Chapter 18 #6
“Magnificent,” whispered Thomas, the word flaring white-hot like a brand. He glanced up with a rather wicked smile. “‘Did He who made the lamb, make thee?’”
“I don’t bloody care. Take your clothes off.”
Thomas laughed, sat back on his heels, and let the dressing gown slip from his shoulders, pooling on the bed behind him like a rainbow cast from the sky. He started to work on the knot in his cravat.
“Today, if you don’t mind?” Micha reared up like an avenging valet and yanked the linen free from Thomas’s collar. Then he began to tear at the shirt, his hands slipping between skin and fabric until, at last, a very tousled Thomas emerged, shaking the hair from his eyes.
He was pale, even in the glow from the lamp, though rather than making him appear fragile, it gave him a deep clarity, like a single perfect note, played on a perfect instrument.
If Micha’s composition tended towards a certain baroque extravagance, Thomas embodied a pure, and striking, simplicity.
Long-limbed and lean-flanked, he was all precise, clean lines and the subtle promise of strength.
Micha’s fingers trembled too much to be useful, so he braced himself one-handed and brushed the knuckles of the other against the ladder of Thomas’s ribs. His skin was raw silk and sun-warmed marble, flawless, and only lightly stippled by pale, gold-tipped hair.
A flush, like the fairest dawn, rose to the surface of Thomas’s skin. “I’m not—”
“Don’t. I love you.”
Somehow, tugging and pulling, wriggling and laughing, they shed the rest of their clothes, and Thomas, sleek as a seal, slipped naked into Micha’s waiting arms. And, suddenly, everything was skin. They gasped in muddled unison, Micha’s harsh obscenity entangled with Thomas’s softer, gentler groan.
“I have dreamed of this.” Thomas sounded half-delirious as he pressed his body to Micha’s, sliding between his legs, against his chest, moving with him, as sensuous and shameless as a cat in catmint.
“I . . .” Micha found himself breathless, wordless.
Thomas’s erection was nestled against his thigh, insistent enough to stir his own into temporary arousal.
He parted his legs and arched his hips until they met, a rough-sweet clumsy-tender intimacy that made Thomas cry out in startled wonder.
That was its own pleasure, warm as whisky on a winter day, and Micha buried his hands in Thomas’s hair and dragged him into a finesse-less kiss.
Sex had long ago shed its mysteries for Micha.
There was little that had not been done to him over the years, but, even with Isidore, it had not been like this.
He had been an assured, imaginative lover, passionate often, tender sometimes, occasionally cruel, a man of incalculable erotic refinements.
And Thomas was simply Thomas. There was nothing remarkable in the way they touched each other and moved together, but there was no restraint and no uncertainty now, just a deep mutual joy that Micha thought perilously close to a kind of innocence.
It swept across his skin with Thomas’s hands, like the brush of sunlight.
And Micha unravelled, not artfully or even entirely consciously, just blissfully and completely, moaning open-mouthed against Thomas.
Finally, he pushed away, and Thomas pulled back, dazed and dreamy-eyed, bruise-lipped and shaking slightly with arousal.
The play of shadows made his patrician English features stand out more starkly than ever, but Micha knew all their secrets now.
How to coax the stern mouth to playfulness, draw warmth from those plain brown eyes.
“Give me your hand.”
Despite the abrupt order, Thomas did, without hesitation. Micha took it up—that pale gentleman’s hand he had, caught between yearning and despair, once imagined touching him—and closed his lips over the slender fingers, drawing them deep into his mouth.
The breath stuttered out of Thomas in a broken sigh, and his eyes fluttered closed.
“Someday soon,” said Micha, somewhat muffled, “I’m going to do this to your cock.”
Thomas answered only with a delirious noise.
Releasing Thomas’s fingers, Micha nudged him into position between his knees and tipped up his hips, throwing wide his legs.
He would have felt utterly absurd if not for the look on Thomas’s face.
Thomas stroked his free hand up the inside of Micha’s thigh, not quite gently, and the intimacy of the touch, the hint of possession, made Micha’s heart thud hard with instinctive pleasure.
“Here.” Micha seemed to have lost the ability to converse in more than jerky monosyllables. “Like this.” He spread himself and pressed Thomas’s fingers awkwardly to the entrance of his body.
“Will I hurt you?”
“No.”
