”Aidan forbore to tell her that he told Sam never to bother him again, and that thankfully she had honoured his request. The subject dropped, though...he could see she was itching to ask more.They shared the rest of a bottle of Shiraz and then repaired to bed.He marvelled at how unselfconscious was the way she shed her clothing. While he was in his business suit, she was in a sweater and sprayed-on jeans. She lifted the sweater and it disappeared; she slipped down the jeans as if her legs were. She had been my first true love, and I loved her still for holding that place in my heart. What Ruth had needed was me to be the man I was today, but back then I was still just a boy with no clue in the universe of how to break the sexual stalemate we’d found ourselves in. We were both virgins trapped in a fantasy, with no concept of how adults dealt with these issues. At nineteen, I was horrified at the concept of sex without love or that sometimes I woman wanted a man to be extremely direct. He knew this information would push his master to new level of rage."It is time to send the Lyr' out to finish the job." His voice was hideous and cruel. "We can't kill them ourselves but we can continue nudging them into killing each other. Have the Lyr' gather the rogues into gangs and armies that will prey on the weakened populations. The greatest portions of the survivors are females with little or no protection. They should be easy prey for the lawless hordes we send into their midst." I. Then he surprised the heck out of me:“How are you coming on your novel?” he asked, completely out of the blue.“How did you know I was writing a novel?” I answered.Vandiver said he had started in the newspaper business and knew that “inside every journalist is a novelist struggling to get published.”He explained that nearly every week, he would get two or three manuscripts from people, asking him to “just look at my book,” and yet I had spent 10 hours with him and never once brought it up.“I.