“I have never stopped to think about it but—yes, yes they do.”
“I had forgotten there existed so many.”
There was a line of broken heat running the line of Micha’s body where the edges of Thomas met the edges of him.
“There is a generosity to it, isn’t there?” offered Thomas, finally.
“Or carelessness.”
“I know very little about beauty, Micha, but I think to be heedless is not necessarily to be careless. It seems, I don’t know, free somehow.”
Micha extended his arm, his gaze following his finger into the sky. “They look so close. As if I could reach them if I only stretched a little further.”
Thomas’s fingers closed lightly around Micha’s wrist and turned his palm upwards. “There. Now it looks as if you hold them.”
The starlight spilled over his hand and down his wrist like pure, bright water. Unexpectedly, Micha shuddered. He dropped his arm, breaking the contact, and Thomas did nothing to prolong it. “That constellation”—he gestured half-heartedly—“the one right above us, is called Cygnus.”
“I can’t see anything that looks much like a swan.”
Micha traced the lines between the stars. “There ... those are the wings, see, outstretched, and there’s the neck.”
Thomas tilted his head. “If you say so.”
“Well,” drawled Micha, “what happened to your sense of romance? Would you rather they called it ‘the one with the pointy downwards bit and the two pointy sideways bits’?”
He caught the glimmer of Thomas’s smile in the darkness. “I fear I’m a poor stargazer. Nobody has ever named them for me before.”
“Isidore knew them all.” From nowhere, a piece of memory: lying with his head against Isidore’s shoulder on one of Oxford’s glass-smooth lawns, gold and silver spun into a tapestry of light for their pleasure. Micha swallowed. “And that one ... the long one with the square tip, that one is Draco.”
“That is not, by any means, a dragon. It’s a wiggly line with a dot on the end. If anything, it is a kite.”
“For fuck’s sake, that’s its tail. And that’s the curve of its neck. Are you laughing at me?”
“I am certainly not laughing at you. I think it’s lovely that you know these things, and I’m touched you would share them with me.”
“Oh shut up. That one there, with the three lines radiating outwards from the square, that’s the Bowl of Peonies.”
“What?”
“And that one, just next to it, with the three small stars and the cluster, is known as the Cheese Board and Fish Knife.”
“Now you’re just making it up.”
“Yes.”
Thomas’s laughter rang out, as clear and joyous as bells on a summer morning. “You wretch.”
And, for a moment, Micha forgot to care that Thomas had only brought him here to fuck him. He almost wanted him to do it, here and now, amid the silence and the beauty. It seemed almost like a price worth paying. Thomas’s body would cover him like moonlight and Micha would live amongst the stars, in the distant depths of the sky, far away from everything below. He turned, quite deliberately, pressing himself to Thomas, and the line of heat became a lake of fire.
It should have been enough. But Thomas made no further move to touch him.
“Portly Man with a Cigar,” he said, instead.
Which was really not what Micha had expected. “Uh?”
Thomas’s smile was close now, close enough to kiss. He pointed. “There, look. Those three bright stars close together. And there’s the man, holding the cigar.”
“That’s the Warrior, you stupid man. Those three stars are Orion’s Belt.”
