There was a perverse beauty to the scar, holding Julian’s body together in defiance of every force that had tried to pull it apart.

He could feel every fold of fabric against his skin, every goose bump and fine hair on his forearms. But the details didn’t fight with each other anymore. They didn’t cling to his limbs and pull him downward. They washed through him like a symphony.

As always, Paul wanted to be charmed—but it was a kind of affection Julian had never shown when they were face-to-face, and it kept Paul writhing at the end of the hook so helplessly that he could never quite believe it wasn’t by design.

That class makes me so angry”—a sharp, nervous laugh, anger and panic burning inside him—“because—it’s just—I’m getting plenty of empirical evidence toward my hypothesis, that the worst damage humans do isn’t rooted in malice but in thoughtlessness.”

“I kill them because they’re beautiful, and it’s the only way I can keep them.”

It isn’t just that the young man of means is conditioned to obey (though he certainly is—Daddy always knows best, and the nice fellow in the white coat probably does, too). It’s that he is also conditioned not to particularly care about the collateral damage of his obedience.

When Paul shut his eyes, he could pretend someone else was speaking. Someone he hadn’t become yet; someone who deserved to speak. “I love you,” he said, and once he’d spoken, the words took hold of his tongue like a prayer.

“For instance, as rigid as your definition of ‘moral laziness’ is, I did notice a tendency for it to expand conveniently to encompass every moral framework you don’t agree with.”

He endured it to punish himself, and to prove to himself that he could; those were the only two reasons he ever chose to do anything worthwhile.