Shirts and jeans litter the asphalt, the empty fabric limbs askew as if they're attempting to escape. Blood smears Sarah's lips as she struggles against the chest of a dirty looking man with a beard. Terror. Terror is the only word my mind can seize on and it forgets what it means. I forget how to think - to move.

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.

It was her turn to hold him up.

Be myself. If only I remembered what it was like to be myself. I__ a fucking waitress in a crappy bar in a small town in the middle of nowhere. I was going nowhere. I had nothing to give him beside myself and my heart and he denied me.

Don__ cry,__ he breathed out so very close to my face. Just a little closer and I__ feel his lips ghosting against mine. __t__ like a punch in my guts when you cry.__ __ou shouldn__ touch me,__ I said, but despite my words, I didn__ try to move away from his touch. A tear ran to my upper lip and I tasted it with the very tip of my tongue. Nolan__ eyes darkened when he followed it, not straying from my mouth. I could see goosebumps over his skin on his neck and on his forearms. __olan?

Seeing you with that guy tonight made me nuts, because every bone in my body says you__e mine.