Chapter 13 #3
Micha’s hands released his arms—blood returning in a pricklish flood—and then he was dragging apart the fastenings of Thomas’s shirt, and Thomas was shipwrecked all over again.
At first, it felt almost an assault, just heat and pleasure in near-unbearable waves, Micha’s mouth and hands sweeping over Thomas’s untouched body, claiming and inflaming.
And Thomas writhed and shuddered under him, each panting breath a shallow moan, as he gave himself to Micha, piece by piece, gasp by gasp, until the other man suddenly muttered something inaudible, tumbled down against Thomas, and kissed him hard enough that Thomas tasted copper.
The urgency of Micha’s body driving against his was such a new and raw kind of sensation that Thomas actually cried out—loud enough to startle a bird from where it must have been resting in the branches of a nearby tree.
It took to the sky in a rustle of wings, streaking across his vision, the moment Micha took his mouth.
Eventually they broke apart, and Micha shoved him back down amongst the leaves.
His kisses spilled from Thomas’s lips, down across his neck and torso, scattering bliss wildly and unbearably in their wake.
And Thomas felt . . . unlike himself, transformed beneath Micha’s touch into someone desirable and desired, and he thought he might be just about dying with the need for Micha, and for this.
Thomas’s fingers curled heedlessly, clutching at nothing but crumbling leaves and grass.
He feared he could run mad on the sheer rapture of it all.
His body, at least, seemed to understand, on some ancient, fundamental instinct, how to surrender itself, to lips and hands and the promises of pleasures to come, as he had once surrendered all his dreams to duty.
Life had taught Thomas control. Now he was learning how to abandon it.
Not a dignified lesson, but perhaps the most joyous.
For Micha, he came apart, everything he was and everything he knew transformed into panting desire and frantic urgency, and, with the shreds of reason he had left to him, he called it paradise.
“Oh God,” gasped Thomas, the words flying from him, as heedless as swallows in springtime.
Micha froze. “Don’t say his fucking name.” A pause. “Say mine.”
“Micha.” Uncertain what Micha wanted from him, Thomas had left his arms spread where they had been pinned.
He was desperate to reach out to his lover, but Micha had told him not to touch.
So, instead, he tried to put it all in his voice, all the yearning and all the wonder.
All the unleashed wantings he was only beginning to discover. “Oh Micha.”
Crouched over him like this, Micha seemed an extraordinary being, a wildling of shadow and fire, mercurial, cruel, tender, and beautiful.
It struck Thomas as rather incredible, incredible and humbling, that he—the youngest, dullest, and shyest of all his father’s children—could be wanted by such a man.
Micha, clumsy again, made an abrupt, convulsive movement.
His hand pressed downwards, beneath the waistband of Thomas’s trousers and, fumblingly, beneath his drawers, until it curled around Thomas’s stiff and straining cock.
Thomas’s body ignited into shuddering ecstasy, and he babbled out Micha’s name, repeated like the most heartfelt prayer he had ever uttered.
It was a searing kind of bliss, too beautiful and too terrible for shame, and that was all it took. The embrace of Micha’s hand.
Thomas threw back his head, the distant sky, bluer than any sky had ever been, the purity of it filling his eyes like tears.
“Oh Micha . . . I . . . can’t . . .” His back arched, he thrust his cock against Micha, and, in one wild moment, as sudden as summer lightning, Thomas came.
It was not an experience unknown to him, but whatever he had felt of it before was mere shadows.
He was too gloriously lost in his own body for anything close to thought, but his heart instinctively understood the difference—this was not merely pleasure, it was given pleasure, the kindest, sweetest gift he had ever received, and from the most extraordinary man.
His spinning world had found again its centre, and Thomas, no longer lost, felt safe and whole again.
Micha, his eyes as blank as glass, caught Thomas’s spendings in his hand before he pulled abruptly away.
Thomas fell back, gasping, still pleasure-stricken though Micha no longer touched him, and waited for his breathing to steady, his heart to slow, and the world to return to some semblance of normality.
But, no, his dazed eyes beheld the brightest sky, the reddest trees.
And the light came down through the branches like spears of gold, as though it wanted to build a pagan temple to their desires.
Micha had half-turned away, but Thomas, heedless suddenly of his earlier remonstrance, caught him in his arms and pulled him back down, so he could drown the last shudders of the ecstasy Micha had given him in the man’s skin.
Micha’s body was cold and unresponsive, except between his legs, where his cock burned and throbbed against Thomas’s hip. Thomas slipped a hand between them, wanting to give Micha what Micha had just given him.
“No.” Micha sounded so ferocious that Thomas immediately drew back.
Though he still refused to be touched, Micha did not pull away, so Thomas accepted that as well, whatever it meant, simply glad for Micha, as he was.
The violence of completion was fading from his flesh.
He sighed, shivered, bliss-wrung, grateful, and fragile.
His beauty-dazed eyes blurred with a sheen of moisture, hastily blinked back, and he gave a shaky laugh.
“You must think me the most callow of lovers. I can only apologise for . . .” Thomas did not quite dare to give the act a name “. . . so gracelessly upon your hand.” He tried again for mirth, but it was hard to know how laughter sounded when his breath was suddenly so uncertain.
“Perhaps I am in need of practice . . .” It was no use.
He swallowed hard, but his eyes felt as painful as if knives had gathered in the corners.
When the first tears escaped, if not for the shame that he wept, it could have almost been relief.
Micha jerked away from him as if scalded by their closeness. “Oh no. Don’t do that. Don’t you fucking dare.”
Thomas sat up, trying to smother tears on his fingertips. “I’m so sorry.”
