count the headlights on the highway

But I don't give a damn

And I continue to carry on

The broken heart in hand

They looked at me—eyebrows raised—and answered: uhhh, no.

Remus strokes his hair, his back, kisses him when he leans up for it. With every touch, every sigh Sirius lets out against his chest, Remus feels something gnawing at the edges of his composure.

Gods, I want him.

It's not just desire, he realizes — it's hunger. Deep, primal, almost animalistic. Not just lust for Sirius's body, but an ache to consume every part of him: his chaos, his softness, his tears, his laugh. Every single one of his moods and states.

Every time Sirius clutches tighter, Remus has to bite back a growl. Every time Sirius sighs “don't let go” into his shirt, Remus wants to pin him down and make it true with every inch of his body.

Lying here with no one near

Only you, and you can hear me

When I say softly, slowly

Hold me closer, tiny dancer

Count the headlights on the highway

The air in the room is thick with a scent of scorched skin. Louis lies still, his eyelids twitch in shallow dreams. I sit beside him. My hands hover but do not touch — my flesh is too cold, I fear the startle. I have watched centuries of life shrivel, yet this, this — is unbearable.

I tell myself: this is the act of devotion. To stay here, after everything. Gods know he did not ask me to. In the bone marrow I feel the truth: I am guarding the only thing I haven't lost yet.

The burns are raw geography. Yesterday I washed what was left alive of him, afraid that one wrong stroke might send him crumbling like burnt paper. While I did, our fight played as a constant in my mind — Louis's voice, calling me boring, colourless, dull, dull as fuck. I hear myself too, in memory, talking about his daughter: But she didn't love you, not like he did. Not like I have. The ugliest truth I've ever spat at him.

So the room got dirty, so what? I’ll clean it up.

No, you won't, Louis. You never do.

I return to the present. The cloth in my hand trembles slightly. I press it down. He winces.

The words come in order, each with its own heat and shape. The mocking repetition. The sneering dismissal of our life together. The jagged use of the things I have told him about my past, things I have laid bare to him, things he weaponized, threw back at me like broken glass.

And yet, it's boring that stuck. Not the old wound, not the history dragged into the light. No. Boring slid under my skin and stayed there, like a splinter. A word that said that I was nothing worth craving. That I could be set aside for a stranger who could provide ten hours of novelty. The drugs were speaking, yes. His aching depression was speaking, correct. But that wasn't a minute's heat. No, on the contrary. Those were days. Months. Decades of bottling suffocation. Spilled at once. I stripped myself of every visible flaw. I tried to provide him with a life of serenity. And yet it was Lestat's insanity he had longed for, all along.

The reporter boy was still here. Daniel Molloy — thin, pale, smelling of fear and antiseptic. Still bleeding faintly. Still exactly where I’d put him. Not because I needed him, but because Louis had chosen him for ten hours over me. That alone made him an object of study.

Five chapters in, Trollope has me doing what he does best — smiling and even giggling at his sarcastic descriptions of conservative men (despite his being a conservative man himself, I reckon). Even though it’s probably too early to leave a review, and the Victorian style is a heavyweight for my poor 21st-century brain, I’m slowly but surely adjusting.

Mrs Dale is my favourite so far: civility armoured with self-respect. She knows dependence corrodes, even when it’s comfortable. Trollope never has to shout it; he lets the way she calibrates every “thank you” do the talking. There’s an ache in me for her — how many times do we say “fine” about arrangements that are not, in fact, fine?