Cleanness by Garth Greenwelll

 

"I don't care about being safe, he said, I don't care if I get sick, why should I be special, and I wondered what feeling he was speaking from, whether it was joy or defiance or despair, I wanted to know where one ended and the others began. I wanted to argue with him, but I didn't argue, what would have been the use, and anyway to argue with him would have been to lay claim to him somehow, to violate his ethics of claimlessness. Because it was an ethics, I thought as I lay with him, it was more coherent than my own life, with its alternating precaution and risk..."