“Oh God.” Micha turned and came suddenly into Thomas’s embrace. His face, nestled against the side of Thomas’s neck, was damp. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to be monstrous. I’m ... fuck ... I’m scared. It’s frightening, to be who we are, and want what we want. Even though it’s no fucking different to what they take for granted.”
Thomas held him tightly, understanding for the first time the kind of fear Micha had lived with, and not quite sure what to say.
“I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you.” A shudder rippled from Micha’s body into Thomas’s. “I hate that you have to think about these things now. What kind of world am I dragging you into? You used to be safe, and now it’s all secrecy and shame and—”
“Stop.” Thomas stilled him with a light finger to his lips. “I would not trade this life with you for any other sort of life imaginable. And I promise to be more circumspect in future.”
Micha muttered something about Thomas being romantic and ridiculous, but he had stopped trembling.
“Besides,” Thomas went on, “George won’t risk the disgrace. To expose me would be to expose the family. We have nothing to fear from him.”
“Well.” Micha huffed out a sigh. “All right. I don’t trust him. But I trust you.”
Thomas lay for a while, pressed up against Micha, not speaking. He loved everything Micha had taught him, the storms of passion and the wickedness of shared laughter, but he cherished the quiet too. The intimacy of small touches when the world felt very far away.
Then, haltingly, he told Micha what he had learned about Edward, which was, perhaps, something he had always known, and Micha turned in his arms to hold him. It did not, and could not, make it better, but it made it bearable, and that was enough.
“Do you think it’s true?” Micha asked. “Do you really think that’s why he did it?”
“I’m not sure,” returned Thomas, after a moment’s thought. “It’s hard to really know anything for certain. But it’s almost unimaginable to me, the despair and desperation that would lead one to such an act.”
“Perhaps he was being blackmailed. It happens.”
An old and helpless fury, carefully suppressed, stirred like a demon in the chains Thomas had forged from acceptance and filial piety, and the forgotten power of it flooded him now, bitter as wormwood. “He was being blackmailed his entire life. George’s duty was to join the army and die a heroic death. Mine was to join the church and be quiet. Edward’s was to live precisely as our father determined. To bear the title, to marry, to procreate.” He sighed, rage fading to pain. “His future must have felt impossible.”
“I’m so sorry.” Micha sounded young and a little helpless in the face of all that deep and distant hurt.
“I think George hoped understanding would make a difference—help somehow—but loss is simply loss. It doesn’t come with an answer.”
There was a small pause, and then Micha muttered, “You should have said that to Esther. Instead of telling her a pointless story about Jesus.”
That startled a laugh out of Thomas. Perhaps it was wrong, just then, to be laughing, but all he felt was relief, the tangled knot of his heart unravelling sweetly. “You heathen. Also, is this really the time to critique my priesting?”
“You’re right.” Thomas could feel the upward curve of Micha’s lips against his skin. “It’s just there’s so much ... understanding in you. So much love. I wish you wouldn’t hide that from the people who need it most.”
“How can you see so much good in me when I have spent my whole life in costume?”
One of Micha’s hands stroked lightly over Thomas’s flank, spreading warmth and a lazy kind of pleasure. “Because I love you.”
Thomas was silent a moment. “I’m going to do better by them.”
“Who?” asked Micha, sleepily.
“Esther. My parishioners. Everyone.”
“I thought we were leaving.”
“Yes but . . . until then.”
“As you say,” returned Micha, and Thomas did not have to be able to see him to know the sardonic half-smile that accompanied his words.
“I just wish,” Thomas admitted to the trustful dark, “I knew how to express what I feel, not merely what I’ve been taught.”
Micha kissed Thomas’s shoulder. “You seem to do all right with me.”
“So when I stand there, at the front of the church, I should speak as though to you?”
“Why not?”
