He pressed his fingernails into the palms of his hands. His heart was beating too fast. Unspecific anxieties gathered inside him like carrion birds. He paced. He trembled. He paced some more. He started weaving a pattern between rooms, counting his footsteps as they resounded against the floorboards.
The walls pressed in around him, like a crowd, like an unwanted lover, squeezing the air from his lungs. Sweat broke out across his skin. He reeled to one of the windows in the garden room and tried to yank it open. There was not enough air in the world to let him breathe.
And then he saw.
Thomas outside. In the last of the light. A man caught between twilight and starlight, delineated in the deepest silver and the faintest gold. He was in his shirtsleeves, armed with a wooden sword, teachingHope to fence. They danced back and forth across the grass. Madame Defleur’s daughter sat curled on a nearby bench, watching them with amusement.
Though Micha had lost the will to struggle with it, the window perversely swung open, and the room filled up with the clack of swords and distant voices.
“En garde, varlet.”
“Hope, please do not call Mr. Mandeville a varlet.”
But Thomas was laughing. “A challenge. On my life.”
“And I will answer it!”
They met again in a clash of blades, Hope coming at him with far more aggression than technique, and Thomas falling back, Micha thought, because he was the sort of generous idiot who would do that.
He caught for the window and slammed it shut again.
Then he went to his room and took some laudanum.
Took more than he had intended because when next he stirred from his dull, dreamless stupor it was full dark. He pulled himself upright on the bed and tried to shake off the aches and the lethargy. There was just enough opium still in his system that Edward Mandeville’s paintings glowed through the gloom like gemstones.
It was too late, and Micha’s mind was too disordered for it to be remotely sensible for him to seek out Thomas. But he went anyway, stumbling his way through the dark towards the faint gleam beneath Thomas’s bedroom door.
Thomas answered his knock swiftly. He was clad in a startling multicoloured cotton print dressing gown. His expression was somewhat guarded, but hope flashed in his eyes, as bright as spring.
“A present from George,” he explained, gesturing at himself in response to an expression Micha had not quite been swift enough to conceal.
“It’s ghastly. And now I really do know all your secrets.”
There was an uncertain pause.
“Did you want something, Micha?”
“Yes.” He stepped forward and Thomas stepped back and it was just like in their forest except this time everything was different. Micha kicked the door closed behind him. “Yes.” He caught Thomas’s face between his palms and claimed his mouth. “Yes.”
Thomas put his hands on Micha’s shoulders, as though he was not sure whether he wanted to push him away or pull him closer. But then Micha kissed him, as he had once been kissed a lifetime ago on a golden afternoon in Oxford. All the dreams of youth and hopes of age, promises spilling from his silent tongue, worlds and lifetimes spun on a thread of breath. Since leaving London, Micha had seen Isidore in only half-dreamed fragments.
But he felt a trace of him now, an echo in the kiss that connected them—Micha, Isidore, Thomas—like a gift, or a curse, or a whisper rippling across the years.
And Thomas yielded, just as Micha had yielded, with only the softest of noises, spilled wanton as communion wine against Micha’s mouth. It became an embrace then, two bodies melting together like new-made shadows in the flickering lamplight, lips clinging to lips, hands to hands, as they learned on instinct alone the deep lessons of each other’s flesh. Micha shuddered, half-lost, half-found, and so very afraid. Then he closed his eyes, and everything was gone, drowned in the dark, sweet Lethe of Thomas. All the faceless hands and the nameless faces, ghosts, and reflections of nothing, as hollow as Micha’s poppy-drenched self.
“Micha, I—” Words, pressed breathless to his mouth.
Micha’s fingers curled into Thomas’s arms, the harshness mirrored in his voice. “You want this.”
“Yes but—”
“You want this.”
There is no sin or shame in this. This is what Isidore tells me.
He calls it Mesopotamia, this secluded island where the Cherwell splits, sun-dappled and dreamy with celandines and willow trees. The sky is acerulean Aegean, the river a snake of silver. And Isidore holds strawberries to my lips. The juices run in damp garnets down his fingers.
His eyes are greener than the grass, as bright as diamonds. He is an angel of alabaster and gold, and he kisses me, he kisses me, and I think I might die on the wonder of it. Sunlight and strawberries. But there is a roughness to his mouth that thrills me in the deepest, darkest ways. When his tongue pushes between my lips, it is a shudderingly perfect violation, and I moan, I moan so wantonly he kisses me harder, until his mouth shapes mine, forces mine, until I feel the strength of him like a shadow in all his touching. And it is the sweetest shame I have ever known.
