I'm writing this because it's two o'clock in the morning and you aren't here. There's that sort of emptiness that comes when you've just finished something all-consuming, and don't quite know what to do with yourself, but can't just go off and sleep.

I couldn't sleep. Not now. Not with you still in my brain -- your voice. I've been tangling myself in that voice for hours. And you're not here to tell me to stop.

And then the speech is finished, and you're gone. I don't know if you'll be surprised to hear this, but there's something strangely disappointing in finishing, as though you've got nothing left. Like you said in the car the night we won -- "What do we do now, Stephen?" -- only without an answer. But it isn't just the end of the speech, because finishing it means I've lost you. I can bring up your ghost as long as I'm writing your words, words for your tongue to wrap around, for you to touch with your lips -- but then you disappear.

And all I'm left with is this body of mine, because my mind has just made love to yours about seventeen different ways, and your body is missing, so there's very little left to do.

I have the general impression that when people reminisce about sex, they tend to be anecdotal. "Remember the time when..." "the best I've ever had was..." "there was this bloke I slept with once who..." "that time you did..." I could never understand that. Details of you emerge only rarely, and I couldn't put them in a timeline, or craft them into a narrative. When I remember you, it's more as though I'm suddenly awash with the memory of a thousand sensations, simultaneously. I don't remember the course of any one night -- what you said, what I did then, what happened next -- but I can recall with visceral closeness the lingering trace of your hand on my back, the murmur in your throat as I kiss it, the exposed deepness of your eyes. I love that the cameras never see that expression.

I need the things the camera never sees. God, you have to understand that. Sometimes I'm afraid you don't, that you give me the same bloody tease you give all of them, and then you wonder why it feels cheap when I take you to bed afterwards. Sometimes it's wonderful that way, the simplest parts of us, just to assure you that it still works, and to give me something to look at. But there's got to be something of you that belongs only to me -- I'm too jealous for there not to be. Something to fill the empty space after we finish the speech.

There are occasionally details I remember. Probably not the ones you'd expect. The first "I love you" is gone, but I do remember your hand in my hair as you whispered, "Love me?" -- you'd never asked before. The question until then was whether you could love, not whether you wanted -- whether you needed me to love you, whether it mattered one bit to you if I did. Until then, your fervent I love yous and I want yous and God, Stephen, it's always been yous...they were all taken for granted. As though they were part of the act. Part of the way to get me to want you.

Which I did. Even at the beginning, when it was all relatively cheap and simple and straightforward -- beautiful man who loves being watched by a man who loves to watch him. Even then, being around you got me unbelievably high in a way that not just any beautiful man could do. I used to hate you for that. I used to be absolutely sick over it. It was a surrender, that sort of obsession.

But for you, that was the easy bit. The seduction is what you're good at, and it's what you love -- but if you wake up the next morning, and he's still there, that's when you start to drown.

And I know where that comes from, from years of needing to bury this thing and smile at your wife in public, from watching your ex-boyfriend self-destruct in front of you and not being able to do anything about it without having it all exposed. It must have been torture for you -- to love being looked at by men, and by cameras, and knowing you could only have one in public. And you chose the cameras, ultimately, not because their eyes were bigger but because they let you talk to them about making people's lives better. I love that about you.

But it meant you needed to hate the fact that you loved something. Something that makes you come alive. And at about the time when I first pinned you against the wall of your office and pulled your clothes off you, you were beginning to realize, on your own, that you might as well hate the fact that you need to breathe. You were beginning to realize that somewhere under all the ways you had used it to try to kill yourself, there was a bit of it that refused to go away that was giving you life. And that was the first time you could believe it wasn't your tragic failing.

You say you would never have made peace with it, would have never told Sarah what she had known when she married you and never told you, if it hadn't been for me. I don't believe you. I hated seeing her face when you told her, how it didn't change, and how she'd left for a week after that and you thought she wasn't coming back, and what you said to me was, " This is the end of me -- they'll get me for this," when what I wanted you to say was, "Oh, my God, what have I done?" It's strange -- they all think I'm the political obsessive.

