shrinemaidens:

I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.

If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.

As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.

“Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.

—Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles