Chapter 18 #7
Thomas, however, was too considerate to linger like that for long. He slipped free of Micha and collapsed onto his side, still breathing hard. Micha tucked his hands beneath his chin and rested a cheek on them, feeling well loved and languid.
Thomas reached out and smoothed the heavy curls that fell across Micha’s brow. “Oh Micha.”
“Well,” he returned softly, “now we’re both damned.”
Thomas did not flinch, did not stop touching him. “No, my love, that was a sacrament, not a sin.”
Micha let his suddenly heavy eyes fall briefly closed. “If that’s what you need to believe.”
“We are fashioned in His image, Micha. To love each other is the most intimate communion with Him.”
“Can we leave God out of it for once?”
“I’m sorry.”
Micha sighed. “It’s like we’re having some kind of divine ménage à trois.”
“There’s only you in my eyes, in my heart.” Thomas’s fingers caressed his cheek, the edge of his jaw, warmth trailing in their wake.
Micha’s eyes drifted closed again, and, when he spoke, there was too much dreamy pleasure in his voice for his words to have any sting. “I thought He was supposed to be a jealous God.”
“It’s all connected. There is no shame in love.” Micha felt motion beside him. And Thomas’s hands moving between his legs, cleaning him with . . . something. He blinked. “That better not be my shirt.”
“Mine, I think. And not likely wearable, regardless, since you tore it off me.”
Micha smiled, just a little, feeling absurd and impossibly content, even knowing the hell that waited for him on the other side of dawn.
Thomas cast the shirt aside and lay down again, elegantly and unselfconsciously naked, his sweat-sheened skin shining as softly as the moon.
Micha hesitated a moment and then sidled closer.
He put his head on Thomas’s chest, over his steadily beating heart, and Thomas slipped an arm around him, drawing him closer still.
For a long time, they were silent.
Thomas’s fingertips traced idle curlicues over Micha’s back. “That was beautiful, Micha.”
“Oh, yes, sodomy’s great. No wonder they keep outlawing it.”
“You know”—Thomas’s eyes flared with sudden mirth—“your manners improve considerably during coitus.”
“My what?”
“You become quite polite, if insistent.”
“Fuck off.” Thomas laughed, and the sound wrapped itself around Micha’s heart like Mayday ribbons. “It’s bad form to mock a man for the things he says in the heat of the moment.”
“I would never mock you.”
“What’s this then?”
“Teasing. And, besides, I liked it. I liked it very well indeed.”
Micha felt heat rise to his cheeks again. “So did I.”
Silence claimed them once more. The lamp had burned low.
The room filled up with shadows. Outside, the world was dark and cold, sunrise a still too-distant promise, yet the possibility of morning pressed against Micha’s heart, heavy as an iron bar.
He was tired, but he feared sleeping and the loss of these few scant hours.
“Don’t stop touching me.” His voice broke the stillness like a stone dropped into a well. “Please.”
Thomas’s arms tightened around him. Their legs entwined. The fingers that had so lightly caressed Micha’s skin became a palm instead, moving across his back as strong and inevitable as waves against the shore.
But it was not enough. He was falling helplessly into the future. “Thomas. What . . . what will become of us?”
There was a pause. “What do you mean? I will not abandon you, as Isidore did.”
Micha sighed. “He didn’t abandon me. I just became a choice he couldn’t make. Is it so different for you?”
Something Micha could not quite interpret flickered across Thomas’s face. “You know,” he said softly, “the strange thing is that I feel closer to God than I ever have, in ways I would never have understood before we met. But I can’t remain a priest. Not now.”
“Because of me?”
“Because of me. It wouldn’t feel right, attempting to guide others to the grace of God, when I would be seen as excluded from it.”
For someone who had felt so little for so long, Micha was now feeling far too much. And much of it was guilt. Shame. Terrible relief that Thomas would still be his. “There’s nothing in the Bible against what we are, you know. Isidore told me.”
“He’s not wrong,” agreed Thomas. “And neither are we. But I would be living in sin, not because we’re both men, but because . . .”
“Because we’re violating the sacred covenant of marriage, I know.”
“I’d marry you in a heartbeat, Micha. If I could.”
Micha tried to laugh it off. It was, after all, an impossibility and, therefore, not worth squandering either thought or dreams upon.
But it was something that Isidore—either too practical or less romantic than he seemed—had never said to him, never offered.
Even as an impossible dream. “Fuck,” he said.
