Pain was simply an inevitability of living, and I had to learn how to trust him with his own, as I trusted him with mine.

I hated myself, and the part of me that was cowardly wished for a simple solution: an exchange of pain for forgiveness. But life didn’t work that way, and fucking up was forever.

My cock actually sort of staggers like a punch-drunk boxer who doesn’t know when to stay down.

I closed my eyes, adding dark to dark, and the wanting unfurled like the sails of a phantom ship. This could be my universe. This nowhere world, circumscribed by skin and breath, where nothing mattered but two bodies moving together. The past and the future rendered irrelevant by the beauty of the now, the sum of the self transmuted into a moment. Oh, was there ever a more seductive definition of madness?

I have a sort of . . . thing, I suppose, for certain words. They spark inside me, somehow, turning me to touchpaper, but I don't know what they are until someone says them.

I was the climber of a sheer cliff, dragging myself on bleeding hands towards a summit that I'd never reach and sometimes didn't want to reach. The things I cared about were the hooks I'd driven into the rock face. Depression snapped them, one by one, one by one. My only certainty was the fall.

I'd wasted so much of my life. So many of my days, and all of my promise, all of my dreams, lost to hospitals, to depression, to wanting to die. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This is not who I am.Except, of course, it was. It was all there was left to be.

When I was lost in the fog, it was as though nothing else existed. And, afterwards, it seemed incomprehensible that I had ever really thought like that. Self-recrimination inevitably followed.

Sometimes I though about killing myself. The idea of it circled my head, shining and lovely like a tinsel halo. How beautiful it would be if everything could just stop. If I could stop. If I didn't have to feel like this. Yes, I thought about it and thought about it, but I was too exhausted to do anything about it. That should have been funny, right?

The tapestry of my life was a ruin of unravelling threads. The brightest parts were a nonsensical madman's weaving. And now every day was a grey stitch, laid down with an outpatient's patience, one following the next following the next, a story in lines, like a railway track to nowhere, telling absolutely nothing.

Days passed in a grey fog. I was becalmed. Without energy, without hope, with no sight of land, I could remember feeling better but I somehow couldn't believe in it. There was nothing but this.

There had been a subtle realignment of the spheres. The world was somehow a place I could endure again. If life was a grey corridor lined with doors, it was now within my power to open some of them.

I knew how to be a friend, a lover, a partner. I knew how to make someone feel cherished and seen and listened to -- everything I had myself always so desperately wanted and been afraid I might never have because I was so used to being overlooked.

I thought of Marius. Wild, wonderful, Byronic-fantasy Marius, who had somehow found something he wanted in the everyday quietness of me. Until he hadn't.

He was wearing a gleaming cream-coloured linen suit, and a Panama hat. The weirdest thing about this was that he was not the most outlandish-looking person in the room by a long way. Not that Little Miss Dresses-Like-Bogart over here has a right to complain

It's ironic, since they're supposed to be immortal, but vampires are kind of like small businesses: half of them go down within their first year

And now he smiled at me. All teeth. The way only people who hadn’t learned self-consciousnessknew how to smile.

I never interrupt people when they're speaking because I know only too well how annoying it is. But with my every brattish interjection, the dimples deepened at the corner of his lips. And I was half-drunk on his smiling and the power of saying things that made him smile.

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.

Life is so full of rough edges - small tasks and expectations that scratch you bloody and remind you that you're naked and alone.

In daylight and up close, he was merciless, all smiles and freckles, the brightest, boldest flame a moth could wish for.

The future is terrifying because it's full of stuff, not because it's empty.

Love doesn't just go away when it becomes inconvenient.

It's not what you do, it's what it means.

You do know you’re one of the hot ones, right? You could have any dom in this room if you looked marginally more approachable than an underfed piranha having a bad day.

My dominant (no pun intended) discourse seems to be needy as fuck.

His attention. Sweet and intense at the same time. Like a barley sugar I could untwist from its plastic and hold in my mouth. A flood of secret pleasure.

Nim handed me a mug of tea. I took a sip and it was just how I like it, strong and sweet. If you added psychotic and emotionally unavailable to that, it would also cover my taste in women.

This is the story of my life: standing on the edges of things and worrying, when I'm supposed to just walk through them.

I'm not trying to upset you. I just think it's about time you move

There’s risk inherent in most things that matter.

We are all the playground of angels and demons.

I had no idea it would be like this. That having someone on their knees for you would make you so vulnerable.

Kink crowds are the same the world over. The good ones are already taken, the hot ones only talk to each other, and everyone else is desperate.

I stared at him. At this too-thin, too-sincere boy. This person.Because I knew what he meant. I understood exactly. And I’d felt it too, that interior certainty. But over the years, I’d let all the fervour fade. I’d stopped believing in it, somehow. I’d let it become something I did, not something I was.

Thank you," I said bravely, dropping the syllables cleanly, like marbles, and secretly full of the most pathetic pride imaginable. I had spoken to strangers.

Behind my eyelids, I saw him dancing in spirals of coloured light, emerald, blue, and brilliant purple, enfolding him like the wings of an electric angel.