But, in this, Thomas would not be controlled. He twisted Micha’s hand free from his wrist and did the deed himself, his damp fingers fluting so lightly over the muscle that it made Micha writhe in helpless anticipation.
“Fuck’s sake.” Micha’s head tossed restlessly against the covers. “I want to feel y—”
The words were consumed in a cry as Thomas parted him with deft fingers and pushed inside.
There was little to feel, the laudanum saw to that, but there was still the warm stretch, and the pressure, and the fact it was Thomas, to light tiny sparks behind Micha’s eyes.
He rocked himself against the fingers inside him, wanting more, far more. Wanting everything.
“I could spend just watching you do that,” breathed Thomas.
“Well don’t.”
Thomas experimentally curled his fingers upwards, and the tiny sparks ignited into a silver-white inferno.
“Ahh, fuck, oh fuck.” Micha clawed at the covers, then at Thomas, grabbed for his hand and pulled it away, hard enough to feel the shock of withdrawal. He flipped onto his stomach, twisting his head so he could still see Thomas over one shoulder. “Like this.”
Thomas covered him, smooth heat and supple strength, and Micha just . . . groaned. Ground his hips back. And Thomas answered with a kiss, pressed sweetly into the nape of his neck. A ripple of response ran all the way down Micha’s spine.
Micha drew in a sobbing breath of sheer, frantic need. “Please. Will you fucking . . . please.”
Thomas’s hands moved over him, soothing his burning, trembling flesh, and Micha dropped his head onto his folded arms, lost in the waiting and the wanting.
Then came the flutter of Thomas’s fingers and the darker, deeper pressure of his cock.
Micha hissed out something that might have been “yes,” struggled onto his knees, and shoved back hard.
A brightness that might once have been pain flashed briefly across his vision, but it stirred his dulled senses, and that was, in itself, a kind of pleasure.
Thomas steadied him by the hips, his ragged breath gusting across Micha’s skin in harsh benediction, but he would not move.
Micha thrashed futilely, trying to force his own body’s yielding, incoherent obscenities tumbling from his lips.
Thomas leaned over him, running kisses and love words up and down his spine like climbing roses until the tension went out of him.
Thomas’s hands pressed Micha flat, and then came the muted burn and the rough-smooth glide of Thomas coming all the way into him.
Thomas managed something that might have been Micha’s name, transformed into a breathless prayer.
And Micha spread his legs and arched his back, ceding himself to Thomas, in this, as in everything.
He turned, as best he could, just enough to see Thomas’s face, strained and flushed with ecstasy, the slender muscles standing out on his upper arms as he braced himself above Micha.
His eyes snapped open as though in answer, and, for a moment, there was nothing but the act of looking, their eyes and bodies locked together, like pieces of pattern, links upon a chain.
Then Thomas caught him under the chin and kissed him, their mouths jostling clumsily, words and breath and tongues tangling together into a profane and private glossolalia.
At last, when shivers were chasing each other across Micha’s skin and his every breath was a smothered moan, Thomas released him.
His hands covered Micha’s where they were clutching frantically at the coverlet and smoothed them out, spreading the fingers wide so Thomas could interweave his own between them.
Hesitantly at first, and then with growing assurance, he began to move, claiming Micha’s body with thorough and powerful tenderness, just as he had kissed him that day in the woods near the white horse.
Their mouths found each other again and clung like their hands.
The ghosts of physical pleasure stirred shyly from within the prison of Micha’s flesh, but love was its own, still wilder bliss.
And that was Thomas, all Thomas, only Thomas.
Thomas’s body driving into his, Thomas’s tongue deep within his mouth, Thomas’s fingers curled around his own.
The words themselves seemed meaningless.
They were written into his skin and upon his soul, with every touch, and every breath.
Thomas’s thrusts were turning as ragged as his kisses, his body heaving with incipient culmination. And Micha wanted the other man’s pleasure, as desperately as though it was his own he sought. Something given, taken, shared. And perfect.
“Please,” he gasped, rough against Thomas’s mouth. “Come for me. In me.”
Thomas’s fingers tightened on Micha’s, a shudder shook him, and then his head dropped into the crook of Micha’s shoulder as he surrendered himself to the moment.
Micha wished he could have watched his face, but he felt the echo through his own body and in Thomas’s muffled moans.
Thomas was a damp, heavy weight, but Micha welcomed the closeness and the sweat-studded heat that blossomed between their still-joined bodies.