Who would have thought some doors only slammed shut temporarily; that when you turned to trudge away they could be flung open again, and love come pelting down the path, shouting for you to come back?

He looked like a man who was turning into paper, folding himself into origami angles, fragile and friable and prone to crumple.

To all the asexual activists out there without whom I would still be thinking of myself as merely weird, wrong, and slightly inhuman. In the hope that the more people talk about it, the fewer people there will be in the world who reach my age without knowing what they are.

He’d thought he had to give Aidan up so that Aidan could find someone he genuinely desired, but if Aidan wasn’t capable of desire, then that changed everything.

James tried to imaging a future in which he did not make love to Aiden, but in which they nonetheless shared the same house and slumbered innocently in the same bed and woke up every morning with that same bone-deep contentment he had felt this morning. Then he imagined a future that had no Aiden in it at all. It was no choice. No contest.

Sex isn't everything. I love you because you're beautiful and caring and an incredibly strong person to go through so much and to come out of it still so generous and loving. I'm not losing that, not for anything.

if sex could exist without love, it surely stood to reason that love could exist without sex.

Aiden felt so safe he didn't even go to his room to weel, just covered hos eyes and let the fire's warmth and the warmth of tears mingle on his fingers.Molly had clarified Carol's statement for him, explained that "ace" in his case probably meant "homo-romantic asexual.

The right to say no was a right he ought to exercise if he wanted his yes to mean something.

All couples had little niggles they had to deal with. People who squeezed toothpaste tube in the middle, and people who were oddly obsessed with rubbing their groins together. It wasn't a big deal, not really, considering how lucky they were in every other way.