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He had never known what the agreement was. It was an unbearable thing to ask him. If Thaniel tapped on Mori’s door at night, he always let him in, but he never touched Thaniel first, and never spoke about it; no endearments, no promises, and no discussion.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, Natasha Pulley
Think of someone you want to touch whom you cannot touch, someone forbidden. Think of a room where there is nothing except the two of you: still, you cannot touch them. Think of the heat between two hands about to touch, the language that exists in that silence.
Chelsea Hodson
December, 1884.
A week after Mori fits the new iron grate into the hearth in Six’s attic room, Thaniel kisses him in the kitchen. The curtains are closed. The candle guttering on the scrubbed table draws golden fingers along his cheekbones and the imperial arch of his brow. He’s telling a story about Japan in winter, how in the north the ice floes send creaking bellows over the landscape all night as the ocean shifts and thaws and refreezes under a crooked and lonely sky. He doesn’t tell it exactly like that, but Thaniel can hear it anyways – how the sky bruises the color of loneliness in the long winter evenings.
Thaniel wants to ask what he was doing there, anyways, in the middle of the brackish gut of a winter so cold the boats froze in the harbor, but Mori pauses and flicks his eyes at the ceiling.
There’s a thump and a thud from upstairs. Thaniel cocks his ear towards it. There are soap suds up to his elbows.
“She’s alright,” Mori tells him, quietly. “She just found the loose floor-board near the hearth. She’s going to use it to store food scraps from the table.”
Thaniel breathes through his teeth. “That’s very clever of her,” he says, finally, when he’s found the words.
Mori takes the wet teacup from his fingers. “Yes,” he says, simply. The cup moves slowly in his hands, the tea cloth twisting along its surface. “I’ll go to the shop tomorrow. She likes apples.”
“Apples.”
“The green ones,” Mori explains. He shifts to put the cup back in its cabinet, and when he turns around, Thaniel puts his arms around him. He smells like lemon, and faintly, the sweetness of gear oil. Thaniel’s mouth finds his throat, where the smell goes hotter.
After a moment, Mori’s hands cup his shoulders, then slide over the wings of his back. He tips backwards and Mori tips forwards, and then they’re kissing in the kitchen. The rice from their dinner is still cooling on the stove, and last time he looked outside it was starting to snow, and upstairs a six-year-old is contemplating having her own bed for the first time.
Mori’s mouth is a little wet, like he’d licked his bottom lip just before turning, and Thaniel feels that click into place all over him, like something rotating and fitting inside of him just the right way. He opens his mouth a little.
Mori’s foot slides an inch forward, between his legs.
Upstairs, there’s the sound of a creak and a whirr, and then a little girl’s voice shrieking.
Thaniel jumps so hard he cracks his elbow on the worktop.
“It’s alright,” Mori tells him. “Katsu was curious about her socks.” Six makes an otherworldly noise, like a rocket going off. “She doesn’t approve.”
Thaniel swallows. “I’m gathering that.” He licks his lips. He can taste Mori on them, and when he looks up, Mori is looking back at him. His eyes are dark.
He reaches for the tea towel. “She’ll be wanting you.”
“Yes,” Thaniel says. He wipes his palms on his waistcoat. Mori’s voice is like a gold so deep he thinks it could only be found very far into the earth, or at the bottom of the ocean. “Come up and say goodnight, later? Right now you’re just the bad man who made a sock-stealing octopus.”
Mori doesn’t turn around, but there’s softness in his voice when he says, “Goodnight, Thaniel.”
It takes a walk around the block and a cup of cocoa before Six regains her equilibrium enough to consider going back into her room, where Thaniel reads to her from the Japanese dictionary with his back against the door, book propped on his knee. Six watches him balefully from the foot of her bed, but when he marks their place for the evening with the ribbon, she looks at him speculatively and then announces she’s going to help Mori in the workshop tomorrow.
“You don’t have to do that, anymore,” Thaniel says, helplessly, jaw working.
“I know that,” she says, which means she doesn’t. “I was thinking only that I would, and if I did, then you could keep reading.”
“Oh,” Thaniel says. He looks at the ceiling, and when he can go on again, he says, “Well, how about we keep going anyways, since I need the practice?”
She eyes him. Thaniel smiles encouragingly at her, and she wrinkles her nose. “Well, if you need the practice, I suppose it’s okay.”
