Q8: Quotable or Trembling with Anticipation

From P8:
"Well." With great exaggeration, she tossed her napkin onto the table. "I suppose you might as well should."

Pushing the great, white lock back, she leaned in. "Stavros was a waiter who had worked plenty of events at my parent's house, and the parties of their friends. He was quiet, polite, and handsome. His hair was black enough, and his features... strong... enough, that it was easy enough to smile at him and accept a canape." Danny thought of Marina. Quotable, no matter what.

"But to me, he was terrifying." She placed a hand on her chest. "More beautiful than I knew a man could be. More of a man than any of the boys I knew at school. He was my woodcutter." She looked at her lap.

Danny knew the type - that longing. The lifeguards at the pool, impossibly tan and muscular and at ease on foot, in the water, or on their high lifeguard chairs. Their feet gripping the edge of the pool, their bodies knived over the water. He could still name individual coaches and football players. A cop who monitored the school parking lot his senior year. All those men who were the opposite of what Danny was, or knew he was, inside.

"So when he spoke to me, I nearly died."

Danny remembered his first heightened brush against a man in the bathroom on a trip to visit colleges during his senior year.

Miriam was lost in her story now. "It was at the end of the party, and my parents were on the lawn saying a few last goodbyes. I'd stayed inside to help tidy up - unnecessary, really, but I wanted to let the air back into the room - and he'd stepped quietly into the dining room where I was watching my parents through the blinds. 'Beautiful,' he'd said, in his thick accent, and I'd dropped my glass on the floor. His hand touched mine when I stooped to help him rather than let him clean up alone."

Fuck the new hardbacks, Danny thought. For this, I'm sticking around.