I am embroiled in a mock Jacobean tragedy of my own making. The desperate struggle of A's gift-wrapping, the still visible white edges shying away from the sellotape make me want to weep, just as he did when he sat on my bed for the last time this evening and attempted to protect his new, rubied eyes from my gaze. If there is such a thing as Hell, then I am definitely that way bound. All the more soulless I am for sitting there, rubbing my neck against his and wishing it was W's spidery touch silvering along my throat and shoulders, remembering the way he scattered it over my skin after we had sex first last night, in the early hours, and then again this morning before we went for coffee and talked too much about the naivete of anarchist protest, and made him late to meet his father. A is violently jealous and petrified that W will have his shameless way with me. Too late. The thought that he may eventually find out is a leadstone worse right now, than the idea that D meet uncover just what I have knotted myself into merely eight weeks.

Bruises

Edging towards bed, I clatter my wrist against the table edge. The top of my wrist throbs. I ignore it, but a minute or so later it is already ridging, blackening. I ache tenderly and think of the bruises that have dotted my hips, my thighs over the past few weeks. If you join the dots, you can follow the trail of our flame-thickening desire, the ebb and flow of our intellectual conversation, and the burgeoning of my real love for him. He has thrown my relationship with the Cypriot into the ring, trampled us both under foot, especially the Cypriot, although he cannot know it, currently swaddled in the sun of good food, raucous debate, grating bouzouki.