Seven Days in June

“I don’t miss drinking,” he continued. “But I do miss having a crutch. At first, I’d look at sober people like, damn, y’all really out here feeling everything?”

nostalgic for it before it had even ended

Listen to me, she thought. I get one slice of dick and turn into a wide-eyed Disney princess.

Running away wasn’t empowering. An empowered woman would’ve indulged.

When someone went too long without touch, they became hypersensitive to the slightest graze.

Why do you keep writing about me?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Apparently not.”

“I’m not just writing about you,” said Shane. “I’m writing to you.”

“You burst into my solitude, demanding to be seen. You were overwhelming. Just wild and weird and brilliant, and I never had a choice. I liked everything about you. Even the scary parts. I wanted to drown in your fucking bathwater.”

“So. You had to make me evil, huh? A vampire?”

“If the fangs fit,” she shot back. “Did you have to make me an adorable runaway with a heart of gold?”

“I didn’t make you that. You were that.”

They walked down the hallway, cool, calm. But the second they hit the exit doors, they linked hands and ran. Wherever Shane was going, she was going, too.

everyone could trace their bloodline to the same eighteenth-century pair: a French plantation owner and an enslaved African woman.