He’s got the sort of face that looks good from a distance and the closer you look but not inbetween, not in a photograph of a group or at conversation distance. When he’s far away you get the sense of him first, whatever it is he’s got - authority, strength, “he’s not technically nice looking,” Emily said once, “but I guess he doesn’t have to be.” She wasn’t right.

When he’s close to and you’ve looked for the longest time… What is it that’s supposed to make a face something special, appealing? Symmetry, blemish free, everything in it’s right place, everything in proportion - that’s taking a face in as a whole, that’s not it. The longer you look at his, the more it starts to be a hundred different perfect parts and not one, unremarkable, unpleasant whole. Long eyelashes and that dip, between the nose and the lip and detached earlobes and red rimmed eyes. All of them separate, the bricks not the building, bits of a boy.