barrons just told me he loves me.

I couldn't imagine Jericho Barrons as a child, going to school, face freshly scrubbed, hair neatly combed, lunch box in hand.
He'd surely been spawned by some cataclysmic event of nature, to born.

Even I don't know what you're doing, and I know everything.

I'm sorry your pretty little world got all screwed up, but everybody's does, and you go on. It's how you go on that defines you.

If he’d been any other man and i'd been any other girl, I’d have called the narrowing of his heavy-lidded dark eyes lust. But he was Barrons and I was Mac, and a blossoming of lust was about as likely as orchids blooming in Antarctica

Punch me."
"Don't be absurd."
"Come on, punch me, Barrons."
"I'm not punching you."
"I said, punch--OW!"
He decked me.