“What about your Mrs. Clark?”
“I don’t think she’s much for tutting.”
“She’d marry you in a heartbeat.”
For the first time since Micha had left Nettlefield, Thomas felt calm. Felt like himself. “She wouldn’t. And she’d be right. As would any woman.”
Micha’s lip curled. “You sell yourself and your pretty parish too short, Thomas.”
“Were I to wed anyone, it would be adultery. Because in my soul I am married to you. And I will be until death do us part.”
For long moments, Micha just stared at him. Then he lifted his wrist to dash away a glitter of tears. “For fuck’s sake, Thomas. Don’tdo this to me. Not when ... not when I’d almost begun to bear being without you. Besides, I know you want to be a father. I see the yearning in your eyes every time you look at that girl.”
“What do you see in my eyes,” Thomas asked gently, “when I look at you?” And then, when Micha seemed unable to hold his gaze, he went on, “Nobody gets everything they want in life. We all pay prices, make choices, accumulate regrets. There will always be paths we didn’t, or couldn’t, take. But I fell in love with you. I wouldn’t change that, even if I could. Even for every other dream in my heart.”
“And your God?”
Thomas’s lips twitched. “My God made me. He’ll work it out.”
“He may,” Micha conceded. “But will Nettlefield? Will your family?”
“I suppose we’ll see.”
Micha’s face was a mess of raw hope and pained disbelief. “This is madness. You know it is.”
“I don’t care,” Thomas told him.
“There’ll be rumours. Potentially a scandal. Fuck.”
Micha curled his fingers into his hair, the gesture achingly familiar. Thomas reached out and caught him by the wrists, and, suddenly, they were embracing, frantic for each other, as they stood ankle-deep in the icy surf.
“It’ll be the ruin of you,” Micha muttered. “I’llbe the ruin of you.”
Thomas clung to him, breathing in salt, tears, the scent that was only and forever Micha’s skin. “Then take whatever steps you must. Come when you can. Depart when you wish. Return when you’re able. I’ll wait for you. I’ll never stop waiting for you. Just ... don’t leave me.”
“And what do I do,” asked Micha roughly, “when I’m not with you? Scratch the days off on my cell wall?”
Lifting his head, Thomas pinned Micha with his eyes. “You live as freely and truly and with as much love when you’re without me as when you’re with me.”
“Thomas, no. That isn’t—”
Possible? Reasonable? Right? Fair?
Thomas didn’t know what word Micha might have chosen. But it didn’t matter. “I wish I could give you everything I want to give you,” he said. “And I wish I could ask you to give me everything in return. That’s the life I’d have chosen for us, Micha, if it was up to me. If I had the power to create it. But I don’t. So this is what we have. What we can have. If we ...” He swallowed, remembering the church at night, and Sheba, who had brought him answers after all. “Compromise.”
Above them, a seagull wheeled against the endless canvas of the sky, its widespread wings flashing a black as defiant as Micha’s eyes.
“Please,” Thomas tried. “It’s better than—”
“Nothing,” Micha finished for him.
Thomas nodded. Suddenly, it seemed a small and paltry offer. Love like a handful of pebbles when he held a world of it inside him.
But then Micha smiled. One of his slow, rare, entirely unpractised smiles, intended neither to disarm nor to deflect, but simply to express what he was feeling. It was a little lopsided, a little cynical, because Micha always was, but tender too. “Well,” he said, “if it was good enough for Persephone, I suppose it can be good enough for me.”
“I’m not sure I have much in common with Hades.”
“Oh, don’t you?” asked Micha, still smiling, his eyes at their most gleaming. And, seeing the understanding in them, Thomas shivered, soul-bared, because he suddenly realised how well Micha knew him. Better, perhaps, than Thomas would ever know himself.
