“I'm not trying to avoid you,' I replied lamely, but what else could I say? Sorry Brae but when I first came down to meet you I had no idea how hard it was going to be to avoid telling you that I was turning into a grotesque monster and I am worried that there is a good chance I could wake up one morning with a sudden lust for your blood. Somehow I didn't think that would go down particularly well.”

“I loved him, more than anything else in the world and that when he was away it was hard to breath and that I couldn't go through a single second without thinking about him.”

“I sat down on the grass and looked up at Brae. He was still shirtless and - although it pained me a little to even think it - it suited him. He was in really good shape and he looked less uptight without it, more relaxed. If it wasn't for his weird silver hair he could have looked perfectly ordinary. Better than ordinary in fact.”

“Don't you understand? I want to spend my life with you. I want you to be there when I go to bed at night and when I wake up in the morning.”

“I forced myself to breathe deeply; perhaps they would have vanished. Perhaps I'd been imagining them because Brae was gone and I was scared without him, and now that he was back I'd feel safe enough again that they would go away. Perhaps it was just paint or something and would have been washed out by the sea spray earlier. I breathed again, feeling much calmer and then, slowly, opened my eyes.”

“You will do as you are told the second you are told to do it. Is that clear?''I'm not six mother, I think I can grasp standard sentences.' Whether I chose to pay attention to them however...”

“It was exactly the sort of thing I needed to be reading that afternoon: a story where, no matter how bad things got, you knew everything was going to turn out fine in the end.”