Chapter 18 #4
He opens me with slickened fingers, and the shock of it makes the breath catch behind my teeth.
He murmurs to me over the rushing of the river and the rustle of the willow.
His shadow falls over me first, then his kisses, like sun dapples on my skin.
His mouth is a circle of warmth, full of words and promises, and his fingers glide, press, twist, glide, press, twist until I learn to want them.
Until I am mad with wanting. I spread myself soul-wide upon the grass for Isidore.
The flush stands bright upon his pale face.
Sweat glimmers at his brow and on his upper lip.
And he watches me as though he cannot look away.
As though I am the brightest star in his vast and dazzling universe.
By the time he presses into me, I am breathless with begging for him, senseless with pleasure.
Our bodies join like our tangled hands, like they were made to fit together, and there’s no pain, no uncertainty, just the closeness of his body, and the rough rhythm of his breath, and the slowly building furnace of our desire.
Isidore sheds his poise like a selkie’s skin. He is savage and glittering and desperate. He kisses me like he wants to drown in my mouth. He fucks me like my body is a shrine he wants to desecrate. And it’s beautiful. He’s beautiful.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Yes, he says, yes. As he pours himself into me.
“Oh Micha, really? All this time? Everything you have done for me was done in hate?” Thomas was silent a moment. “I don’t . . . I can’t . . . understand it. How could you have been so kind, if you hated me?”
Micha shuddered, self-loathing trickling through his veins as thick as poison. “Kind? I’ve never been kind. I’ve done nothing but use you and lie to you.”
“But I lied to you. I lied to you about Edward, and I tried to pretend I did not desire you and that my heart was pure. I am every bit as corrupt as you would have me be.”
“But you’re not,” cried Micha. “That’s the fucking problem. I wish you were, but you’re not.”
“Those are not the words of a man who could hate me.” The sharp edge of pain was fading from Thomas’s voice, but Micha could still not bring himself to face him.
“I am no saint, Micha, and I would not wish to be. I tried to carve myself into the image of one, but you showed me what a hollow man it left me.”
“Please. Please, stop it. I’ve done nothing for you.”
Suddenly, Thomas’s arms were around him.
Micha tried to resist and then to pull away, but he lacked true conviction and his body betrayed him.
He leaned into Thomas as if he could not have stood alone for another second, his head falling back against Thomas’s shoulder.
And when Thomas spoke, his lips moved against the edge of Micha’s cheek like an ever-forming kiss.
“Nobody has ever asked me about my dreams before. Nobody has laughed with me. Nobody has told me the names of the stars.”
“God,” muttered Micha. “Does your life so lack for love?”
“I don’t know. Mostly yes, I think. But I cherish what you have given me, Micha. I adore the world through your eyes.”
“How could you?”
“You see so much beauty. I was blind before I met you.”
Micha shook his head, his hair tangling with Thomas’s, like strands of shadow. “Don’t talk like this. It’s pathetic. This isn’t love, it’s barely the shadow of it.”
But Thomas would not be silent. “You comforted me when I grieved. You tended me when I bled. If these are the actions of a man who hates me, I want nothing of love.”
Micha had thought himself immune to shame, but now he felt its sting as deeply and bitterly as he ever had.
It was strange, and oddly painful, to see the moments he had cast away as carelessly as grains of sand made precious in another’s eyes.
Regret stirred in his heart like ashes. He had wanted Thomas’s love as a thief desires a trinket, a thing coveted but not earned.
He turned slowly in the yielding circle of Thomas’s arms. “I don’t hate you.
I couldn’t. I can’t.” He pressed his face against Thomas’s neck. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
Thomas’s fingers coiled lightly in his hair. “There’s no need to apologise, my dear, dear friend. Can’t you see how much you mean to me? How much you’ve done?”
“But it’s so very little,” whispered Micha brokenly. “And you think it so very much. I wish . . . I wish I was different. I wish I was better.”
“That’s not the first time you’ve said that. I would have you as you are.” Thomas lifted Micha’s head. He slipped a hand between their bodies and let it rest against Micha’s pounding heart. “This is the man who saved me. This is the man I love.”
“But you don’t know the half of it.”
“Then tell me, and I’ll listen, and love you still.”
Micha nodded and met Thomas’s eyes. “I’ll teach you the names of all the stars,” he said unsteadily. “You’ll be so fucking sick of them.”
“Never.” Thomas’s lips curled into the faintest of smiles.
