His gal had thrown down, and he was going to follow her wherever that led.
Her English, though accented, was idiomatic. She would have learned it young enough to pick up the idiom, but not quite young enough to eradicate the accent.
He was blushing. Christ, the kid was so transparent. Harry, are you going to tell me you’ve got a girlfriend? I asked. The blush deepened, and I laughed. I’ll be damned, I said. Good for you. He looke...
George Burns line? ‘Sincerity—if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
For some, the distance between who you were and who you have become is unbridgeable, and the dissonance attempted repatriation creates is a constant reminder of the very changes you want so badly to f...
First was the fewer, not less. Now it was the care in avoiding a preposition at the end of a sentence. An educated man, presumably. Precise. Apparently fussy about small-minded rules, perhaps to compe...
Context had reinforced familiarity, and familiarity had blinded them to new possibilities.
Checking your six? he said, still smiling. I thought you wanted an airport because they’re safe. What is it about me that scares people so much?
But we rarely see what we prefer to overlook.
Because we’re friends, dumbass. Friends stay in touch. I won’t lie to you, you’re so good at reading people, but sometimes you assume everyone else is just like you, and that ain’t the way the world w...
And Harry’s bug and video detector was blessedly quiescent.
A few minutes later we pulled up in front of a nondescript office building. I paid the driver and we got out. The rain had stopped but the street was empty, almost forlorn. If I hadn’t known where we...
The young man’s blindness irreparable, his mistakes immutable, the consequences irreversible.
We were quiet for a moment. Then I said, Look, I’ve got an idea of what you feel for this woman, okay? I saw her. She’s a head-turner. She’s more than that, he said softly. The dumb, sappy bastard. Hi...
The months and days are the travelers of eternity. —Bashō
Sometimes, you have to remind yourself the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Something about all that power seemed to make the assholes who wielded it believe they were invulnerable.
She’s a bargirl. You don’t know where her loyalties lie. That one was unconvincing. No one had directed her against me—I was the one who had been pursuing her. She hadn’t needed to warn me about the b...
She spun around and I heard her inhale sharply. What the hell? she exclaimed in her Portuguese-accented English. I raised my hands, palms forward. I just want to talk to you. I used English because it...
Prepping people to believe something was the hard part. Once the framework was established, they became eager to fill in the details themselves, and could be counted on to do so even if those details...