Chapter 23
Micha was starting to resent Sundays. Thomas was busy most of the time—so much for that old joke about a clergyman’s working hours—but there was no escaping the fact that on Sundays he belonged to his parishioners, to his God, to everyone but Micha.
It was absurd to be jealous—could one even be jealous of something so abstract?
—but Micha had no other word for the ugly feeling.
It was a little bit like loneliness and a little bit like loss, and it made him scratchy and desperate, like a feral cat, locked out in the cold.
Of course, he need not have stayed away.
He could have attended any of the services, joined the gossip in the churchyard after, gone along to lunch, or tea or dinner, and been welcomed as lavishly as any biblical prodigal.
The residents of Nettlefield were too polite to mention such things, except to make the occasional joke about Micha’s wild and heathen ways, but he knew his godlessness troubled them.
Depending on his mood, he found it some combination of officious and strangely charming that there were people who cared about him enough to extend that concern to the state of his soul after death.
As if all that was standing between him and eternal glory at his divine Father’s side was his poor church attendance.
Probably they consoled themselves with the thought that he was young, and the Lord was infinitely forgiving, but the truth was, Micha simply did not like God.
He could not believe in Him the way Thomas could: with unshakeable trust in his goodness, His understanding.
The truth was, Thomas had been changing.
Was changing still. Not in essentials but in small ways that nevertheless accumulated, each a blade of grass.
And, one day, Micha would open his eyes and see a whole new landscape.
Though he was as grave and softly spoken as ever, Thomas’s newfound certainties shone like polished glass.
Very little trace remained of the painfully dutiful servant who had first brought Micha to Nettlefield.
And Micha rejoiced for him, was entranced by him, and did his best to lock away his bitterness.
For he was the one to show Thomas passion, and yet it seemed God had claimed that too.
They had never discussed it, but Thomas seemed to have made some pact, come to some arrangement with his other beloved, that the seventh day was His alone, and he would not touch Micha at all.
Sometimes he would barely even look at him.
Micha had accepted it with good grace, then bad grace, and finally rebelled.
He told himself he would have been satisfied with the smallest acknowledgement—a kiss, a touch, a loving look, anything to remind him he had a place in the heart of this suddenly uncomfortable stranger.
But Thomas was marble, cold and shining and splendid.
So now it was open warfare, a battle of flesh and spirit, God and man, that Micha was losing.
Even so, it was somehow easier to have his seductions ignored, and physically rejected, than to hear Thomas say he didn’t want him.
And easier still to make this an external struggle than one rooted in Thomas’s own conscience.
Sundays were nothing, however—mere inconvenience—compared to Thomas’s occasional summons to the Episcopal Palace.
It was a world to which Micha had no access and in which he had no place, and Thomas always returned to him, restless and subdued, and then it would be Sunday for days, sometimes weeks.
And Micha could not even bring himself to be righteously indignant because Thomas was so unhappy.
Eventually he would find his peace again, and crawl into bed with Micha, and he would be too relieved, too joyous, to do anything but welcome him.
And then, one winter evening, Thomas came back from dinner at the palace, and, instead of creeping about like a penitent ghost, he shed his clothes with something close to violence and flung himself straight into Micha’s arms. It should have made Micha happy—and it did, it did—but he had resigned himself to the pattern of their lives, with its peaks and troughs of closeness, and this change was too sudden.
It was everything he would have wished for, but Micha did not believe in miracles.
Thomas kissed him, the faintest tang of salt and brandy on his breath, his naked body sleek, and warm, and familiar against Micha’s.
More than familiar, intimately known, all its little imperfections and hidden beauties, the texture of the skin of otherwise untouched places.
He loved the trembling softness of Thomas’s belly, the chalice of his armpit, the pearly smoothness of his inner thighs, everywhere he was precious and open and vulnerable.
But he also loved more carnal things: strong legs wrapped around him, a hard cock driving into him, hands that could—and did, when he willed it—pin him down, leave their bruises, like promises upon his flesh.
And Thomas knew him too, and that was its own wonder.
He roused Micha now with a few urgent touches, the clumsiness its own provocation, because it was so full of need.
And that was like an iron bar prying his ribs open, leaving his heart naked to the world.
