Aiden felt so safe he didn't even go to his room to weel, just covered hos eyes and let the fire's warmth and the warmth of tears mingle on his fingers.Molly had clarified Carol's statement for him, explained that "ace" in his case probably meant "homo-romantic asexual.

if sex could exist without love, it surely stood to reason that love could exist without sex.

Sex isn't everything. I love you because you're beautiful and caring and an incredibly strong person to go through so much and to come out of it still so generous and loving. I'm not losing that, not for anything.

James tried to imaging a future in which he did not make love to Aiden, but in which they nonetheless shared the same house and slumbered innocently in the same bed and woke up every morning with that same bone-deep contentment he had felt this morning. Then he imagined a future that had no Aiden in it at all. It was no choice. No contest.

He’d thought he had to give Aidan up so that Aidan could find someone he genuinely desired, but if Aidan wasn’t capable of desire, then that changed everything.

To all the asexual activists out there without whom I would still be thinking of myself as merely weird, wrong, and slightly inhuman. In the hope that the more people talk about it, the fewer people there will be in the world who reach my age without knowing what they are.