Second Place by Rachel Cusk

 

"The quality that attracted him now was unavailability, the deep moral unavailability of certain people, so that to have them was in effect to steal them and violate—or at least experience—their untouchability. Disgust came easily to him these days, he was filled to the brim with it, so it didn't take much to make him overflow, and he wondered sometimes whether this was the presentation at long last of the bill for his childhood, when he had held his disgust inside himself year after year. Whatever the reason, he said, that quality of untouchability was the antidote to it, to the sickness that overcame him whenever he caught the stench of human familiarity."