- "Shakespearean in that hopefully I'll get stabbed to death" - Alex.
- "You know what you little shit," Alex says the second the call connects, "you can hear it for yourself and then tell me how you would handle this". "Alex?" Henry's voice sounds scratchy and bewildered across the line. "Have you really rung me at three o'clock in the morning to make me listen to a turkey?".
- They're rounding the corner for their eighth lap now, and he's starting to see some flaws in his logic. Straight people, he thinks, probably don't spend this much time convincing themselves they're straight.
- "I mean, er, should we, I dunno, slow down?" Henry says, cringing so hard at himself that one eye closes. "Go for dinner first, or-". Alex is actually going to kill him. "We just had dinner". "Right, I meant- I just thought-". "Stop thinking". "Yes, gladly".
- In an instant of sudden, vivid clarity, he can't believe he ever thought he was straight.
- Oh, Alex thinks. "Oh," Alex says.
- "Maybe there's more than one dream for you or more than one way to get there." - June.
- "Bisexuality is truly a rich and complex tapestry," - Alex.
- "So, to borrow a passage from Sense and Sensibility: You want nothing but patience- or give it a more fascinating name, call it 'hope'." - Henry.
- "He came from a long, long line of princes, but never before had there been a prince quite like him: born with his heart on the outside of his body." - Henry.
- "Sometimes you just jump and hope it's not a cliff." - Oscar.
- "[...] and one day you'd get tired of me and leave because I'm-" He stops short, and one shaking hand moves through the air in front of him in a helpless sort of gesture at everything about himself.
- "If there's any legacy for me on this bloody earth, I want it to be true, so I can offer you all of me, in whatever way you'll have me, and I can offer you the chance of a life." - Henry.
- "Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 1927: With me, it is quite stark; I miss you even more than I could have believed, and I was prepared to miss you a good deal." - Alex.
- "And then I was a careless fool, and I fell in love with you anyway. When you rang me at truly shocking hours of the night, I loved you. When you kissed me in disgusting public toilets and pouted in hotel bars and made me happy in ways in which it had never even occurred to me that a mangled-up, locked-up person like me could be happy, I loved you. And then, inexplicably, you had the absolute audacity to love me back. Can you believe it?" - Henry.
- Henry's looking back at him, beautiful and vital and heartsick and still, always, the person Alex is willing to risk ruining his life for.
- "I've kissed your mouth, that corner, that place it goes, so many times now. I've memorized it. Topography on the map of you, a world I'm still charting. I know it. I added it to the key. Here: inches to miles. I can multiply it out, read your latitude and longitude. Recite your coordinates like la rosaria." - Alex.
- "Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon, 1917: And you have fixed my life - however short. You did not light me - I was always a mad comet, but you have fixed me. I spun around you a satellite for a month, but shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze." - Alex.
- "But the thing is, jumping off cliffs is kinda my thing. That's the choice. I love him, with all that, because of all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose." - Alex.
- "I don't care. You can take your legacy and your decorum and you can shove it up your fucking arse, Philip. I'm done." - Henry.
- "My whole life has been about fighting. I fought." - Rafael Luna.
may 24 2020 ∞
may 28 2020 +