I didn’t know how to react. I could see the vexing guilt in Simon’s eyes as he realized I had never completely made the connection between him and that moment. I knew he had been one of the attackers of course, but the violence had been so extreme it was like it was detached from specificity. I had forgiven him and Wulfric for the incident as a whole, but that was back before I knew him like I knew him now, as a man sitting across from me, the only man in my life now.
Maybe I was too quick to appease him and sounded dismissive. “You were only doing what you were told.”
“I shouldn’t have been.”
“Youshouldhave. Otherwise none of this would have happened.” My words were feeble because what wasthisanyway? A stone hut on a muddy hill?
Simon wanted to appease and deflect as well. We both wanted to get beyond this, get back to something else. “Well, you took a good chunk out of me.” He showed me his hand—there were small scars across his knuckles and thumb.
“Is that me?” I took his hand and marveled at the glossy little stars etched in his skin.
“Yep, all of them.” He laughed to break through the shame. We slo-mo reenacted what had happened. He put his open hand across my mouth. I felt the warm calluses against my cheeks, the determined, eager fingers. I had bit him there and in retaliation he had balled it into a fist, forced it in with his other hand and held it there from behind my head. He held the closed fist right against my lips now. Tiny wisps of hairs on his fingers tickled my nose. My lips fit perfectly between the peaks of his knuckles.
Playfully, I nipped his hand. I tried to line my teeth up with the scars. He laughed. We did this slowly in wonderment. Then I closed my lips.
We froze. Simon’s hand relaxed. His fingers loosened as his knuckle stayed between my lips. We stared at each other. Waiting. He held his hand there, then rotated it, running it across my lips, presenting his index finger now, unequivocally, which I took inside my mouth. He moved it deeper. I wrapped my tongue around it. He felt along the inside of my cheek, then out and around my lips. We both exhaled at the same time and instead of the air expanding between us, it was as if it contracted, bringing our faces closer than they had ever been before and his lips coming over mine and closing as easily as hands over mouths, fingers between teeth. We kissed. Sensations I thought had been left behind in modernity came flooding back and I needed him, I pulled him closer, his hands already slippingunder my clothes, gripping, grabbing, I could have cried, tears threatening to pulse and break with the thrill of a man becoming exactly what I had wanted him to be. A man of my own. But there were already tears, a saltiness I tasted. The wetness was not mine.
“I’m so sorry, George,” was all Simon could say as we pushed ourselves together, over and over again, as we kissed necks, lips, cheeks, crying eyes. And I was so sorry too—that all this could have been done earlier, the long winter that had been so long—as I rushed him out of his clothes, out of mine, interlocking our bodies and snapping together but pulling apart, wanting to see every inch of his chest, the soft nipples, tight stomach, hard penis, arms reaching, legs wrapping, heads together, bodies forcing a conjoining, a closeness that had been obscured by so many layers of clothes, of suppositions, unsaid dares and whispered prayers.
Oddly enough, I felt loneliness as we sucked each other off—the sensation of loneliness lifting in and out of me, in and out, of it breaking like a fever and realizing the imprint it had made across my whole life and how for all its weight and terror, it instantly went fleeing into the past, into the future as I came and filled Simon’s mouth just as he did so in mine, feeling the warmth coat our throats.
7
It became suddenly clear that this was what we had been working toward all this time, inch by inch. We had escaped Greenwich and saved each other, but there was more to it than that—there had been this unspoken longing, there had been a goal all along. After all, Simon seemed to know exactly what he was doing when we made love again in the morning, both of us spread out wide and open for the other, a complete newness transforming everything. We had spent every day of the past six months together, only now for the first time we were spending time inside each other, fingers interlocked, sweat on backs and chests, our grip on the day inverted, and everything I thought I knew needing to reestablish itself through unclouded eyes.
The world of Simon opened up to me and the thrill felt nostalgic—our desperate clawing for each other a feeling I didn’t think I would ever find out here, yet here it was. We inspected each other’s naked bodies in the brilliant light of day. We fucked on the banks of the flooded stream. There was a meatiness to allof it, a brutal humanness that had us both in strangleholds and the thought crossed my mind that maybe this actually wasn’t gay at all, just an excise of pent-up maleness. We had spent an entire winter together, hardly seen another soul. More importantly, Simon’s sweetness and chivalry seemed in diametric opposition to the concept of gayness and the bitterness it creates in a person—there was no shirking, there was no squeamishness. We held hands in public.
