only a matter of time before it broke through our fragile web of denial, forcing us to confront the truth and acknowledge who we are: two people in love – a love that nobody else could possibly understand.

I want to tell her that I can't pull her down. I want to tell her that she has to let go of my hand in order to swim. I want to tell her that she must live her own life. But I sense she already knows that these options are open to her. And that she, too, has made her choice.

She can't just be a face, a body; there has to be more than that, some kind of connection. And I can't connect, don't want to connect, with anyone.

The sight of such aching beauty would infuse his soul with pain.

I don't know when it started - this thing - bit it's growing, muffling me, suffocating me like poison ivy. I grew into it. It grew into me. We blurred at the edges, became an amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

I would give anything to escape myself, Flynn thought, just for a day, just for a minute even. Just to know what it was like to think differently, to feel differently, and to not be me.

Before there was anything, there was Lochan.