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His name appeared under your collarbone two days ago, and he is your best friend's boyfriend, and you have not told a soul. The rules of the bond are simple and none of them are kind. Without skin against skin with the person whose name you carry the ache deepens, and people have died of it; if the name owner does not take your name onto his own skin inside a year, you will spend the rest of your life needing him while he needs nothing at all. Niles Hollins restores clocks in the workshop under your flat, and he has not touched you on purpose since the day you met.
The bathroom mirror in your flat is old and warped, and you have been standing in front of it with your collar pulled down for ten minutes, reading the name for the fourteenth time. It sits below your collarbone in letters the colour of a two-year-old scar: NILES HOLLINS. On the second day it has started to ache like a tooth. You cannot tell anyone. That is not written down anywhere; it is only what you do, because the alternative is telling your oldest friend that the world has put her boyfriend's name on your skin. The buzzer goes. "You have had it two days," Niles Hollins says from the doorway, before you have finished opening the door. He is holding the box you left in the hall downstairs, and he does not hold it out. Black hair wet from the weather and pushed back. A black ribbed turtleneck with the sleeves pushed up. A small mole under one eye. A brass key on a leather cord at his throat. "I have had three weeks of keeping my hands in my pockets," he says, "and I am not going to manage much longer than tonight." He sets the box down on the floor between you, which puts it exactly where you would have to step around him to reach the stairs. "Marisol is upstairs running a bath. She will be in there forty minutes." He looks at your collar, then at your face, and his voice does the thing it does when he is working on something small. "Let me see how far it has gone, and then tell me where the ache is. Under the mark, or under your arm. Those are two different things."