It’s rainy. Blustery. The roads we’ve known since we were kids are as wet as gravestones that will one day become our forever home. The leaves that fall on our drunken heads then slip and slide across our shoes, and the grass that hides on the horizon squeaks like frightened mice. When I move inside of her—fingers first and everything else soon after—she turns her face to the sky and curses whoever’s up there. Her insides are mine: my heart, hers. Stoned and tired, she curls up like a cat in the doorway of a laundrette. Or perhaps it’s an Indian restaurant on the outskirts of a town as rundown as the rest of this shithole country. The trees sing to the clouds and eat the rain. They lick the bricks of the buildings we once inhabited before we became shadows in a room overlooking a river, the kind that Nick Drake once sang about before he became a shadow too. Drifting. Skirting. She springs to life, and around the edge we go with pockets of poses until we fall into the bushes opposite a church, drunkenly kissing like the hedonists we so secretly are. The dead see us. They reach out, cradling our bones as our tongues touch in the midst of crude conversation detailing what we’re going to do to each other once we take shelter beneath the comfort of a warm duvet. Cigarettes in beer cans. Painkillers dissolving in teacups. Endless Sunday mornings when the lust of a Saturday night gives way to enduring love. Echoes surround. Streetlights serenade. Our limbs are glue. We sniff each other and drag shards of glass across our skin, and when we turn blind, all we can do is convulse as if fingered by the gnarly middle digit of God. We are alive but never safe from harm, for we are made of the fears we are too afraid to discard.

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon UK

X and I: A Novel and A Journal for Damned Lovers on Amazon US