Thaniel looks down. The inky characters blur and sway for a moment and then he smiles and murmurs, “Thank you, Six.”
“You’re welcome,” she says solemnly.
By the time she falls asleep, the candles downstairs have been snuffed out. The kitchen smells waxy and clean. Thaniel gets himself a glass of water, then pours a second one. The house is quiet. He dumps the second glass of water and heads upstairs. His feet make soft thumps on the stairs, and the clockwork stars on the hallway ceiling flutter faintly, lit up by the same golden stuff that makes the fireflies glow. Mori had been putting them up for a while, one at a time, but he’d finished the same night he’d brought Six home.
His door is closed.
Thaniel looks at it, then turns and goes into his room. He sits on his bed, placing the glass of water down on the bedside table. There’s a water ring working its way towards the surface now, and he feels a twinge of guilt. Outside, an owl calls softly.
“Pull yourself together,” he thinks. When he realizes he’s said it out loud, he bites his lip, hard. He works the buttons on his waistcoat free, and pushes his braces down, and watches the moonlight make shards of light on the bare floor.
He sits down on the bed, again.
In the kitchen, Mori had slid his leg forward, until Thaniel could feel the heat of him through both of their clothes. His voice had been so clear and bright that Thaniel had tasted amber at the back of his throat.
He stands up and unclips his braces, toes his shoes off one by one, edges towards his bed, and in the same instant that he bends to sit, he pivots back toward his bedroom door instead.
He touches the door handle. There’s a fleck of rust on it, and it sloughs off against his thumbnail.
In the hallway, he taps his knuckles once, and then twice, on Mori’s bedroom door. It opens before he’s finished pulling his hand away.
“Were you standing on the other side?” Thaniel shakes his head, horrified at himself. “I mean – I meant. Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”
Mori steps back. The door arcs open. “Would you like to come in?”
Heat bursts across his cheeks. “I only wanted – to say goodnight.” He shakes his head again. “I mean, yes. Yes, I do. I would. Like to.”
Mori smiles. He’s wearing a loose sleep shirt and long johns. His collarbones are visible. “I wasn’t sure,” he says. His eyes cut away, and then he seems to force himself to clarify. “You change your mind too often.”
Thaniel pushes the door closed. He leans back against it, inviting. He’s never flirted with anyone before in his life. His eyes drop half-lidded anyways. “You keep saying that.”
Mori orbits back towards him, as if drawn in by a magnet. Its pair must have taken up space in his chest because Thaniel feels that way, too – scooped out, full of longing, easing into him.
Mori’s hands find his elbows, then draw their way up his biceps, his shoulders. He stops there, waiting.
Thaniel thinks that if he were trying any harder, he’d be handing him a written invitation. In gold ink.
Mori smiles like he heard him, and that’s what their mouths are doing when they meet – curving into two crooked smiles.
August, 1885.
“That doesn’t sound very exciting,” Six tells him, when he asks her if she’d like to watch the Perseids from the rooftop that night. “I can see the stars every night.”
Thaniel blinks. Mori looks down at his plate to hide his smile.
“I suppose that’s true,” Thaniel reasons. “This is special, though,” he says, and spears a piece of chicken with the end of his chopstick. Mori makes a wounded noise.
Six looks between the two of them. “I don’t think it is, very,” she says apologetically. “You can take me on the roof, though, Dad. I like going on the roof.”
“How generous,” Thaniel murmurs, looking down at his plate. He can count on one hand the number of times she’s called him that. He rubs at his chest, looking up at her and smiling. “I’d like that very much.”
Even Katsu joins them, winding his way up Mori’s shoulder and making clicking noises every time an owl or pigeon flutters on the nearby rooftops. Six wears herself out inspecting the generator under Mori’s watchful eye, and when she’s done, she puts her arms up for Thaniel. “Bedtime,” she announces, and he decides it was worth it after all. She doesn’t put her arms around him, but when he ducks her carefully down the rooftop stairs, she permits him to leave his hand on the back of her skull, gently cradling, all the way to her bedroom.
Later, after he’s finished tidying the kitchen and given his latest sheetwork one last musing glance, he knocks on Mori’s door. There’s a bottle of plum wine and two porcelain cups in his hands. “I’ve been stood up by a seven-year-old with more discerning taste,” he offers. “Plus,” he continues, looking away briefly before cutting his eyes back, “your room’s got the better view.”
