“Are we to be friends then?” asked Micha, half-curious, half-wary.
“I would not care for us to pursue further intimacy, if we were not.”
“Doesn’t that rather limit your opportunities?”
Gale shrugged. “I haven’t touched another man since I was at university. That was twenty-seven years ago.”
“Then you must be bad at making friends.”
“I had a wife. For that matter, I still do. But she has her own lovers, and all our children are grown.”
“Was it worth it?”
“My wife is a good woman. And I love my family with all my heart.”
“And now you’re ... what? Trawling the streets of Dover looking for ...?”
“I wouldn’t say I was either trawling or looking.” Reaching out a gloved hand, Gale gently pushed a lock of hair back from Micha’s brow. It wasn’t how a client would have touched him. And it wasn’t like Thomas. But he felt warmth nonetheless from that promise of skin. “Then again, one never knows what the tide brings in.”
“Or washes out.”
Gale made a sound so soft and lost it was almost lost beneath the rustle of the waves. “It’s probably not fair on those I care for, and who care for me, to say I’m lonely, Michael. I can’t make a mockery of the life we built together by claiming to be unhappy. But the years keep passing and I ... there are so many pieces of me I have put aside. For safety. For convenience. Sometimes out of sorrow. Sometimes in shame.”
Impulsively, Micha caught Gale by the wrist and drew his hand back, folding their fingers together. “The thing is, I’m only fucking pieces. But”—and here he smirked—“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
It’s been a very long time, he tells me, gazing up at me with such trust in those green-gold eyes. And then he asks, can you ... can you be gentle with me?
I can be anything you want, I promise.
And, to my surprise, I can. It’s easy to take care of him, the way I might want to have been taken care of myself, in a different life. And it feels good, not the best it’s ever felt, but good enough, my body belonging to nobody but me.
Afterwards, though, I cry, and he shushes away my apologies, and holds me, and I let him. He doesn’t press me for more than that. For an explanation I’m not ready to give and wouldn’t know how to even if I was.
The truth is, love has taken so much from me. I’m just relieved it’s finally given something back. Even if it’s only myself.
Chapter 27
Thomas had been in Dover for the best part of a week. Why Dover, he hardly knew, only that it felt right. He was sure Micha would not have gone to London, not after his previous experiences there. And this was where the last man Micha had loved had left him. It made sense he might return here, on being left again. Or on being the one to leave, though Thomas had not helped him stay.
It was on his second day of walking unfamiliar streets without direction that Thomas had realised that he had no real hope of finding Micha. But he kept wandering, kept looking, his heart stumbling in his chest for dark curls glimpsed at a distance, the certain set of a spine, every profile that could have been Micha’s. He enquired at boardinghouses and cheap hotels, scoured the manifests of departing ships. And, after dark, followed less reputable paths to dank rooms, full of smoke, or the moving bodies of men. Everywhere he went, memories of Nettlefield and Micha clung to him, intermingling with desperate fantasies of a future that, even now, he knew could not be theirs. Soon it all began to feel like the same dream, one he could never fully wake from and, like Caliban, would weep for all his life.
At some point, his steps would take him down to the shore, to the beaches, and coves, and bays, where the waves churned themselves through shades of grey and blue and green beneath the equally protean sky. With the horizon unbound like a ribbon from a dancer’s hair, andthe vastness of the world laid softly at his feet, it was easy to feel God, but Thomas didn’t pray. He just searched and waited. And, eventually, one day, he did see Micha, sitting on a rock, looking out to sea, his hair ruffled by the breeze.
It was impossible. A miracle. Everything Thomas had not dared to hope for. And, yet, in the moment, he felt no surprise at all. And, from the expression on Micha’s face as he turned towards him, neither did he.
“I can’t do this.” The words came from Thomas without thought or even volition.
Micha’s gaze was sharp and unreadable. “Do what?”
“Anything. Without you.”
“You can’t do anything with me either.”
“Then let’s do it anyway.”
With a clumsy, convulsive movement, Micha was on his feet, his face as grey as the sky and his curls as wild as the waves. “We’ve tried this, Thomas. Fuck knows we’ve tried. You won’t, you can’t, come away with me. And I won’t, I can’t, stay with you. Play housekeeper and whore while the world calls me your friend. And eventually, when the bishop escalates from suggesting to demanding, someone else your wife.”
“I’ll never marry, Micha.” Of this, at least, Thomas knew he was certain. “The worst the bishop can do is look askance and tut.”
