Sam: “You—you greatly overestimate my self-control.”
Grace: “I’m not looking for self-control.

I folded myself against her body, breathing in the smell of my new life and matching my heartbeat to hers" Sam, Linger

To Grace, these were the things that mattered: my hands on her cheeks, my lips on her mouth. The fleeting touches that meant I loved her.

He slouched back in his seat, looking tired, and leaned his face on his shoulder to look at me while he played with my hair. He started to hum a song, and then, after a few bars, he sang it. Quietly, sort of half-sung, half-spoken, incredibly gentle. I didn’t catch all the words, but it was about his summer girl. Me. Maybe his forever girl. His yellow eyes were half-lidded as he sang, and in that golden moment, hanging taut in the middle of an icecovered landscape like a single bubble of summer nectar, I could see how my life could be stretched out in front of me.

Grace,” I said, very softly. “Say something.”
Sam,” she said, and I crushed her to me.

Again and Again, however, we know the language of love, and the little churchyard with its lamenting names and the staggeringly secret abyss in which others find their end: again and again the two of us go out under the ancient trees, make our bed again and again between the flowers, face to face with the skies