I'm always a bit wary about giving a definite visual of what I think characters look like, because I feel it's really important not to have your own mental pictures screwed with...

...that said, my friend Ellie is a goddamn genius so I'm posting this (with permission) anyway. Feel free to disregard ;)

The kid follows Lindsay into the living room after he's calmed down a bit, comes over to sit on the arm of his chair and reaches out to play with his hair. Lindsay ducks away, muttering, "Get off!" and Valentine does as he's told amiably enough, but he's still perched there on the arm watching him. Lindsay raises his eyebrows and waits. When there's still nothing, just a staring-contest, he prompts him: "Well?"

"Well what?"

"What do you want?"

"Are you gonna fuck me or not?"

"Can't," Lindsay says. He starts flicking through the cable channels to cover up how flustered he suddenly feels. "Haven't got any condoms."

"So?"

"What do you mean so?"

"I don't mind."

"I mind. Christ only knows where you've been, you could be crawling."

"So could you."

"How dare you?"

"You started it." After a second, he reaches out to brush his fingers through Lindsay's hair again, and again Lindsay slaps his hand away. "Oh, come on. I'm clean, I swear."

"And why should I believe that?"

"Cos I'm asking you to?" He's making it sound like he thinks he's the reasonable one, like Lindsay's a boring old bastard who doesn't know how to have fun, and that's so stupid. "Just... you're a fucking career criminal, ain't you? Take some risks."

"And catch everything you've risked with your other tricks? I don't think so."

"Fucking hell," the kid mutters under his breath. He springs up off the armchair to stand in front of Lindsay, spreading his arms slightly like a gameshow dollybird presenting the prizes, only he is the prize. "I'm in perfect health. Look at me. I'm amazing. Look at me, Mr. Brown, and tell me honestly, do you really think I ain't fussy about whose grubby hands touch me?"

Stockholm Syndrome, Chapter 4

I know I've been promising proper Kindle/etc formatted files for ages and haven't got around to finishing them yet because of various computer crashes and general laziness, but New Year's Resolution is "stop being such a lazy apathetic fucker" so I'm really hoping to get them reformatted completely within the next couple of months. It's taking a while because I lost the original Word files and I'm too computer-stupid to know if there's any other way of getting the content from pdf to doc except copy/pasting and manually sorting out all the screwed up line breaks and stuff. I don't mind really, it's an excuse to do minor edits along the way, but it's pretty long-winded. I'd like to get them done by Valentine's Day ;) (because there's no such thing as Lindsay Day) but that's probably a bit optimistic.

Whenever it happens, I'll email the files for free to anyone who had to get the less-than-ideal versions. I had no idea they were such a pain in the arse to read on other devices, it was just an easy tickybox on Lulu to offer the pdf source files as downloads. Sorry I'm such a luddite :P