Mori stands back to let him through. He’s down to his shirtsleeves, as if he’d been halfway through to undressing before he got distracted by something.
The window ledge isn’t really big enough for both of them. “We could go back up to the roof,” he says, when he sees Thaniel eyeing it.
Thaniel licks his lips. “We’ll wake Six, if we do that.”
Mori looks at him. Thaniel puts the cups and the bottle of plum wine down on the bedside table.
“Thaniel,” Mori says. It sounds somehow like a question and like the answer to a question.
“Kei.” He remembers the first time he’d said it. They’d been in bed, moving silently against each other. It had spilled out of his mouth like a stone he couldn’t keep inside of him any longer. Mori had stilled, only for a moment, and then he’d leveraged up on his palms and found Thaniel’s mouth with his own and they’d finished like that – together, breathing against each other’s lips.
Thaniel kisses him. It happens all at once – his mouth on Mori’s, his hand finding the surge of his jaw, his hips pushing forward and close. He doesn’t realize he’s shaking a little until Mori clutches him back, until he can feel his own stuttering pulse against Mori’s steady frame.
Thaniel moves them, pushing forward, feeling like a brute, but Mori’s fingers are steel strong on his shoulders and when their knees hit the bed Mori drops backwards first, an elegant undoing motion that Thaniel falls after.
Like this, he can feel Mori hard against him. He can feel Mori feel his own hardness, pressing into his belly, and when Mori rolls up against him, something hot and explosive surges up inside of him and breaks.
He shoves backwards until he’s on the floor, kneeling between Mori’s spread legs. His palms look huge against the neat shape of Mori’s thighs.
When he can bring himself to look up, Mori has leveraged forward onto his elbows and is watching him, but when their eyes meet, he looks away like he can’t stand it. He looks up at the ceiling instead, and his head drops backwards, dips between his shoulders, as if all of the fight has gone out of him.
Thaniel wants to ask him what he’s thinking but he can’t. He can’t think of anything beyond the way his fingers curve a path up the shape of Mori’s thighs, his hips, over to the front placket of buttons. Between his legs, Mori’s cock pushes against the fabric of his trousers. If Thaniel were to put his mouth on it, right now, he’d taste the heat of it.
Mori makes a guttural noise in the back of his throat, and his elbows drop out from under him.
“You -,” Thaniel says; his voice sounds too loud and too bright and too awful and he swallows the rest of the words back. He isn’t even sure what he was going to say. He works the buttons on Mori’s trousers and when he starts to slide them down, Mori raises his hips.
You’re beautiful, maybe, he thinks, looking at the angular lines of Mori’s body, the faint shape of his dusky cockhead against his thigh.
Above him, Mori leverages forward, until he’s sitting up. “I want to watch you.” His voice is a golden rumble barely discernable, but Thaniel hears him. The back of his neck flames. He puts his mouth on Mori’s thigh. He wants Mori to say it again, but if he gets too close to that thought, Mori will hear him, so he shoves forward an inch and presses his open mouth against the thick shape of Mori’s cock.
They’ve never done this before, and both of them make a shocked, hot little noise at the same time. Thaniel doesn’t close his mouth into a suck just yet; he can’t seem to stop pressing his parted lips all over; soft smudges of his mouth that leave damp licks of saliva in their wake.
Faintly, he realizes Mori’s thighs are trembling. He fits his fist against the base of Mori’s cock and presses his lips down over the head. Something sparks and fizzes in the back of his skull, then trips its way down his spine. The head of Mori’s cock drags over the flat of his tongue.
He presses forward, sliding his mouth along the shaft, pulling back to edge the wetness forward along with his lips. He realizes with a frenetic thrum then that his mouth is moving between Mori’s legs. If anyone saw them – there’s nothing to explain this. He’s sucking Mori’s cock. He’s on his knees, bobbing his mouth wetly over the length of Mori’s hard prick.
He closes his eyes, because the image of that feels like tiny explosions all over his body. Pinpricks of fireworks rising in him, making shatter lines out of his bones. When his mouth meets the curl of his fingers, he takes his hand away and slides down the rest of the way. Against the flat of his belly, his fingers flex and tremble.
