Lie With Me: A Novel

by Philippe Besson

I stick to who I am. In silence, of course, but it’s a proud, stubborn silence.

This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.

I discover the pain of waiting, because there is this refusal to admit defeat, to believe that a future where it happens again is possible.

I know what that’s like, to be the son of a man like that. I wonder if it’s cold fathers who make the sensitive sons.

I had the time to think all the way home about how affairs of the body are so much more preferable to affairs of the heart, but that sometimes you don’t have the choice.

The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love. Enough to use the right word.

Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash. In the end I gave up on all possibility of a reunion.)