I lied until the lies became a second skin—thick, binding me like wet linen to a corpse. After Bunny… well. What was there to feel? Guilt? No. Guilt implies a choice, and what we did felt less like a choice than a slow, inevitable descent. We couldn't involve you. Trust was never the obstacle—it was something far more ancient. Camilla understood this.

“Atonement requires a vessel,” she told me once. “Someone untouched by the Furies.”

I laughed at her then. Not because it was absurd, but because she was right. Did I fear losing you? No. I feared what we might do to keep that light. How easily we'd mistake salvation for destruction. Blood for wine, a life for a metaphor. Camilla would've called it ἁγνός—a sacred purge. I called it cowardice.

But here's the truth, philtatos: I would've let her. When the fever of those days took hold—when the lines between miasma and mercy blurred—I'd have stood silent as she raised the knife. Not out of malice, but because I believed, truly, that beauty demands ruin.

The harder I fought to untangle myself from you, the tighter the knot grew—a noose around my neck. I cherished my silence. Even in the dark, alone, I refused to name it.

Amor vincit omnia? Bullshit! Love doesn't conquer—it corrodes. It's laughable, really. All my grand philosophies, my icy detachment—shattered by something as banal as longing. I've mapped every star in the sky, dissected every line of Keats, and still, I cannot reconcile this… hunger with the man I've become.

Richard?

Your voice forces me to draw a shuddering breath, finally clearing the fog. I realise I'm standing on the threshold of your flat, caked in filth, my coat sleeve dangling by a thread. “Love you.” My hands move without permission, clawing through the space between us until they find you. Don't vanish. Don't fade. Do not leave me here in this bloody limbo again.

“I love you,” I rasp again. The world narrows to this: your heat, the hitch in your breath, the terrifying, glorious truth that you let me hold you.

Even now.