“With him being so charming, and so perfect, so heart-achingly beautiful, but tarnished in all of the right places, and in all of the ways that I understood so well, how could I not love him?”

“I loved your eyes first,” I told him , repeating his words from a few weeks ago back to him, because it was true, and because we were two halves of a whole—we had been all along, and he’d been so clever to know it right away. I used to think it was insanity, but now I was beginning to think that it was pure brilliance. “I see it, too, James. I see the other half of my soul in you.”

“He had an angel's face, but his eyes were so hypnotically tarnished, a mirror of my own pain in their depths.”

“You were this perfect, enchantingly beautiful girl that made the world brighter just by being in it, and you were ours. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that I drove you away.”

“I wondered how my heart could be both light with happiness and heavy with love at the same time.”

“Yes, you scare me,” I told him, after a very long silence, while I processed his answer. “But I’m irrevocably fucked up, so you excite me in equal measures. I find it liberating, to let someone control me…”

“You read me so well without me ever having to say the words. It astounds me. Perhaps we were made for each other. You're making me a believer, my love.”