She didn't deserve it. You weren't entirely to blame, but she deserved better. And when you say that it was I that liberated you, that means I'm also responsible for what we did to Sarah. You lied to yourself, Nick, I never did that for you. And I may have, through those early nights that seemed so simple and irresistible, brought you to a place where you were no longer capable of separating your two selves, but I never forced you. Nobody made you unbutton your shirt and bring my hand to run down your stomach, nobody made you pull me down on top of your desk and unfasten my belt for me, nobody forced you to look up at me with blissful eyes and flushed cheeks and whisper, "Don't just go home now."

So I suppose I do remember details.

And that was years ago.

What for me was the relief -- seeing you stumble, being the one to stand you up again -- was to you the terror. And a bit of me will always rejoice in that, because it came after months of going to bed with a man who made me helpless with his very competence. You needed me when Sarah left, and you needed me when she came back, and you needed me when it terrified you that you needed me. And you closed your eyes and stretched out against my pillows and whispered, "You're amazing..." and for you that was a sign that we would survive. But I'd known long before, and that night was the result of my knowing. Because I had, in some way, triumphed over you, and that night was your surrender. If it was the sex that persuaded you, it was the sex that vindicated what I already knew. Your conversion was my sacrament.

You slept with your head on my chest that night. And your fingers wrapped around mine.

And that was years ago, too. And I don't know why I'm still writing, except that it hurts to not be touching you.

And now, I can't remember not knowing that you were mine, not knowing all the secret things, not seeing the lines of your skin and hearing the shades of your voice that none of the cameras get to see. Now, I can't imagine believing that this incredible thing we've made could fall down at any second, or that I might have to write my life without you at its core.

But none of this will make you appear at my desk.

So I will create you. Not just your voice, now, that's been enough for the evening but it won't do on the night. Just as I need words when your body is present, I need your body with me now, to remind me that you are real. If your body isn't part of this, if this time spent with you vanishes when you appear, then I have nothing of reality to cling to when I can't see or touch you. I need to believe that this time with you is part of us.

And now is when the details fail me. I can't see you, I can only feel some echo of you, some trace you've left in my skin. I can be surrounded by you, but I can't look at you. You've brought me inside the picture I used to watch, and I can't breathe.

I know you'll read the speech once more on the way over, and I want to write for you every detail of what will happen when it's done, and staple it to the back. I'm waiting for you when you return, I've watched you and my words, staring at you on the television like a million other people, almost afraid of how publicly I can watch you. But you're back now, behind the half dozen doors between your desk and the outside, past secretaries and bobbies and public tour groups. The eye of the storm is quiet and still, and nobody will open the door unless you let them.

It's a brilliant idea, because that's what I do -- I write for you, I write your life.

But that was at the beginning, when it was all so dichotomous and symbolic, and we hadn't come alive yet. It's in the mess that I find you, and myself, and the only semblance of love I've ever had. So the beautiful thing, the neat and symbolic thing, won't come. I've tried. There were a million years between some of those last few paragraphs, while I tried.

What's coming back to me, slowly, is Greece.

One of the first warm days after that wretched winter, with Daniel resigning, and Sarah, and you vanishing in the middle of the night.

You woke me at some god-awful early hour, and your hair was wet and you smelled of salt, and you looked like you'd just seen the beatific vision. You have to remember this -- you brought me outside, and around the back of the hotel to the beach, and then around this little spit of land to a spot where the water was shallow and there were trees hanging over it.

You tasted like the water. And you didn't talk about cameras. And when I kissed you back, and dug my fingertips into your shoulderblades, you didn't pull away, or look about -- you melted against me, your lips parted against mine, your hands trailing down the sides of my hips.

I remember drops of water on your eyelashes.

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