“It’s all connected. There is no shame in love.” Micha felt motion beside him. And Thomas’s hands moving between his legs, cleaning him with ... something. He blinked. “That better not be my shirt.”
“Mine, I think. And not likely wearable, regardless, since you tore it off me.”
Micha smiled, just a little, feeling absurd and impossibly content, even knowing the hell that waited for him on the other side of dawn. Thomas cast the shirt aside and lay down again, elegantly and unselfconsciously naked, his sweat-sheened skin shining as softly as the moon. Micha hesitated a moment and then sidled closer. He put his head on Thomas’s chest, over his steadily beating heart, and Thomas slipped an arm around him, drawing him closer still.
For a long time, they were silent.
Thomas’s fingertips traced idle curlicues over Micha’s back. “That was beautiful, Micha.”
“Oh, yes, sodomy’s great. No wonder they keep outlawing it.”
“You know”—Thomas’s eyes flared with sudden mirth—“your manners improve considerably during coitus.”
“My what?”
“You become quite polite, if insistent.”
“Fuck off.” Thomas laughed, and the sound wrapped itself around Micha’s heart like Mayday ribbons. “It’s bad form to mock a man for the things he says in the heat of the moment.”
“I would never mock you.”
“What’s this then?”
“Teasing. And, besides, I liked it. I liked it very well indeed.”
Micha felt heat rise to his cheeks again. “So did I.”
Silence claimed them once more. The lamp had burned low. The room filled up with shadows. Outside, the world was dark and cold, sunrise a still too-distant promise, yet the possibility of morning pressed against Micha’s heart, heavy as an iron bar. He was tired, but he feared sleeping and the loss of these few scant hours.
“Don’t stop touching me.” His voice broke the stillness like a stone dropped into a well. “Please.”
Thomas’s arms tightened around him. Their legs entwined. The fingers that had so lightly caressed Micha’s skin became a palm instead, moving across his back as strong and inevitable as waves against the shore.
But it was not enough. He was falling helplessly into the future. “Thomas. What ... what will become of us?”
There was a pause. “What do you mean? I will not abandon you, as Isidore did.”
Micha sighed. “He didn’t abandon me. I just became a choice he couldn’t make. Is it so different for you?”
Something Micha could not quite interpret flickered across Thomas’s face. “You know,” he said softly, “the strange thing is that I feel closer to God than I ever have, in ways I would never have understood before we met. But I can’t remain a priest. Not now.”
“Because of me?”
“Because of me. It wouldn’t feel right, attempting to guide others to the grace of God, when I would be seen as excluded from it.”
For someone who had felt so little for so long, Micha was now feeling far too much. And much of it was guilt. Shame. Terrible reliefthat Thomas would still be his. “There’s nothing in the Bible against what we are, you know. Isidore told me.”
“He’s not wrong,” agreed Thomas. “And neither are we. But I would be living in sin, not because we’re both men, but because ...”
“Because we’re violating the sacred covenant of marriage, I know.”
“I’d marry you in a heartbeat, Micha. If I could.”
Micha tried to laugh it off. It was, after all, an impossibility and, therefore, not worth squandering either thought or dreams upon. But it was something that Isidore—either too practical or less romantic than he seemed—had never said to him, never offered. Even as an impossible dream. “Fuck,” he said. “I hate that you have to give up everything just to be with me.”
“Not everything. I mean”—Thomas gave a pained smile—“in the spirit of honesty, I’ve never been much of a priest.”
“That’s not true.” The modes of giving comfort had long since been lost to Micha. But he was rediscovering them now. For Thomas. “I think you’re so concerned with being a priest that you forget to be a man. Or a human being rather.”
