“Oh my God,” said Elliot. “You can’t handle me now.” He found himself almost laughing in Jase’s baffled face. He knew what was wrong with him: awkward, spiky, occasionally cruel, inherently unlovable, all of that. But he’d always had a certain intense belief in what he could do: write treaties, end wars, throw all the knives away, make people listen to him, accomplish whatever he wanted. He was getting better at it too: by the time he was twenty, someone like Jase would be a haystack in the path of a hurricane.