“I hate that you have to give up everything just to be with me.”
“Not everything. I mean”—Thomas gave a pained smile—“in the spirit of honesty, I’ve never been much of a priest.”
“That’s not true.” The modes of giving comfort had long since been lost to Micha. But he was rediscovering them now. For Thomas. “I think you’re so concerned with being a priest that you forget to be a man. Or a human being rather.”
“But it’s my job to—”
“To obliterate yourself?” Micha asked sharply. “To strip away all that’s good and kind and true in you in order to fulfil some duty, meet some standard, that only you decided was right or necessary?”
“Is that how you see it?”
Micha shrugged. “Am I wrong?”
“No.” It was a simple admission, but the sorrow of it struck what remained of Micha’s heart. “I think I thought that if I could become the priest I was supposed to be, it would make up for . . . for all that was lacking in me.”
“There’s nothing lacking in you.”
Thomas cupped Micha’s face gently. “With you, I can almost believe it. But there’s no escaping the fact I’m a poor son. A poor brother. And even by your reckoning, I’m a poor priest.”
“That’s my point, though,” Micha protested. “You don’t have to be. You love it here. And you love your parishioners—no matter how much you tell yourself you shouldn’t.”
“That’s immaterial. I can’t serve them and lie to them. Nor will I give you up.”
Micha had heard such promises before. What was wrong with him that—even after everything—he ached so deeply to believe them? “Then what do we do?”
“We’ll need to stay here awhile. Until you’re free of your laudanum dependency. Until I’ve put my affairs in order and done what I can for Nettlefield.”
Micha had heard promises like these too. Promises that were little more than compromises. But he just nodded. “And after?”
“Whatever we want. Perhaps”—and here Thomas offered a sweet, uncertain smile—“I will finally see my desert. And you could show me Venice. Or Prague. Granada. The whole world.”
“And while I’m showing you the whole world, how do we live?”
“I have a small inheritance from my mother’s side of the family, and I’m sure I could supplement it with teaching or . . . or . . . something.”
“But what will I do?”
“Again, whatever you want. Draw. Keep house. Take in an urchin.”
Micha said nothing and hid his face against Thomas. He knew he was making exactly the same mistakes all over again—trusting everything to love, and the vaguest of hopes—but he lacked any power to turn away from it.
“We’ll be fine,” said Thomas, sounding like he meant it. And then, teasingly, “Are you not better than a sparrow?”
But Micha was not in a humour to be teased. “For fuck’s sake, God isn’t going to provide for two sodomites on the run.”
“The Lord loves the lost, and we’ll provide for each other. I believe in that. I believe in you.”
“I wish I believed in myself,” Micha muttered. “And I wish . . . I wish we had no future.”
Thomas drew in a sharp breath. “How can you say that?”
“No, I mean. Not because I don’t want one. But because it’s complicated and uncertain. I don’t know who I’ll be without opium. Even assuming I can give it up. You’ll be an exile, from your family and your friends, and even your God. How can we—”
“Stop.” Thomas untangled himself from Micha, rolling him onto his back. And all Micha did was moan as Thomas’s long, lithe body stretched out, hot and perfect, over him. Thomas folded Micha’s hands together and pinned them gently above his head. “Those are questions for tomorrow.”
“I’m scared of tomorrow,” Micha admitted, wrenchingly. “Tomorrows have never been particularly good to me.”
“Then let’s make now last for as long as we can.”
“How?”
“Tell me about Venice again.” Thomas released Micha’s wrists, but it was only to draw him into an embrace. And they held each other, lovers trying to hold the night as well. “I always love hearing you talk.”
Micha lifted his head, pushing the hair back from where it clumped over his brow.
His memories had lived inside him, neglected things summoned only by opium, for so long that he did not really know how to begin to share them.
But he wanted to please Thomas, and to give him something simply because he had asked for it.
“I . . . I don’t . . .” he began and stopped.
It was not a story. There was no natural beginning.
Thomas’s eyes were upon him, a gleam of hope through the gloom.
Micha met his gaze, gave up thinking, and simply spoke.
“The railway bridge had been rebuilt after the Revolution, so that was how I first saw it, a city rising from the mirror of the water. It wasn’t what it once was, silenced somehow, to the heart of itself, but still beautiful.
A dimly dreaming city, of azure and dusty gold. ”
And so Micha talked, and Thomas listened, and time—ever the thief—slipped slowly away from them.