Thomas was praying without gods, entwined with Micha, like some perfect sacrament. He had been, at first, preoccupied with what to do. How he would know what was right, whether he gave pleasure or overstepped the boundaries of his wanting, but with that sound—that impossible, lovely sound—and the parting of Micha’s lips beneath his, all thoughts that were notMicha, andMicha, andoh Micha, dissolved into nothing. Micha’s body was the only tutor Thomas needed. His lessons in the involuntary clutching of Micha’s hands upon his shoulders and the broken murmur of his breath. Thomas might not have known how to kiss, but he knew how to kiss Micha. How to learn his lips, how to take the offered chalice of his mouth with gentleness, how to gather the taste of him with his tongue, how to make him shudder and moan and fall against him, helpless.
Thomas would have liked to keep his eyes open, for that way he could hold Micha and be held by him, kiss and be kissed, and look at him still so that he could truly believe that they did this thing together—this thing called sin that felt like paradise—but it was impossible. The pleasure of Micha’s mouth was simply too intense, and Thomas kept falling into a soft interior darkness that built a world from Micha, and Micha alone. He thought perhaps it was a defence mechanism—like the instinct to draw away from pain—as it seemed beyond his body’s earthly limitations to see so much beauty and feel so much joy all at once.
He could not have said who broke the kiss—and “broke” was the word, for pulling away felt like shattering—or if it was a mutual parting. But when Thomas drew back, just enough to breathe and open his eyes, he felt as though he would have fallen if not for Micha and the tree. He let out an unsteady breath and sagged within the circle of Micha’s arms, hiding his face in the curve of the other man’s neck. For a long moment, Micha was absolutely rigid against him, and then his handcame up to stroke through Thomas’s hair, lightly but surely, as though he touched the strings of a harp.
Thomas pressed into him, still and silent. The kiss was done but everything had changed. Where once he had given himself to duty, and duty had demanded he give himself to God, he was Micha’s now. Circumscribed by fingers in his hair and the body that demarcated the edges of his own. Strange, unimagined pleasures ran up and down his spine, and through his shivering skin, just to touch and be touched like this. His breathing steadied slowly. He could taste Micha’s pulse beneath his mouth, a hard and steady beat that made Thomas feel closer to him than he could have believed possible. As though it would be the rhythm of his own heart now.
Suddenly Micha’s hand tightened in his hair and pulled Thomas’s head back, until Thomas met his wild, burning eyes. There was a slash of red across each of Micha’s cheekbones. The mouth that had succumbed to Thomas’s kisses was set in a strange, harsh line.
“Down,” growled Micha. “Lie down. Now.”
And then he was pulling Thomas with him into a flurry of leaves that crackled beneath them like applause. Thomas landed on his back, startled and breathless, his hands flung wide across the forest floor. Micha came after, stretching across his body, strong and supple as a panther in pursuit of its prey. He pinned Thomas by the upper arms—hard enough to hurt, though Thomas would not have thought to fight him—and kissed him, with a deep, deliberate carnality. Thomas made a noise, less of protest than of surprise, but the insistent thrust of Micha’s tongue soon stole all words, all breath.
To lie beneath a man, so completely possessed, brought a host of new experiences, no more or less intimate than standing within the circle of his arms, but different. There was such an unabashed physical audacity to it that it made Thomas flame with intense, if unfocused, wanting. He could feel the shape of Micha’s pelvis and the flex in his thigh muscles. And then, quite suddenly, the hot, hard outline of his cock. Thomas’s hips came up of their own accord, nudging clumsily atthis evidence of Micha’s desire. It seemed a profane, impossible miracle that Micha wanted this too.
Another sound, lost in Micha’s brutal kiss, and Micha pulled back, staring down at Thomas, his expression tight and unreadable, almost angry. His mouth looked red, like the interior of some poisonous fruit, and slightly bruised, in stark contrast to the darkness of his eyes.
The sun broke unexpectedly from behind a bank of cloud, half-dazzling Thomas and gilding Micha’s tousled curls with transitory gold.
“I’m sorry,” said Thomas, feeling he must have crossed some line without knowing it. “I’m so new to this.”
“You don’t touch me,” Micha told him.
If this was strange, Thomas had no way to judge its strangeness. There was already too much for him to feel and think. Knowledge that he had always known to be forbidden, revealed to him, in all its beauty, like a vision of heaven itself. To be like this, with another man, crowned in falling leaves and sunlight, seemed a blessing beyond any earthly reckoning. His heart over-spilled on the loveliness of it, and happiness—pure and clear as water—ran through all his veins, as riotous as spring after the longest of winters. Thomas made a sound he barely recognised as coming from himself. “Kiss me again.”
Micha glittered above him, as hard as a diamond, though he was breathing heavily. “Ask me. If you truly want it.”
“I do. I want you to kiss me. Please.”
“Fuck.” Micha suddenly sounded almost on the verge of tears. “Oh fuck.”
He dipped his head and Thomas pressed up against his mouth and they were kissing once again. Thomas had been kissed twice now—he was counting—once with tenderness and once with wantonness, but this was different again. Micha was neither compliant nor deliberate. He was just clumsy. And the kiss itself was deeper, somehow harsher. It tasted of desperation and the stinging salt of Micha’s unshed tears. Thomas parted his lips, clinging to the heat that poured from Micha’s open mouth, until they were both ragged and frantic and lost.
