Micha huffed out a sigh. “It’s stupid. It was always stupid.”
“No more ridiculous, surely, than a priest who wishes to see deserts and lie with men.”
“You could lie with a man in the desert. That might bring about the apocalypse.”
Thomas laughed. He reached out a hand and let Micha’s curls run through his fingers. They twisted there like little snakes, as though they wanted to keep him captive. “Please. I won’t insist. But I would like to know something of you.”
“Access to my body does not give you any right to my heart.”
“Are they not one and the same?”
“No.”
“As you wish.”
Thomas closed his eyes again and let the subject die. Unexpectedly, he felt Micha’s lips on his.
“I wanted,” whispered Micha, against his mouth, “I wanted ... to be someone to come home to. That’s all.”
Chapter 14
Micha was in hell. It was not supposed to be like this. The opium was the barrier between his body and anything it might have to feel. And yet, somehow, he was breached. Thomas had barely laid hands on him, but he had given of himself so utterly that it had not mattered. Every sound he’d made was seared into Micha’s skin like a brand. His mouth tasted of Thomas’s mouth. The skin on his palms, where he had touched the untouched, felt raw. He’d drugged himself into a stupor, but still the memory would not release its hold on him. It was not a thing of the mind. It was a thing of the body, indelible somehow, written into him and onto him, as surely as Isidore and everyone who had taken Micha since. But Thomas was unblurring, the freshest, the deepest and brightest, as though he had drenched Micha in sunlight.
Micha lay in bed, waiting for the laudanum to help him, but it felt as though ants were crawling inside his skin. Edward’s paintings swarmed across his vision. In a blur of too-brilliant colour, he saw Thomas’s body arching red-gold under his own, his hair spilled across leaves only one shade lighter, pale hands clutching at nothing, gleaming like the moon. That night, for the first time in months or even years, Micha touched himself by choice. His flesh responded only distantly, like the bells that used to chime daily over the gables of Oxford. He wrapped a hand around his half-stirring prick, imagining it was Thomas’s hand that touched him or Thomas’s prick he touched, but his ardour was a guttering thing, and both hand andprick were too familiar to inspire anything beyond contempt. He raked his nails over the head of his cock until he hissed. That, at least, he felt.
He gave up. He wanted, but not this.
He wondered what it had been like for Isidore the first time they had lain together. If Isidore had watched the wonder dawn in Micha’s eyes as today he had watched it dawn in Thomas’s. And felt the power of it, so terrifyingly sweet. Micha tugged the covers over his head and curled in on the memories, trying to smother them in heat and darkness.
He did not want to want.
He had chosen his craving.
But Thomas had made him into a world. A whole universe, star-studded with kisses.
Micha could still not entirely untangle the impulse that had made him yield himself. Thomas’s grief. The white horse. The empty palms of history. He had thought, grinding Thomas into the oak tree, forcing their mouths together, that he would take something from him. But all Thomas had done was give and give and give. Isidore had said there was no sin or shame in love. It was not until Thomas that Micha had come close to believing it.
The next evening, they attended the first meeting of the Nettlefield Reading Group, which was held up at Chalfont Manor, or “the big house,” as most of the village residents called it. They walked there together through the evening haze, Micha slouching along, doing his best to appear as if nothing had happened, and Thomas practically bouncing. The man had an absolutely ridiculous glow about him and a smile that kept slipping onto his lips like a guest who refused to go home.
Micha felt annoyed and pleased and absurd. “If you turn up for an evening of improving literature looking like that, they’ll think you’ve been at the communion wine.”
“Like what?” asked Thomas, whose eyes brightened as they alighted upon Micha.
Micha made an ill-conceived gesture. “Like ... that. All happy for no reason.”
“Is happiness a sin now?”
“You tell me.”
Thomas made a visible effort to contain himself. “I’m sorry. I just feel so very blessed.”
Blessed? How could he possibly. “From one ...” Micha made another ill-conceived gesture, and Thomas went pink to the tips of his ears.
“Not just that,” he said, quickly, “though it was lovely. Everything. You. Being with you. Knowing I am not utterly alone. And feeling, for perhaps the first time in my life, truly myself.”
“And how are you squaring this with your God?”
“I’m not.”