Micha’s fingers clutched at him clumsily.
“You can beat me at chess. All the time. I’ll fill your house with flowers.
I’ll draw you terrible landscapes. I’ll learn how to knit and make you a scarf for the winter.
And I’ll . . . I’ll lie in your arms all night, I’ll wait for you all day, I’ll . . . I’ll—”
“Micha.” Thomas silenced him with the sweetest of kisses. “Micha, please, it’s all right, I understand.”
Micha was breathless from his own babbling. “Understand what?”
Thomas’s smile grew radiant. “That you love me too.”
There was a long silence. Then Micha nodded. “With all my ruined heart.”
Isidore, oh Isidore, oh please, please.
His body is a trembling velvet weight on mine, and I am as wild as a trapped lark. He stirs, heavy-eyed, his hair falling over his face in damp, golden rivulets, smiles, and kisses my helpless mouth.
He turns me onto my side, our two bodies nestled together like a pair of quotation marks in one of the texts I’m supposed to be studying.
His hands idle across my body, ships at the mercy of the wind, trailing a wake of pleasure that gathers on my skin with the sheen of sweat.
I writhe into all his touches, breathe only in gasps and pleas, unravel and am remade.
His teeth graze my shoulder and his hand closes hard about my prick until I’m driving myself mindlessly, shamelessly against his ink-stained fingers, lost in the moment of his making.
He cries out my name and I shatter into starlight in his arms.
Afterwards, when our lips are sore from kissing and our bodies weary from coupling, we lie beneath a sky swirled pink and gold by the setting sun. And Isidore says, come away with me.
And I say yes.
“It all began with Isidore.” Micha sat hunched on the edge of Thomas’s bed. He glanced up with a faint, sardonic smile. “We fell in love at Oxford, and, when he left, I went with him.”
“You travelled together?” After a moment of hesitation, Thomas reached out and took his hand, and Micha did not pull away. His cold fingers lay quiescent, enfolded by Thomas’s.
“Yes. On his money, for I had none. We never intended to return to England. Isidore said we would take a villa in Naples, live out the rest of our days together beneath a kinder sky.” Micha swallowed. “He always loved the sea.”
“Oh Micha, you were so young.”
He nodded. “Boys playing at being men. But he loved me, I know he did. I think that’s what I find hardest to bear.
” Thomas’s fingers stroked and squeezed.
“And, of course, I loved him too. How could I not? He was beautiful, brilliant, extraordinary in many ways.” Again Micha’s eyes sought Thomas’s. “He was not like you.”
“Well, no,” said Thomas gently. “I am none of those things.”
“You see people. Isidore saw only the horizon. I admired him terribly, but it was like staring into the sun. I should have known I couldn’t keep a man like that.”
Thomas frowned, just a little. “It was very wrong of him to make you promises he did not intend to keep.”
If only it had been that simple. A villain, a victim, a betrayal, and a broken heart. “It wasn’t like that. We truly believed we could be together. We thought love was enough.”
“What happened?”
“His father died unexpectedly, and Isidore inherited everything. That was the first time we truly understood the choice we’d made.
It was easy enough for me to give up my world; it was such a narrow thing.
An education. A respectable career. A wife from a good family.
Fuck.” He leaned lightly against Thomas, his head resting against the other man’s shoulder.
“But Isidore, he had ambition, intellect, and a whole shining future waiting for him back in England. It was me or everything else. So we parted ways at Dover. It was the greyest day I’d ever seen, and I had absolutely nothing. ”
“He gave you no assistance?”
Micha’s head jerked up. “I was his lover, not his whore.”
“I didn’t—”
“And, anyway, I was too miserable and too proud to tell him the truth.”
Thomas smiled rather sadly. “That sounds so very like you.”
“It’s not real pride. I lost that a long time ago.”
“Had you no friends to turn to? What of your family?”
“Our friends Isidore and I shed together. And my family I lost when I left Oxford. I should never have told them. I don’t know why I did. Perhaps they would have forgiven me, but I didn’t dare go back.”
Thomas drew in an unsteady breath.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry, it’s absurd, I can’t protect you from your past, but I hate to think of all you must have suffered.”
“Don’t weep for me.” Micha pressed a kiss against Thomas’s cheek to take the harshness from his words. “It carried a heavy punishment, but I saw the world. I knew love. How many people can say that?” He paused. “And it seems to have brought me to you.”
“Yes. You are world enough for me.”