They never see me. Never. I think it is because I am always standing beside you. I suppose you see me when they cannot only because you cannot be blinded by your own beauty. Some would say you are, and call you vain and arrogant, but I know otherwise. With all your beauty and charm, you draw the eye; next to your brilliance, anyone else would appear dim and dull and ugly, and so I do. I am only a man, as you show me so often, for I bleed - often at your whims. But you, Sydney, are...
No, you are a man also. I have seen you bleed as well, many times, even if your skin never bears a scar. You eat, you breathe, you sleep just as the rest of us do. But you have been touched by the gods, and you became something more than an ordinary man.
That touch of the gods... I can understand why so many have offered their bodies to you. To touch you is to touch what the gods touched, to draw close to that divinity and power. Even if not for your beauty, you are what every man and woman has craved since time began - a taste of omnipotence, the attention of something greater than themselves. I know this because I know man, and I know that it is a wretched, greedy species. Yes, I know this because I am the same.
...But more than the part of you that was touched by the gods, Sydney... I find divinity in the part of you that is still man. For I was long without the gods, and even while I doubted the claims that you were something beyond mortal, still I desired you. When I touch that part of you that is still unmistakably man - when I coax those deep, quiet sounds from the back of your throat, when I make you shiver - I am touching what the gods could not reach. I am touching you, and unlike the others who seek kinship with the gods by touching what they have touched, I become like the gods in that like them, I touch you. That is as close to divinity as I could ever hope to come.