When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn't a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you'd been missing.

Dispensing with the frivolity, he kissed her meaningfully. When at last he pulled away, her troubled expression alarmed him. What?Be careful, Hammond.No one will know I was here.She shook her head. Not that.Then what?You may have to put me on trial for my life. Please be careful that you don't make me fall in love with you first.

His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years.

I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have.He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. Hardly.Born and raised. You're a transplant. I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. Country bumpkin! I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing.City slicker, he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating.

Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.

This is what I want. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. Everything else— every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss— has meant nothing.

Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?I don't know any other way.Let me show you.And then we're kissing. Or at least, I think we're kissing— I've only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. But this isn't like anything I've ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: this is like music or dancing but better than both.

They couldn't have known that even this was a lie— that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven't chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

At first we had so much to catch up on we were talking a hundred words a second, barely even listening to the ends of one another's sentences before moving onto the next. And there was laughing. Lots of laughing. Then the laughing stopped and there was this silence. What the hell was it?It was like the world stopped turning in that instant. Like everyone around us had disappeared. Like everything at home was forgotten about. It was as if those few minutes on this world were created just for us and all we could do was look at each other. It was like he was seeing my face for the first time. He looked confused but kind of amused. Exactly how I felt. Because I was sitting on the grass with my best friend Alex, and that was my best friend Alex's face and nose and eyes and lips, but they seemed different. So I kissed him. I seized the moment and I kissed him,

I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.