“Hurting?”
“N-no . . . just . . . just . . . I don’t know.”
Thomas’s breathing had turned swift and shallow. His head fell back, and Micha bent over him, kissing the bared curve of his throat until he felt the other man’s pulse fluttering in response. He wrapped a hand around Thomas’s fading erection and stroked it lavishly, drowning unfamiliar violation in familiar bliss. Fresh perspiration gathered, moon-silvered, in the hollows of Thomas’s body, and he began to moan softly, pressing against Micha’s cock and his hand. His eyes had fallen closed, leaving his face open, and as unprotected as his heart had ever been.
And, at the sight, Micha came a little bit undone. Rough desire, long stifled by opium, rushed over him, driving him hard against Thomas. “Oh Thomas,” he muttered, fighting himself and the uncontrolled selfish urges of his flesh. “My love, I need you so.” His voice broke on a note of desperation. “Please, darling, please.”
Thomas reached up suddenly, flung his arms about Micha’s neck, and pulled their bodies together until Micha was fully sheathed inside him, one flesh, as close as breath and their beating hearts. Micha babbled out a stream of obscenities that were their own caress, and Thomas clung to him, panting and trembling. For a long moment, they were still, accustoming themselves and each other to the intimacy of their entwining. It had been so long since Micha had felt anything like it. He thought he might break from the joy of it.
He pressed his head against Thomas’s shoulder, pouring clumsy kisses over his skin. “You feel like fucking heaven.”
“Are you using that as a verb or as an intensifier?” Thomas’s voice shook a little, and he shifted him against Micha, as if trying to become comfortable with new sensations. “Because ... it works ... either way.”
“We’ll make our own heaven.”
Thomas’s fingers dug into Micha’s back. “Oh ... oh good.”
Micha unhooked Thomas’s arms and lowered him onto the window seat. Very gently he began to move, a slow, gliding rhythm that made Thomas’s eyelashes flutter dreamily. Sliding a hand beneath one of Thomas’s knees, Micha adjusted his angle and drove in deep—
And Thomas’s eyes jolted open. He arched like a wildcat in the moonlight. “Oh my God ... I mean—” Micha repeated the motion. “Oh ... my ... oh ...” Thomas’s hands flailed and landed, helpless as wind-buffeted birds, against Micha’s chest.
“My name,” growled Micha, “say my name.”
“Oh Micha.”
“Yes.”
“Can you—oh yes. Oh Micha. Yes.”
Micha was half-laughing, half-crying, undone by the sheer pleasure of pleasing. It was like knowing all the secrets of the universe. A glimpse of the numinous that brought him not into an awareness of some abstract deity but into perfect and complete communion with another person. His lover. Thomas.
They fucked with increasing urgency, entangled in each other’s arms and learning together the patterns and rhythms of how to move with each other, their responses mingling and echoing, like the touch of body to body and skin to skin, to drive them into deeper, wilder ecstasies. Micha pushed Thomas’s legs back, bracing himself with a slipping hand upon the windowpane, his other curled around Thomas’s cock, stroking it clumsily to mirror his thrusts. Thomas threw back his head, starlight speckling his throat and shoulders, gave a shattered gasp threaded with Micha’s name, and climaxed.
Micha was left, shuddering desperately on the brink of release. The pleasure was pain-bright, clawing like a trapped thing in his flesh. Sweat streamed from him, sparkling silver over Thomas. He closed his eyes, but bodies, other bodies, were twisting in the darkness, and his mouth was sour with the memory of laudanum. He was falling, too lost, too ruined, traitor to himself, even to the last. “F-fuck, oh fuck, I can’t.”
Thomas reached up, cradling Micha’s face between his hands, whispering his name, calling him back.
And then, like a forgotten, impossible miracle, it happened. He was caught by Thomas, caught by the moment, not falling but flying, and he was free. Micha opened his eyes, drove himself into Thomas, into the blissful, sinful heat of him, and claimed himself, his past, his future, and the body he chose now to surrender entirely to pleasure. Culmination rushed over him, ferocious as fire, annihilation and renewal, eternity in a handful of seconds, and Thomas held him through it, still murmuring softly. Micha fell against his lover, utterly spent, still shaking, but unafraid, unbroken.
They stayed like that, crushed together, for longer than Micha thought was, strictly speaking, polite. But he could not move, andThomas, of course, did not push him away. Eventually, though, they untangled, their bodies sticky and reluctant. Micha groped for one of their hastily shed garments and began to clean up some of the evidence of their exertions.
“That better not be my shirt,” said Thomas, smiling sleepily at him.
They dressed themselves just enough for decency. It was cold without a fire, but Micha barely noticed. His body felt alive with heat and satisfaction, and the closeness of Thomas, who was curled up between Micha’s legs on the much-abused window seat. His head nestled against Micha’s shoulder, his face in shadow, his breathing slow and even. Micha thought he slept, but then he tilted up his head and whispered, “Happy Christmas.”
Micha kissed the curve of his bare shoulder.
From the slowly greying sky, a few haphazard snowflakes began to swirl in restless spirals, gleaming softly through the gloom like fragments of fallen stars.
Micha drifted, not quite awake, not quite asleep, and when he next opened his eyes, Thomas’s face was turned in to the breaking dawn.
“How lovely it is,” he said. “So much unheeded beauty in the world.”
“But you’re heeding?”
“Yes. Now I am. For most of my life, it would never have occurred to me.” His fingers drifted lightly across Micha’s forearm. “I love these moments with you. They make me feel so close to God.”
“I’m not sharing you with Him,” Micha growled, not entirely jesting.
