Why were certain things - even things that were obviously and deeply true - often the most difficult things to say to someone?

School? Of all the godforsaken, no-good places on earth, why did he have to go to school? What kind of aunt and uncle would do that to a child? What good would school do for him?
He was already one of the smartest people she knew! And if he absolutely had to go to school, why did he have to go to school so far away?

What good was a Chief Rat Catcher once all the rats were caught?
What use was a warrior once the war was fought?
What worth was loyalty to a friend who had taken the train north to a different world?

The way Henry’s looking at him in the picture is so affectionate, so openly loving, that seeing it from a third person’s perspective almost makes Alex want to look away, like he’s staring into the sun. He called Henry the North Star once. That wasn’t bright enough.

We can have a real legacy here, of hope, and love, and change.

Nobody’s supposed to see how much he needs.

And Henry. God, Henry. Those emails—those letters —were the one place Henry could say what he was really thinking. There’s nothing that wasn’t laid out in there: Henry being gay, Bea going to rehab, the queen tacitly keeping Henry in the closet. Alex hasn’t been a good Catholic in a long time, but he knows confession is a sacrament. They were supposed to stay safe.

I took the night I visited Bea in rehab and begged her to take it seriously, and I put it in a room with pink peonies on the wallpaper and a golden harp in the center of the floor. I took my first time, with one of my brother’s mates from uni when I was seventeen, and I found the smallest, most cramped little broom cupboard I could muster, and I shoved it in. I took my father’s last night, the way his face went slack, the smell of his hands, the fever, the waiting and waiting and terrible waiting and the even worse not-waiting anymore, and I found the biggest room, a ballroom, wide open and dark, windows drawn and covered. Locked the doors.

At cruising altitude, he takes the chain off his neck and slides the ring on next to the old house key. They clink together gently as he tucks them both under his shirt, two homes side by side.

Alex looks over to find Henry’s expression careful, waiting, and he realizes this is the same as when Alex took Henry to the lake house—the most sacred place he has.

When Alex was a kid, before anyone knew his name, he dreamed of love like it was a fairy tale, as if it would come sweeping into his life on the back of a dragon one day. When he got older, he learned about love as a strange thing that could fall apart no matter how badly you wanted it, a choice you make anyway. He never imagined it’d turn out he was right both times.

“Sometimes you just jump and hope it’s not a cliff.”

I guess that makes you the North Star?

Thinking about history makes me wonder how I’ll fit into it one day, I guess. And you too. I kinda wish people still wrote like that. History, huh? Bet we could make some.

If Alex’s head is a storm, Henry is the place lightning hits ground.

“Someone else’s choice doesn’t change who you are.”

He wants to call Henry. He guesses it makes sense—they’ve always been fixed points in each other’s worlds, little magnetic poles. Some laws of physics would be reassuring right now.

And Alex’s heart doesn’t spread itself out in his chest, and he doesn’t have to grip the edge of the settee to steady himself. Because that’s what he would do if he were here in this palace to fall in love with Henry, and not just continuing this thing where they fly across the world to touch each other and don’t talk about it. That’s not why he’s here. It’s not.

Henry is a challenge, head to toe, beginning to end.

Henry doesn’t want the spotlight, and Pez naturally absorbs what Henry deflects.

“He’s not my friend. He’s someone I like to antagonize all the time, and one time I talked to him about something real.”
“That’s a friend, Alex.”

Well, he gets told he’s great a lot. He just doesn’t often get told he’s good enough.

“Anyway,” she says. “The point is, you’re never too young to figure out your skills and use them to get shit accomplished.”

Le « bordel » ne me fait pas peur, c'est la vie.

C'est aussi à l'effet que produit sur nous la mort de quelqu'un que l'on prend la pleine mesure de la force du lien qui nous unissait à lui.

Dans certaines circonstances, respecter un serment est la pire des trahisons.