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.

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.

Then why was his tongue in your mouth? Was he conducting a clinical test of your gag reflex?" He smiled, but not nicely. "How is your gag reflex, Ms. Lane? Are you a hair trigger?"

Barrons likes to use sexual innuendo to try to shut me up. I think he expects the well-raised southern belle in me will think eew and back off. Sometimes, I do think eew, but I don't back off. "I'm a spitter, if that's what you're asking." I flashed him a too-sweet smile.

"Didn't look that way to me. I think you're a swallower. His tongue was halfway to China and you were still taking it."

"Jealous?

Although it may not seem like it, this isn’t a story about darkness. It’s about light. Kahlil Gibran says Your joy can fill you only as deeply your sorrow has carved you. If you’ve never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another pleasant flavor on your tongue. One day I’m going to hold a lot of joy.

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.