“He cupped her chin to still the movement. "Please, Ricky." he clutched her hand tighter to his chest. "Please... I'm not going anywhere." He leaned closer until his lips were mere millimetres from hers. "I promise.”

“She never asked for that time yet she ended up getting it. He could not get away from her. Even if his feet moved at a hundred miles per hour, she was always right there, vividly imprinted in his mind. Calling him back to her. And he obediently responded to those calls. He was blindly being led by an all-consuming power that he had no control over.”

“The virus was rapidly spreading. It had infected his mind, eating away at everything except thoughts of her.”

“He had wanted to cure the virus by getting rid of the source, but nothing prepared him for the hurt and disappointment he saw in her eyes.”

“When I'm with you I feel like...That's just it. I feel. in a very literal sense, you drive me crazy. In a very literal sense, you make my heart beat faster. In a very literal sense, Ricky...you take my breath away.”

“He cupped her chin to still the movement. "Please, Ricky." he clutched her hand tighter to his chest. "Please... I'm not going anywhere." He leaned closer until his lips were mere millimetres from hers. "I promise.”

“This woman is a virus and she’s eating me alive.”

“Her eyes were a different shade of green today, a soft green. The colour of autumn leaves just before they started turning brown. He had known her for three years, and there were no two days that she looked the same. Every day was a different form of beauty that was slotted irrepressibly into his memory.”

“When he opened his eyes again, all words escaped him. He had seen her just a second ago and yet his eyes were unprepared for the beauty they saw. Her face was perfect.Her cheeks were still flushed from the excitement. It was the same face he could not wait to see every morning; the same cheeks he had kissed every day for the past four weeks. “You’re not good for me,” he whispered.”

“The virus that had lay dormant for two years had been reawakened by simply seeing her smile. He thought he would be impervious to it by now, but every time her eyes changed colour, every time she giggled, it just caused the infection to spread. He had no idea why he continued to torment himself this way; burning for a woman he knew he could not have.He happily spent an hour or two with her each day and then braced himself for the self-inflicted torture that inevitably ensued at night. That torture had become his way of life, but he found that a worse fate would be not seeing at all.”