Micha was kneeling on the leaves, like a vanquished knight, his head bowed to conceal his expression. “Look,” he muttered. “It was just frigging. I’m sure God wouldn’t count it.”
“No,” said Thomas hastily. “No. That is not what occasioned this foolishness. It was simply . . . the moment . . . I suppose one release led to another.” It was too embarrassing even for words.
He hid his face in his hands. “Please forgive me. My experience of these matters is limited, but I am more than reasonably certain that this is not the usual aftermath of physical intimacy.”
Micha snorted. “You’d be surprised.” Then he went on, in no kinder a tone, “But what is the matter with you, if not religious hypocrisy?”
Thomas moved across the leaves until he was kneeling as Micha knelt.
He reached out a hand and, with careful, gentle fingers, lifted Micha’s chin so that he had to look at him.
“Micha, you must believe me when I tell you I have no guilt for this. No shame. I cannot. I can only thank you, with all my heart and soul.”
Micha’s eyes skittered away. “All right, all right. Calm down. It’s sex, not the creation of the world.”
“Yes, but I had no idea it would be like this.”
“Wait. What? You’ve never . . . ?”
Thomas shook his head. “I have always tried to live in accordance with my profession. Until I met you, I did not even realise I was made this way.” Micha was staring at him with utter incomprehension, so he kept on talking. “And it has been quite the loneliest discovery I have ever made.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I felt so set apart. So lost. Knowing there was a part of me, an unchangeable part of me, that would make others hate me. You must know how terrifying that is. But today you showed me it need not be so.” He smiled into Micha’s frowning face.
“I can’t begin to tell you how it feels to know that you are as I am. And that you like me too.”
Micha dragged his hands out of Thomas’s clasp and sprawled backwards on the leaves, laughing. It was not a happy sound.
Thomas leaned over him. “Did I say something odd?”
But Micha kept on laughing, his whole body shaking with it. “Forget it,” he said finally, somewhat breathlessly. “It’s nothing.”
Since Micha seemed disinclined to move, Thomas lowered himself onto an elbow at Micha’s side.
“What are you staring at?”
Thomas flushed. “Just at you. I . . . I think you’re very beautiful.”
“Stop that. We fucked. There’s no need to get sentimental over it.
” But then Micha rolled over so that his position mirrored Thomas’s.
They were face-to-face, breath-to-breath.
And, after a moment, he slid a hand lightly over Thomas’s flank and left it resting there.
“It would have been different if I’d known. You should have said.”
“I had no opportunity with your mouth on mine,” said Thomas primly, earning a sour look from Micha. “Besides,” he added, his voice softening, “it was perfect. And you are perfect.”
“You’ve no metric to judge.”
“I need none. I know.”
“You’re an idiot.”
Thomas risked putting a hand over Micha’s hand, and, although Micha glared at it, he did not shake it off. “How remarkable,” Thomas murmured, “that in the vastness of the world, we should find each other. Some benevolence must have guided us together.”
“I don’t know about benevolence.”
“It still feels like a miracle to me.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
They were silent for a while. Thomas had no awareness of moving, and he certainly did not see Micha do so, but, somehow, their bodies slipped together. His head found Micha’s shoulder. Their legs became entangled, their hands intertwined.
“How long have you known?” asked Thomas.
“You mean about me or about you?”
“Both.”
“You, awhile now. Me, forever. Since I was eighteen at least.”
“Since you were eighteen. My word, that is forever.”
“I wish people would stop teasing me about my age. It’s not funny.”
“Do you know . . . I mean . . . are there . . . many . . .” Thomas made an uncertain gesture.
“Buggers?” offered Micha. “Mandrakes? Sodomites? Nancies? Perverts?”
“Men who love men.”
“Plenty.”
“How wonderful.”
Micha sneered. “Why, do you want to fuck them too?”
“No, of course not. I just find it comforting to know they’re there.”
“Oh yes, you and your lonely universe.”
“Mock all you wish.” Thomas smiled dreamily and found himself unexpectedly rewarded by a trace of warmth in Micha’s eyes. “I am too happy to mind.”
“If you ask me, the universe is a bit too bloody crowded.”
Thomas tucked his head beneath Micha’s chin, his gaze drifting over his shoulder to the wood that seemed to him, now, an enchanted place. “Not here.”
“No,” agreed Micha, “not here.”
Thomas closed his eyes, letting physical languor and the warmth of Micha pressed against him lull him into a drifting state that was not quite sleep.
“Micha,” he murmured, minutes, years, or lifetimes later, “can I ask you something?”
Micha’s eyes fluttered open. This close to him, Thomas could see greenish flecks floating deep in his irises. “You seem hell-bent on it.”
“Do you remember when you were ill, and you told me that my dreams were terrible?”
“I remember.”
“You never did tell me yours.”
Micha was silent. His body tensed against Thomas. “I don’t have any.”
“But you must have once.”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
Micha huffed out a sigh. “It’s stupid. It was always stupid.”
“No more ridiculous, surely, than a priest who wishes to see deserts and lie with men.”
“You could lie with a man in the desert. That might bring about the apocalypse.”
Thomas laughed. He reached out a hand and let Micha’s curls run through his fingers. They twisted there like little snakes, as though they wanted to keep him captive. “Please. I won’t insist. But I would like to know something of you.”
“Access to my body does not give you any right to my heart.”
“Are they not one and the same?”
“No.”
“As you wish.”
Thomas closed his eyes again and let the subject die. Unexpectedly, he felt Micha’s lips on his.
“I wanted,” whispered Micha, against his mouth, “I wanted . . . to be someone to come home to. That’s all.”