[ A pause, struggling to compress into words a lifetime of being unloved and left behind, and of not loving and leaving behind, until anything else felt too strange to believe. He doesn’t quite manage. ]
—doing it to myself.
[ And this isn’t what he meant to be talking about, and he shouldn’t have said it. But it’s something, isn’t it, that he can say something he shouldn’t have said, accidentally scrape Byerly that raw, and By is meeting him with an I love you, not pulling back or turning his face away. (Metaphorically, because crystal.) ]
And I don’t do it anymore, [ at least on so large a scale, ] because you love me, and I trust you. But you need to trust me, too.
no subject
[ A pause, struggling to compress into words a lifetime of being unloved and left behind, and of not loving and leaving behind, until anything else felt too strange to believe. He doesn’t quite manage. ]
—doing it to myself.
[ And this isn’t what he meant to be talking about, and he shouldn’t have said it. But it’s something, isn’t it, that he can say something he shouldn’t have said, accidentally scrape Byerly that raw, and By is meeting him with an I love you, not pulling back or turning his face away. (Metaphorically, because crystal.) ]
And I don’t do it anymore, [ at least on so large a scale, ] because you love me, and I trust you. But you need to trust me, too.