“Good Lord.” Thomas looked up from his book as Micha took a place at the table. “What are you wearing?”
“I fell in a stream. Don’t ask.”
Thomas’s expression communicated that he very much wanted to ask, but he kept his peace, as Micha had known he would. The day would come, soon enough, when Thomas would have demands to make, but in the meantime, Micha contented himself with petty tyrannies.
He reached into the pockets of his borrowed frock coat and began to pull out the neatly wrapped packages that had been pressed upon him before he left Esther’s home. “Look at this.” He laid them out on the table. “The way they carried on, you’d think you weren’t feeding me.”
“You are a little thin,” observed Thomas dryly. “Perhaps your benefactors consider you the victim of my Christian austerity.”
“There’s plum cake, lemon drizzle cake, apple loaf, peach cobbler, and some sort of bun affair I can’t remember. You’ll have to help me. Seems a shame to waste all this.”
“Well . . .” Thomas shifted uncomfortably.
“It’s cake, Thomas, not Sodom and Gomorrah.”
He blushed. “You’re right, of course. The lemon cake looks lovely.”
Micha pushed over the little parcel, and Thomas unwrapped it with careful fingers. He ate carefully too, popping neat squares of cake into his mouth, almost as if he feared enjoying them. But Micha was not completely oblivious to the way his eyes and his lips softened very slightly in pleasure. The pink curl of his tongue as he chased an errant crumb.
“I see,” Thomas remarked, apparently unaware of—or untroubled by—Micha’s gaze, “that you’ve been meeting my parishioners.”
“They didn’t give me much choice.”
“No ... no ... they probably wouldn’t.” Thomas looked briefly crestfallen. “They did not trouble you, I hope?”
Micha could not have explained his discomforts, even had he wanted to. “It was fine. But I’m not sure I ever want to see another cake again.”
“They did the same to me when I first arrived.”
“But not anymore?”
Thomas licked lemon-sugar from his thumb. “I asked them to stop. It felt ... I felt ... oh, I don’t know what I felt. Uncomfortable.”
“People bringing you cakes made you uncomfortable?”
“It’s not as if I’ve done anything to earn them.” Thomas’s lips twitched into the suggestion of a smile. “One would think I was selling indulgences for baked goods.”
Though he had made many resolutions when it came to Thomas, Micha still had trouble, sometimes, resisting his playfulness. He smiled faintly. “Well, there has to be something wrong with you underneath all that godliness.”
Micha had only meant to tease, but to his surprise, the other man flushed. “None are without sin.”
“You don’t know what sin is,” Micha told him, taking refuge in scorn. There was no reply from Thomas, which meant he was obliged to break the deepening silence. “There was talk of a book group or some such thing on Friday. They wanted me to go.”
“You should.”
Micha squirmed with incipient mortification. “They”—he couldn’t even meet the other man’s eyes—“I mean. That is. You should come too.” There. Barely a request at all.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“I’m here,” Thomas said, rather primly, “because I have a responsibility to these people.”
“So? What? That means you can’t read a book with them?”
“I’m their parish priest. They feel morally obliged to invite me to everything, much as they feel morally obliged to shower me in cakes or heed my thoughts on flowers for the church. If they invited me, Micha, it was most likely out of politeness.”
This was surely the crowning irony of Micha’s day. That the Reverend Thomas Mandeville was anything but utterly confident in his role had simply not occurred to Micha before. Whatever Thomas’s unnatural desires, his outward virtues had always seemed so implacable that Micha had believed him a man utterly assured of his worth and his place in the world. Perhaps, at some other time, he might have found this hint of personal vulnerability just a little bit charming. But, today, it was simply cruel. The shreds of acceptance and crumbs of affection that Micha’s deceits and obfuscations had stolen, Thomas had rightfully earned. He had everything, and Micha had nothing. And that was how it would always be.
