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it’s difficult, sometimes, for me to understand that I have the power to hurt someone. You see, it requires me to accept that somebody might like me in the first place.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me I might just want to fall to pieces on his doorstep out of sheer sorrow and regret.
Either Darian was so superlatively beautiful that even a Union Jack onesie couldn’t blight him, or I was so superlatively besotted that I found beauty even in his Union Jack onesie. Or: I really was insane.
Yet they all paled to this: weeping my wretched heart out in front of a man who no longer wanted me.
“I was terrified, okay? Because of how happy you made me, and how much you made me feel.”
He catches my face between his hands, his painted fingernails twinkling like stars, and when he kisses me it feels a bit like fear and tastes a bit like tears, but it’s as bright and sweet as sherbet, and I decide to call it joy.
Darian insisted we stay for a cup of tea with Nanny Dot. I insisted we return to London for immediate debauchery. We stayed for tea with Nanny Dot.
I closed my eyes, as Icarus must once have done, and was glad to burn.
“All my smiles, you can have all my smiles, whenever I can find them.”
“Aww, that sahnds well nice.” “Being mentally ill?” “Boyfriend, donut.”
“You ’ave no idea, babes. I’m like Britney, me.” “In what regard?” His eyes gleamed. “Not that innocent.”
“I think it’s nice to have things on the outside as well as on the inside.”
“It’s still the second nicest fing anyone has evva done for me.” “The second nicest? What’s the first?” He kissed my arm, right over the worst of the scarring, where his name began. “Well, there was this boy who was like just a boy and he stood in front of me, asking me to love ’im.”
Tomorrow was waiting. And the day after. And the day after. And then the day after that. Only so many reprieves until my next depression. But that was tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow. There were a lot of nows before then, and this was one of them. I looked down at Darian, who had drifted effortlessly into blissful, heedless sleep, just as he had that first time in Brighton. And, in the privacy of that fragile, fleeting moment, I found myself smiling, just a little.
