You Are the Best Thing - Ray Lamontagne {Breakout Kings, Lloyd/Julianne}

~Oh, because You are the best thing that ever happened to me

You are this junkie's desireAn angel on fire

Don't you go and make me a liar baby

You are the best thing and its the woman in you

that makes me want to be with you

for always... for always.

He shouldn't watch her, he knew that. There might as well have been a huge, neon 'KEEP AWAY' sign flashing above her head. Ray would probably kill him, slowly and painfully, but somehow Lloyd couldn't keep his eyes off of her.

Not in a creepy way, not at all.

In a sea of so much anger, darkness and despair, Julianne was like a beacon of all that was good in the world.

The fact that she had her own issues only made her more perfect in that they made her real and not some idealized image of what a perfect woman should be.

Lloyd knew people didn't like him. He was caustic, abrasive, sarcastic and had no issue with letting people know that he was their intellectual superior. He'd long ago lost the desire to cater to the whims and egos of others and most people found that a personality defect.

Even so, Julianne was kind to him when there was no need for her to be. She offered gentle words and support. She had to have known he lied about his father's number not working, but instead of criticism, all she said was that Columbus had a large Dutch population, offering him a shred of hope for his constructed image of the man.

She hadn't even mentioned the gleam of tears she must have noticed.

Mother would have used either weakness to shred his already tenuous sense of self down to nothing.

So, while Shea continued to tease him about Julianne, calling her Lloyd's girlfriend and making the occasional crass comment to get a rise out of him, he kept denying it…though he wished he didn't have to. If he was the sort of man prone to flights of fancy, Lloyd would have wished they'd met under different circumstances.

Things might have been different.

But the reality was that he was a con, an emotionally screwed up mess of a con who wasn't sure he even knew how to love someone and she was…like a brightly hued butterfly with a wounded wing.

He'd heard it said that when you were in love, all the songs finally made sense.

He wondered what it meant when you started to think in colorful similes instead of mocking them.