Finally, Micha tore himself away. His fingers tangled with Thomas’s simply tied cravat and pulled it aside. And then his mouth came down afresh on Thomas’s exposed throat. Thomas felt his pulse leap, his body arch, involuntary responses that tipped his head back against the leaves and canted his hips once more up to Micha’s. And, this time, Micha did not stop him.
Thomas was not entirely a stranger to sexual desire, though he had not previously associated it with other men. He had, during his adolescence and occasionally after, granted himself physical release. Over time, the need for it had lessened. He hardly thought of it, certainly did not miss it. It had never occurred to him that he had given anything significant up. But the inexpert solipsism of his own hand was as different to this as a candle to the sun. If he had known of this—God,this—the hard pressure of another’s body atop his, a mouth moving against his burning skin, rough, demanding hands that held him down and held him close, he would more readily have abandoned breathing.
He gave an awkward gasp, and it shuddered in his throat, as if Micha’s mouth had drawn it directly from the skin. He was undone by a scattering of kisses. His body—made in the image of God, to have dominion over all creatures, redeemed by His son’s sacrifice—surrendered wholly to the most earthly of caresses. And Thomas did not even think to struggle. He was conscious of no conflict, no concern, not even the faintest stir of guilt. It was like he had somehow gathered up the sundry threads of his physical being and brought them together into this bright-woven tapestry of perfect, sinless desire.
Micha’s hands released his arms—blood returning in a pricklish flood—and then he was dragging apart the fastenings of Thomas’s shirt, and Thomas was shipwrecked all over again. At first, it felt almost an assault, just heat and pleasure in near-unbearable waves, Micha’s mouth and hands sweeping over Thomas’s untouched body, claiming and inflaming. And Thomas writhed and shuddered under him, each panting breath a shallow moan, as he gave himself to Micha, piece bypiece, gasp by gasp, until the other man suddenly muttered something inaudible, tumbled down against Thomas, and kissed him hard enough that Thomas tasted copper.
The urgency of Micha’s body driving against his was such a new and raw kind of sensation that Thomas actually cried out—loud enough to startle a bird from where it must have been resting in the branches of a nearby tree. It took to the sky in a rustle of wings, streaking across his vision, the moment Micha took his mouth. Eventually they broke apart, and Micha shoved him back down amongst the leaves. His kisses spilled from Thomas’s lips, down across his neck and torso, scattering bliss wildly and unbearably in their wake. And Thomas felt ... unlike himself, transformed beneath Micha’s touch into someone desirable and desired, and he thought he might be just about dying with the need for Micha, and for this. Thomas’s fingers curled heedlessly, clutching at nothing but crumbling leaves and grass. He feared he could run mad on the sheer rapture of it all.
His body, at least, seemed to understand, on some ancient, fundamental instinct, how to surrender itself, to lips and hands and the promises of pleasures to come, as he had once surrendered all his dreams to duty. Life had taught Thomas control. Now he was learning how to abandon it. Not a dignified lesson, but perhaps the most joyous. For Micha, he came apart, everything he was and everything he knew transformed into panting desire and frantic urgency, and, with the shreds of reason he had left to him, he called it paradise.
“Oh God,” gasped Thomas, the words flying from him, as heedless as swallows in springtime.
Micha froze. “Don’t say his fucking name.” A pause. “Say mine.”
“Micha.” Uncertain what Micha wanted from him, Thomas had left his arms spread where they had been pinned. He was desperate to reach out to his lover, but Micha had told him not to touch. So, instead, he tried to put it all in his voice, all the yearning and all the wonder. All the unleashed wantings he was only beginning to discover. “Oh Micha.”
Crouched over him like this, Micha seemed an extraordinary being, a wildling of shadow and fire, mercurial, cruel, tender, and beautiful. It struck Thomas as rather incredible, incredible and humbling, that he—the youngest, dullest, and shyest of all his father’s children—could be wanted by such a man.
Micha, clumsy again, made an abrupt, convulsive movement. His hand pressed downwards, beneath the waistband of Thomas’s trousers and, fumblingly, beneath his drawers, until it curled around Thomas’s stiff and straining cock. Thomas’s body ignited into shuddering ecstasy, and he babbled out Micha’s name, repeated like the most heartfelt prayer he had ever uttered. It was a searing kind of bliss, too beautiful and too terrible for shame, and that was all it took. The embrace of Micha’s hand.
Thomas threw back his head, the distant sky, bluer than any sky had ever been, the purity of it filling his eyes like tears. “Oh Micha ... I ... can’t ...” His back arched, he thrust his cock against Micha, and, in one wild moment, as sudden as summer lightning, Thomas came. It was not an experience unknown to him, but whatever he had felt of it before was mere shadows. He was too gloriously lost in his own body for anything close to thought, but his heart instinctively understood the difference—this was not merely pleasure, it was given pleasure, the kindest, sweetest gift he had ever received, and from the most extraordinary man. His spinning world had found again its centre, and Thomas, no longer lost, felt safe and whole again.
Micha, his eyes as blank as glass, caught Thomas’s spendings in his hand before he pulled abruptly away.
