‘I would never … do you understand me? I could never desire you as a bed partner. Never.’ He glanced aside from me. A faint rose came to his cheeks, not of shame, but of some other deep passion. He spoke quietly in a controlled voice. ‘And that, too, is a thing that we both have known for years. A thing that never needed speaking, those words that I must now carry with me for the rest of my life.’ He turned to look at me, but his eyes seemed blinded. ‘We could have gone all our lives and never had this conversation. Now you have doomed us both to recall it forever.’
