had spent his whole life alone, and he had mastered the craft of avoiding any form of intimacy beyond sex. He didn’t need friends, and he didn’t have a functional family to teach him how to interact with people. He liked that hard part of himself—it kept his life simple. He felt suffocated during his first encounter with her, but as time passed and he began to feel something more, something that could change everything, he vowed to keep the status quo. He was used to structured solitude, and she was wreaking havoc on that.
