Garth Greenwell

Even when she found a romantic prospect, why did it feel like her intrigues were always a few inches off the mark?

Because she wants to love him, she doesn’t tell him.

Because to tell him the truth would be to endanger the possibility of being loved by him, and all she wants is to be loved totally, without reason or question or sacrifice.

He is still nervous. She’s too young to rent a car; that’s why he had to book it. He doesn’t like knowing this about her; it makes him feel uneasy, like a predator. But there’s no way that he could unknow it, her youth, her porousness—there’s no way to go back to the time before they met.

all he wanted to do was to keep going, to drive into Queens, into Long Island, to drive all the way until he reached the very tip of the land, where the map ended in the sound and there was no road, only horizon.

She is prone to this, to disappearing within her own life. Everything seems to happen to her.

She doesn’t talk enough, but when she does, she talks too much, like a nervous child.

a deep and lonely desire, a void that he could fill. Romantically, he thinks, he wants her to show it to him—to hold still long enough to be touched in the heart.

She wants him to do what he wants, but she wants those wants to be her wants.

He knows she is more in love with the idea of him than she is in love with the actual him, because she doesn’t know him at all.

He wants to startle her out of her shyness and fully open herself to him, like forcing a peony to bloom by cutting the stem on the diagonal.