She fixed me with her unblinking gaze. "I know you love me, Derek," she went on urgently, "but I could never feel your love. Not directly. You can't feel love. No matter what all the romance stories and trideos and songs say—you can't feel it. When people say they 'feel' love, what they're talking about is something inside themselves, isn't it? They infer the love of another, or of others. They take in what people say to them, how they act and what they do, and from that they infer that those other people love them. And from that inference comes the feeling that people call 'being loved.'