You're not hiding, but you're sitting in a gay bar at dinnertime. You're not hiding, but you're wearing that suit like it's armor.

[...]You can take the pink hair dye out of the girl, but you never lose those roots."

I took another sip of the martini. "You don't know me."

At the end of the bar, the other customer lifted his face to Peter Jennings and smiled.

"Maybe," Seven said, "but neither do you.

I told Seven the Bartender that true love is felonious.

"Not if they're over eighteen," he said, shutting the till of the cash register.

By then the bar itself had become an appendage, a second torso holding up my first. "You take someone's breath away," I stressed. "You rob them of the ability to utter a single word." I tipped the neck of the empty liquor bottle toward him. "You steal a heart."

He wiped up in front of me with a dishrag. "Any judge would toss that case out on its ass."

"You'd be surprised."

Seven spread the rag out on the brass bar to dry. "Sounds like a misdemeanor, if you ask me."

I rested my cheek on the cool, damp wood. "No way," I said. "Once you're in, it's for life.

You," Seven pronounced, "are a train wreck of sexual history."
But this is inaccurate. A runaway train is an accident. Me, I'll jump in front of the tracks. I'll even tie myself down in front of the speeding engine. There's some illogical part of me that still believes if you want Superman to show up, first there's got to be someone worth saving.

Let me guess," Seven said last night. "The first was a rebound. The second was married."

How'd you know?"

He laughed. "Because you're a cliché.

He's an egotistical dickhead who's going to chew you up and spit you out; and you have a really awful history of falling for assholes that you ought to run screaming from; and I don't feel like sitting around listening to you try to convince yourself you don't still feel something for Campbell Alexander when, in fact, you've spent the past fifteen years trying to fill in the hole he made inside you.