This isn’t love, Valens told himself. He knew about love, having seen it at work among his friends and people around him. Love was altogether more predatory. It was concerned with pursuit, capture, enjoyment; it was caused by beauty, the way raw red skin is caused by the sun; it was an appetite, like hunger or thirst, a physical discomfort that tortured you until it was satisfied. That, he knew from her letters, was how she felt about Orsea – how they felt about each other – and so this couldn’t be love, in which case it could only be friendship; shared interests, an instructive comparision of perspectives, a meeting of minds, a pooling of resources. [ … ] Not love, obviously. Different. Better…

Devices & Desires