“And I thought of us, years and years later, you and I, in Paris, and how you seemed to be saying we had every choice, every chance. You acted as though you were free, but you were a ransom note. I paid to watch. I watched your fingers, your red mouth. I watched you undress. I didn't see you go.Later I was still paying and I never counted the cost. You were worth it. Again and again you were worth it. My heart has unlimited funds. Draw on them. Draw them down. Draw me down on top of you. How much? Everything? All right.”

“When my friend Melot set the trap, I think I knew it. I turned to death full face, as I had turned to love with my whole body. I would let death enter me as you had entered me. You had crept along my blood vessels through the wound, and the blood that circulates returns to the heart. You circulated me, you made me blush like a girl in the hoop of your hands. You were in my arteries and my lymph, you were the colour just under my skin, and if I cut myself, it was you I bled. Red Isolde, alive on my fingers, and always the force of blood pushing you back to my heart.”

“Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I’m free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.”

“You said, ‘I’m going to leave him because my love for you makes any other life a lie.’ I’ve hidden those words in the lining of my coat. I take them out like a jewel thief when no-one’s watching. They haven’t faded. Nothing about you has faded. You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror it’s not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me. Can I be sure which is which?”

“When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.”

“I was hungry, but I was nervous too. You were so new and I didn't want to frighten you away. I didn't want to frighten myself away.”

“To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there’s nothing there.”