Thomas reached between them, wrapping a hand around Micha’s cock.
This, perhaps, he knew too well. Exactly the rhythm and pressure, the long drag and little twist, to make Micha spend.
Sometimes Thomas liked to tease, to hold Micha breathless and half-sobbing, blissfully helpless on the edge of satisfaction, but not tonight.
Tonight he sent Micha soaring towards climax with all the defiance of Icarus chasing the sun.
He neither enticed surrender nor demanded it.
He simply took it as his due, claiming dominion over Micha’s pleasure, his body and soul.
And Micha came within moments, with a harsh cry and almost without volition, spilling hot over Thomas’s fingers and his own stomach.
Thomas leaned over him to lick up his issue, his tongue tracing the shuddering grooves of Micha’s stomach, as he kissed his way back up to his mouth. Now he tasted of Micha, but his lips were wet with fresh tears, and when he pulled away, he whispered, “He knows. The bishop knows.”
Micha jerked partially up, all the languor of gratification leaving him. “What? How?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps George told him. But perhaps he simply guessed. He’s a worldly man. Ironically, you don’t get to be a bishop in the Church of England if you’re not.”
“Fuck me,” muttered Micha. “That must have been quite the confrontation.”
“I wouldn’t say it was a confrontation. More a conversation.”
“A conversation about your preference for men?”
“Essentially.” Thomas gave a little shrug. “He told me tonight. He took me into his study for a private talk, poured me a brandy, and said, as calmly as you please, ‘I understand you’re a sodomite?’”
This time there was no unseemly, selfish joy in Micha. Just a cold dread. “He’s got no proof. And making something like this public would do as much harm to the church as it would to you individually.”
“Yes, but I couldn’t deny it,” Thomas protested.
Micha stared at him. “Why?”
“Because . . . it would have meant denying you.”
“Fuck’s sake.” Groaning, Micha fell back against the pillows. “What’s going to happen to us? To you?”
“As it happens,” said Thomas, sitting up, “nothing very much.” He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“The bishop cares more about maintaining his connection to my family than he does about . . . personal immorality. Mainly he’s disappointed I’m not political enough to be a useful archdeacon. ”
Micha was having trouble listening. He felt too cut open and left raw, and Thomas’s words were coming at him as if from a great distance. “So it’s fine then? Just like that?”
“Well . . .” Thomas finally met his eyes, his own little more than shadows in the moonlight that crept from between the curtains. “I’m supposed to be more discreet.”
“‘More discreet’?” repeated Micha. “What does he mean, ‘more discreet’?”
There was a long silence.
“He suggested I should marry.”
Micha sprang out of bed, the heat of the covers suddenly overwhelming, the smell of their bodies in pleasure swiftly turning sour. “You what? You’ve actually been considering it, haven’t you? And this is how you tell me, with your hand on my cock and my come in your mouth?”
“Oh Micha.” Thomas looked stricken.
“Don’t ‘oh Micha’ me.” He was angry, furious, rightfully so, but his eyes had betrayed him with tears. “I don’t fucking believe this.”
“It needn’t change anything between us?”
“Thomas,” Micha cried, hating the broken sound of his voice in the quiet room. “You’d be married. To someone else. How could I be with you, live with you, then?”
“We’d find a way. We could—”
“What? Fuck each other when your wife is out teaching Sunday school?” Micha dragged a blanket from the bed and wrapped it round his waist. The conversation was already verging on unendurable, but standing there naked, with his spent prick sticky between his legs, was making it infinitely worse.
Thomas visibly flinched. “God, no. It wouldn’t be like that. We would find someone with . . . with understanding.”
“Understanding. Of course.” Micha sat slowly on the edge of the bed. He hurt. Everything hurt. “You’ve done more than consider this. You’ve thought it all the way through. You’re going to marry her, aren’t you? Your other whore.”
He glared at Thomas, daring him to lie, to dissemble or insist that the idea hadn’t even crossed his mind. And, this time, Thomas didn’t flinch. “Yes,” he said softly. “Yes. I . . . I wondered. It would be some measure of protection for all of us. And it would secure Hope’s future.”
“But”—and Micha cringed from the bewildered hurt in his own voice—“you’re mine. You’ve said so, time and time again. Were you lying?”