You're a dumb shit. There's a million first girls for a million different first things. There's the first girl you slow-dance with, and the first girl you go to bed with. There's the first girl to give you a kiss, and then the first one you take home...
In addition to the transience of their members, churches themselves face a crisis of hypermobility. Many churches have put down only shallow roots in their neighborhood, or no roots at all. We’ve all heard the question, “If our church suddenly mo...
Nick stands up and offers his hand to me. I have no idea what he wants, but what the hell, I take his hand anyway, and he pulls me up on my feet then presses against me for a slow dance and it's like we're in a dream where he's Christopher Plummer an...
I don't know if anyone's ever told you this", he begins. He doesn't blush, and his eyes don't dart away. Instead I find myself staring into a pair of oceans - one perfect, the other blemished by that tiny ripple. "You're very attractive." I've been c...
She was breathtaking in her beauty and her human spirit, he thought, unable to speak as he gazed upon her. Hers was the sort that would not fade or grow jaded with time and years, but flourish, grow more radiant with life and its experience. Hers was...
She could hear, some way off, her brothers calling to each other in the woods behind the house. She hoped desperately that their game wouldn't bring them any closer, that they wouldn't scare the birds away. Somehow she knew that you didn't get many m...
I saw her sign the register, but her name isn't on it any more. The bellboy says he never saw her. Now they've got me so I'm scared and shaky, like a little kid is of the dark. I want you men to help me. Won't you men help me?' 'We'll help you' - sai...
He opened the door for me with an impassive expression. Oh, but he couldn’t fool me. I knew very well that he gloated inside. He had the right to. I’d be gloating aloud if I were him. I slid into the plush black leather seat and ran my hands over...
Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are alw...
Hello there," Inigo hollered when he could wait no more. The man in black glanced up and grunted. "I've been watching you." The man in black nodded. "Slow going," Inigo said. "Look, I don't mean to be rude," the man in black said finally, "but I'm ra...
It's sweet and everything, but it's like you're not even there sometimes. It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can't j...
It was now twenty minutes past four in the morning, allowing for the fact that the clock in the library of his town house was four minutes slow, as it had been for as far back as he could remember. He eyed it with a frown of concentration. Now that h...
Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing ...
One of the supreme paradoxes of baseball, and all sports, is that the harder you try to throw a pitch or hit a ball or accomplish something, the smaller your chances are for success. You get the best results not when you apply superhuman effort but w...
In a little while they were kissing. In a little while longer, they made their slow sweet love. The iron bed sounded like a pine forest in an ice storm, like a switch track in a Memphis trainyard, like the sweet electrical thunder of habitual love an...
There are boys lying awake, hating themselves. There are boys screwing for the right reasons and boys screwing for the wrong ones. There are boys sleeping on benches and under bridges, and luckier unlucky boys sleeping in shelters, which feel like sa...
I had a dream about you. You were writing a book, and I was reading a book. The problem was, it was the same book. So while you were trying to write, I sat next to you yelling at you to write faster because I am a speed reader. Seriously, can you onl...
I used to pray you know, pray to God that He would somehow stop it. All the nights of listening to my mother scream and things breaking. Of holding my brother and sister and listening to them cry and begging me to stop it.' My voice is slow and stead...
The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerful hot-air blower- standard equipment at Siberian ...
Should I try to help her? Surely I was strong enough to loosen that stubborn backpack. And, in doing so, I could make a clever comment about how cold it must be outside for her nipple to get so hard. She'd laugh and toss her head back; her long blond...
He leaned down, far enough that the dark ends of his hair brushed feather-light against her face, caught in her lashes, She had just enough time to take in a breath, to blink, to part her lips before he took them with his own. Time froze. Her heart c...
