Thomas’s head dropped in defeat against Micha’s shoulder. “You know I do.”
“Then say it.” Micha dug his hand into Thomas’s hair and pulled until Thomas gasped and looked up again. His eyes were wide, lust-drowned, faintly golden in the dim light. Micha put his mouth against the other man’s throat, silk and stubble and the beat of his blood, and branded kisses into his skin. “Say it.” Micha felt the catch of Thomas’s breath beneath his lips, the quick, wild flutter of his pulse, strong and fragile at the same time. Thomas’s skin tasted clean, like nothing, like his mouth, pure and perfect. He arched into Micha’s hold, shameless and heedless, a dazed moan slipping into the silence.
The utter ease of Thomas’s passion filled Micha with a kind of despair. It was too innocent, too unrestrained, much as his own had been before he had learned different lessons. He wanted it, knowing he did not deserve it, and knowing also it was not enough, for it was not the surrender he craved. “Say it.” But Thomas’s only response was a shuddering gasp that blossomed into a cry when Micha, lost to his own savage needs, bit him.
Micha jerked his head up and would have pulled away, but Thomas would not let him, his arms warm and tight around Micha’s body. There was a dull red mark pressed into the soft skin just above Thomas’s collarbone. Micha brushed it with a thumb, and Thomas quivered in response, an expectation of pain transformed into the beginnings ofpleasure.I leave those on your soul,Micha thought, with a twist of utter self-loathing. But he wanted that as well: to imprint himself on Thomas like a plague. To leave bruises on his skin and footsteps on his heart. To change someone else, as he had been changed.
A slight push was all it took, and they tumbled onto Thomas’s bed in a breathless collision of bodies, Micha still clinging like a vampire. He nestled a knee between Thomas’s spread legs and yanked hard enough on the dressing gown to send the buttons scattering to the corners of the room. Thomas, unconcerned at the fate of his clothing, brought his hands up to rest lightly on Micha’s hips. The delicate curl of his fingers reminded Micha of a potter at work, the touch at once protective and assured, as though Micha could perhaps be fashioned afresh in kindness at the centre of the world’s ever-spinning wheel.
He shuddered, for a moment suspended there between Thomas’s hands, and then he grabbed both wrists and bore them down against the quilted coverlet. “Say it.” His voice shook and then broke on a note of pleading. “Why won’t you say it? You want this. Not them. This.” With every word, he shoved Thomas’s hands harder against the bed, the bones grinding beneath his thumbs.
“Micha.” The other man spoke so gently that Micha only stared at him, his own name having become briefly incomprehensible. Then Thomas pushed against him, the movement so swift and sudden that Micha did not even think to fight against it. He sat up on the edge of the bed, and Micha went tumbling unceremoniously to the floor between his legs. Leaning down, Thomas cupped his jaw, his hands as soft as his voice. “Micha, what I want is not in question.”
I know what you want.
Isidore strips me slowly beneath the turquoise sky in the golden light. His mouth and his fingers caress every fresh discovery, every little piece of me, as though he is Raleigh, and I am El Dorado. I am claimed by his touches, mapped and made precious. I tremble for him because I cannot help myself and because it makes his eyes spark like green fires. His kisses are breathless things against my shivering skin.
I know I should not want this, should not allow it, but the wanting and knowing are their own incitement. And the more my mind resists, the more my body surrenders, the more it makes itself an instrument for his playing, the more it twists and turns beneath his hands, the more my throat makes music, music just for Isidore, profane and lovely, its notes thrown only to the unwatching sun.
He lays me out like a maiden. The willow fronds cast shadows in the shapes of fingers over everything that Isidore has laid bare, my body, my heart, my soul, the truth of me.
Micha was shaking helplessly with some terrible mixture of fear, desire, and memory. Tremors, hot and cold, rushed across his skin and buried under it like worms. He turned his face into Thomas’s palm and closed his eyes. He belonged here, vanquished and in pieces, at Thomas’s feet. But, after a moment, Thomas slipped down beside him, his long legs folded around Micha’s as though they knelt in mutual prayer, his body bringing with it a deep and solid warmth. The only certainty in a universe otherwise as random as petals upon the breeze.
They sat there a long time in silence. Then Thomas leaned in and brushed his lips over the stubble-rough edge of Micha’s jaw. “I missed you.”
Micha let out a breath he did not know he had been holding, the heat of it dissipating in ripples over Thomas’s hand. “Why?” he muttered. “Why must you make me defenceless?”
“You aren’t.”
It had all seemed so simple that day in the woods, in the shadow of the white horse. A mere seduction of the skin. An exchange of services: sex for power. But, perhaps, even then it had been too late, the damage done, the wound too deep for cure, for the moment they had begun to touch each other, Micha had wanted Thomas, and the knowledge had shattered him utterly. As it shattered him now. He kissed the soft, secret interior of Thomas’s palm and slowly opened his eyes. “I’ll give you everything.” He paused. “But you won’t want me.”
Thomas’s fingers stroked lightly over his skin. “I do.”
Micha took a deep breath and hurled his confession like a spear. “I read your journal. I always knew.”
Thomas stilled.
“About Edward. And about you. And the way you felt about me. It wasn’t some great mystical fucking confluence of sodomites. I knew.”
“But in the woods you ... the way you ...” Thomas put the hand that had once touched Micha over his mouth. “Why would you do that with me? To me? And I thought—God, what a fool I am.”
“You liked it well enough.”
“I loved it. It was beautiful. And you were different that day.”
It was so typical of Thomas. He did not even try to shield his heart. He loved fearlessly and utterly, and it made Micha ache with longing. He pushed himself away and moved restlessly, almost mindlessly, to a corner of the room, like a beast at bay. “I don’t know why you can’t be just like everyone else. You could have fucked me, and it would have been fine. But you had to make me feel everything. You had to fall in love with me. Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
Thomas had not moved. “I don’t understand. If you didn’t want me, what did you want?”
“I don’t know. Power. Control. Proof that you were human, weak and wicked.” Micha put his head in his hands. “But all you did was make me want you back. It’s all you’ve ever done, and I hate it. I hate you.”
Love me. Give yourself to me.
He opens me with slickened fingers, and the shock of it makes the breath catch behind my teeth. He murmurs to me over the rushing of the river and the rustle of the willow. His shadow falls over me first, then his kisses, like sun dapples on my skin. His mouth is a circle of warmth, full of words and promises, and his fingers glide, press, twist, glide, press, twist until I learn to want them. Until I am mad with wanting. I spread myself soul-wide upon the grass for Isidore. The flush stands bright upon his pale face. Sweat glimmers at his brow and on his upper lip. And he watches me as though he cannot look away. As though I am the brightest star in his vast and dazzling universe.
By the time he presses into me, I am breathless with begging for him, senseless with pleasure. Our bodies join like our tangled hands, like they were made to fit together, and there’s no pain, no uncertainty, just the closeness of his body, and the rough rhythm of his breath, and the slowly building furnace of our desire.
Isidore sheds his poise like a selkie’s skin. He is savage and glittering and desperate. He kisses me like he wants to drown in my mouth. He fucks me like my body is a shrine he wants to desecrate. And it’s beautiful. He’s beautiful.
