Paul decided it was time to go home when he realized he'd been sweating for the past hour under three shirts, two sweaters, and a winter coat in August. It wasn't the warmth he craved; it was the crushing pressure around his ribcage, the best approximation of a hug he could find. Every time he visited his parents, he'd have to learn how to tolerate people again by depriving himself of human contact until the desperation for company finally outranked his aversion to it. And he stank to high heaven and needed a proper haircut. Again. It was never a triumphant homecoming, but at least it was one.

Intro

This is a love story.

I know what you'll say; our kind doesn't write those. It's not that we're incapable of feeling love, as a few will tell you. It's that we usually restrain that impulse that leads most people to write sonnets, songs, or long tear-stained letters; they're a waste of our time, because the feeling is understood and silently acknowledged. We write our papers instead. The science we come up with is new; romance is not.

But I never said this was a romance.

Author's note

This is a blog for the story I'm writing for NaNoWriMo. The idea behind the novel is something I came up with for Rob Martello's "Science Fiction and Historical Context" class last spring, but never actually sat down to finish.

The title is The World Is Too Much With Us.