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Most of the people who aren’t you understand that capitalism is exploitative and climate change is a problem and that choices we make can support things that are bad or unjust. But we survive by a precarious strategy of not thinking about it. And reminding us of that makes us sad, and we don’t like being sad, so we get angry.”
“Terribly sorry. Still a bit of a novel sitch. Not that it isn’t fearfully nice that you’re a homosexual. Just never brought one to the club before. After all, they only let ladies in three years ago. They can’t join, of course. That way madness lies, let us shun that. And, actually, thinking about it, it must be terribly jolly for one’s lady to be a gentleman. You can go to all the same clubs, have the same tailor, play on the same polo team. No metaphor intended.”
my deeply ingrained—and repeatedly validated—belief that everything good in my life was just waiting for the perfect moment to fuck off and leave me. There was also the slimmest of chances that I might have been being a bit of a drama queen.
It was that weird space where I didn’t actually know what I was thinking, only that thinking was kind of happening.
“That’s not what I meant.” I got the impression that Jon Fleming was not a big fan of being challenged. “Luc’s a grown man. I’m not going to try to change his opinions of anything, least of all myself.” I could feel Oliver’s stillness beside me. “It’s very much not my place to say,” he murmured, “but that position might come across as trying to evade your responsibility for considering the impact your actions have on other people.”
“You do not get to call me Lucien. And you don’t get to do”—I waved my hands in a way that I hoped encompassed the everythingness of everything—“this anymore. You reached out to me. Yet somehow I’ve wound up being the one who makes all the effort and the one who has to take responsibility when it crashes and burns.” “I—” “And if you say ‘I understand where you’re coming from’ or ‘I hear you’ or anything remotely like it, then even though you’re an old man with cancer, I will fucking deck you so help me God.”
he made me feel so fucking precious I wasn’t sure I could bear it. Except I also didn’t want it to end. This moment of finding something I’d long since given up looking for. Maybe even stopped believing in. The wild impossible sweetness of somebody kissing you for you—because of you—and everything outside the press of bodies, the ripple of breath, the stroke of tongues drifting away like old leaves in autumn.
“You’ve been through a lot today,” he said. “There’s no need to diminish it.” “Yeah, but if I don’t diminish things I have to face them at their normal size, and that’s horrible.”
The Half Moon in Camden?”
It’s a sort of celebration of things eight-year-old me thought thirty-year-old me would have in the future.
“Should I go to the gym?” I asked. “Like, ever? Because otherwise you’re going to have to get used to me being monumentally average.” “You are many things, Lucien. But you could never be average.”
“I just want to be with you. Like this. I want to make you feel things. Good things. For me.”
I’d almost forgotten what it was like for a moment like this to mean something—the first time you saw a partner undressed, how they both gained and lost mystery, the truth of them, all their secrets and imperfections, surpassing any fantasy you could have conjured.
I’d wanted him from the beginning—from that horrible encounter at that horrible party—but the way you’d want a watch in a jeweller’s shop window. A kind of frustrated admiration for something distant and perfect and just a little bit artificial.
“Shhh. You don’t have to do anything. You’re enough. You’re…” I gazed at him, not sure what was coming next. From the look on his face, he probably wasn’t either. “Everything,” he finished.
“Useful, dear, is for dogs and crescent wrenches. Friends and lovers should care for you even when you’re not a blind bit of good to anybody.”
And maybe the problem was that there wasn’t a problem, and I was just so not used to that, my brain was trying to make one for me.
For a second or two, I tried to do that British thing where you pretend nothing untoward is happening in the hope it’ll sort itself out quickly and amicably, and then you’ll never have to talk about it again.
“How do you stop them?” “You don’t. You just get on with things and eventually it’s…fine. And you’re fine. And you feel briefly bitter you spent so long not being fine. But then you’re fine.”
if we let happy things make us unhappy when they stopped, there would be no point having happy things.”
But you didn’t let me down. You just made a decision I didn’t like. They’re not the same thing. I think you made the wrong call but it’s not your job to make me, or your parents, or anyone else happy.”
“I’m conscious this could be rather burdensome to hear, but you remain the thing I have most chosen for myself. The thing that’s most exclusively mine. The one that brings me the deepest joy.”
I wasn’t prepared for the truth of you.”
