Patrick smiled and he kissed George's hair. "Yeah, I know what you mean there. I know what I did when I was alone. And the answer is 'nothing good'."

He was silent for a moment and then he said, "sometimes I worry that there might have been something like that in my past and I just can't remember it. Like when I was a slave. But my master had lots of female slaves for that, which is one of the reasons I am still so against marriage. The owners could marry their slaves and then-" Patrick shook his head, content to stop talking about that. "I know there was something with another slave but to be honest I was a teenager and I was trapped in a land surrounded by strangers. I was just glad to be touched in a way that didn't involve whips."