Solidly nowhere, vanishingly everywhere.

“You could be my entire world,” he whispers in my ear before moving to my collarbone. “If you let me.”

The Dirac equation. The electron cloud. Beta decay. The Fibonacci spiral. Kinematic models, astral planes, Drake’s formula, the molecular structure of MBBA.

The budding domesticity makes reaching for possessive pronouns that much easier.

He’s looking down at my body like it’s a beautiful space oddity, something belonging to a minor goddess, to be investigated in filthy, methodical, obscene ways.

I don’t even know if I have the capacity to like sex. I never wondered, because me enjoying something was never a priority.

“That I don’t tell my family about my job because I’m unable to let people know that I’m more than the sum of the ways I can be useful to them. That if I show my true self, with my needs and my wants, I risk being rejected. That I’ve wielded my ability to hide who I am like an emotional antiseptic, and in the process I’ve turned myself into a

“That way if something goes wrong, if someone rejects you, then it’s not about you, is it? When you’re yourself, that’s when you’re exposed. Vulnerable. But if you hold back . . . Losing a game’s always painful, but knowing that you haven’t played your best hand makes it bearable.”

We teared up together over the tawny frogmouths, who mate for life and let themselves starve by the body of their dead partner.