We went to Scarborough together a few weeks after this new dimension revealed itself and we walked the streets arm in arm, hand in hand. Vague fear crossed my mind, but fear was always crossing my mind; I followed Simon’s lead. We traded bundles of flax for two sheep, we bought rosemary, lard, a sharpening stone, and rope, and the whole time our glow was showing, a pheromone flagging our coupledom, yet nobody batted an eye. We even attended a mass at the church there and while I felt the natural homophobia of decorum, Simon still slipped his hand inside mine. He held his arm around the small of my back when we were greeted by a cheery vicar before the start of the service.
“Look at you two,” the vicar said. He was simple and round, draped in plain robes with minimal adornment like a snowman without a face. He touched us both on the arm. “Strapping young men. Lovely to have you here today.”
“We were just passing by,” I said, wary—wary right from the start and regretting coming inside the church. (It had been my idea to pop inside because, well, because I was gay and appreciated aesthetics, but there was no such thing aspop insidein this world and a church was not an empty tourist attraction. Simon had taken my suggestion nearly as important as our first kiss, nearly as commonplace as boiling water before drinking it.Yes, of course we needed to take the eucharist, we needed to be blessed, good idea. The flippancy of popping in and taking a picture of a stained glass window with a phone would not exist for hundreds of years.)
Simon took command of the pleasantries with the vicar while I waited for the penny to drop at any moment. The cold water would be thrown over me and all this would come into context. This was Boy Scouts, this was a heightened bromance, this was a Masonic Movember arm wrestle, this wasn’t—
“We’re lovers,” Simon told him.
Maybe he had said “brothers.” Maybe something completely different. Maybe the English I thought I had gotten my head wrapped around was all wrong, but whatever he said was enough for the vicar to touch me on the arm again and say with praise, “A budding romance.” He winked. “A regular David and Jonathan we have in our midst. What a blessing.”
There’s a clear misalignment here, I thought. “Budding” as in buddy. “Romance” as in romanticism, as in the glory of the individual’s emotional truth, not something shared. We were pals—surely that was the interpretation. The church service itself wasn’t even church—not that I had much of a preexisting context, but this was more like a census taking. We worshipped, I guess, but only in the sense that we declared ourselvespresent, we recited prayers, we were blessed and given a sacrament but it felt purposeful like indication, not ritual, like something was being absorbed, physically, into my body, not in a New Agey, superstitious way, not even in a pseudoscientific, born-again way, but like a shampooing of my hair, a stethoscope on my chest, a section of my brain unfolding then recreasing.
It was half in Latin anyway, nobody understood a thing.But it was novelty, it was mystery, and these things felt accumulated and weighty, pressing down. Any tangible checklist about Jesus and what he did or didn’t want us doing was irrelevant in a world where I had spent the past weeks digging holes and making love. It was all just chemicals living this way. Endorphins and hunger, hot and cold, the fever of expenditure and its rewards. Emotions—if you encountered them at all, even at church—didn’t nip and gnaw at you like they did in the modern world. They came and went like smoke. I watched the saints in the stained glass windows and it was more entertaining than a film, no longer as terrifying as they had seemed in Lincoln. They moved with the sun. Simon and I discussed them like superheroes. That’s Saint Bartholomew, that’s Saint Francis, that’s the Virgin Mary.
“They look like astronauts,” I said. It was true. They each had a perfect circle drawn around their head, painted gold. The halos looked like helmets you would wear in space.
“What’s an astronaut?” asked Simon.
“Someone who goes up into the sky,” I said. “Beyond the sky, far out into space where there’s no air, so they need special helmets to breathe.”
“That’s what you need.”
I paused, raised an eyebrow. Simon added, “For your cough,” but somehow my mind had already raced ahead of him, thinking yes, that’s what I need because my breath catches on itself when I’m around you. The spark, the quickness, the smoothness with which he could just touch, press, and kiss. Who he was in private was exactly who he was in public. I didn’t know how to be like that and I was in fearful awe.
What worried me most was that Simon’s eagerly honest sense of self reminded me of Callum, a man from the worst (or best) of my days at the financial firm in Canary Wharf. Callum had come along like all the other sales boys selling themselves for favors. Crisp shirts, tight trousers, thick hair cropped close. Callum’s “performance” with me was the most successful of all the men, so much so that I can’t look back on what it turned into without feeling a flash of severe shame, a disconnection from my own self thanks to what I had contorted into being for him. That feverish anticipation, performance, praying—I recognized too many of those ghosts in how I felt about Simon. Our lovemaking was love making, sure, but so many other things can be that too.
With Callum it started with small things. Pure fantasy on my part. Then real fantasy—fantasy football, which the office ran every year, and Callum, out of all the boys, was the one who finally got me to join in. He got me to treat it seriously, helped me set up a login, cutting through my self-deprecation and irony. He got me to wager serious money.
“You’re a stats guy, that’s all it is. I need you to help me figure out my team at least.”
