There is a particular kind of confession that does not feel like a confession at all until the words leave your mouth. It sits in the back of the throat for years, disguised as a passing thought, a fleeting image, a scene that flickers through the mind in the dark hours before sleep and is gone by morning. I had one of those. It had been with me since long before Leo, long before Klaus, long before the street corner and the strangers and the cold November rain. It was a fantasy I had never spoken aloud, not because it was the darkest thing I carried, but because it seemed impossible. A door that could never be opened. A hunger that could never be fed.

But Leo had taught me that no hunger was too strange to speak. No desire was too dark to name. And so, on a quiet evening in late January, with the snow falling thick and silent outside the tall windows of our studio, I told him.