When he blinks up, Mori is staring down at him. There are soft lines around his eyes. His hands are hovering above Thaniel’s head.
In a minute, he’s going to reach up and clasp his fingers around Mori’s palm. He pictures it: reaching up and taking Mori’s hand in his own, nudging it to rest on the top of his head.
Above him, Mori breathes out sharply through his nose. His hand falls in a soft crescendo, fingers dropping one after the other, to rest on the curve of Thaniel’s skull. His thumb outlines a print on his forehead.
Inside of Thaniel, the shatter lines crack. He makes a raw noise in the back of his throat, breathing out through his nose. In the quiet room, the noise sounds like a wounded animal; red shot through with streaks of grey.
Mori’s fingers tighten on his skull, gentling him. He doesn’t speak. After a moment, his other hand slides forward, along the curve of Thaniel’s jaw. His thumb brushes the corner of Thaniel’s stretched mouth. He opens wider and though Mori doesn’t exert any more pressure, the tip of his thumb hooks inside the rim of Thaniel’s mouth. He knows he’s being greedy, but he can’t seem to make himself stop.
They finish like that. Thaniel moves his mouth over the length of Mori’s cock and sometimes Mori presses his thumb or a finger against the seam of his lips and Thaniel’s lashes flutter. Mori’s hands are anchors on him, and by the end of it, Thaniel realizes he’s got his own palms flush against Mori’s flanks, like he’s trying to hold on. Like he can’t bring himself to let go.
Afterwards, Mori reaches for one of the porcelain cups and tips it towards him. “Spit,” he says.
Thaniel does. Then he wishes he hadn’t.
“Oh,” Mori says, quietly. Thaniel feels his face flame again. He studies the back of his hands on his thighs. He’s still kneeling. He knows he should stand up. He will in a moment, but not yet. Not just yet. He can’t bring himself to look at Mori, but then Mori is sliding off the bed next to him, trousers pulled up but still undone around his hips, and he’s tugging Thaniel’s face forward roughly and kissing him, pushing his tongue insistently inside of Thaniel’s mouth.
Delicately, Thaniel realizes Mori can taste himself.
He clutches at Mori’s shirt. “Kei.”
They never do get around to drinking the plum wine that night.
February, 1886.
In the dream, Six is calling for him from across the street. The cabs stretch monstrously above the rooftops and there are too many of them, and also the horses have red eyes and slavering mouths, which is around the time Thaniel realizes he’s dreaming. Six calls his name again. He’s only dreaming, though, and Six knows better than to cross a busy street.
She steps off the curb.
His eyes flash open, and Six is in his doorway. “Dad,” she says. “My bones hurt.”
A chill licks over his spine. Last month, she’d scraped her knee into a bloody pulp with the Haverly boys’ assistance, and when Thaniel told her she was being very brave while Mori plucked shards of stone and brick from the embedded mess, she’d shrugged. She’d probably have a scar there for the rest of her life.
He hasn’t even touched her when he feels the heat radiating off of her. He scoops her up and gamely ignores the shiver of fear when she doesn’t protest.
“That’s right, petal,” he tells her, nonsensically.
In the hallway, he knocks on Mori’s door, except he’s halfway up the stairs towards the tub and he hasn’t done that at all, but Mori’s door kicks open anyways. He’s pulling on a threadbare sweater and his eyes look soft and lined, like he’d gone from sleeping to dressing in the space of a breath.
He makes for the downstairs and Thaniel calls after him, helplessly.
“Sorry,” Mori says, stopping on the stairs. “Going for Dr. Haverly. Thought I said.”
Thaniel nods, but neither of them wait for him to see it.
Six makes a helpless little attempt at a shriek when he puts her in the cool bathwater. “I know,” he tells her, wringing a cloth against her forehead. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done to you, petal, I know.”
He recites what he can remember from the generator manual, and brushes her sweaty hair off her forehead, and waits for the charcoal thump and brighter yellow tread of Dr. Haverly and Mori coming back up the stairs.
In the hallway outside her bedroom, he rests his chin on his curled fingers. “Not even a little heads-up?” he says, quietly. Last weekend, Mori had crossed the back courtyard and discreetly pushed a thin box of Gurkha cigars through the fence into Dr. Haverly’s pleased hands.
When Thaniel had asked him about it, he’d shrugged and said he’d forgotten about them in his desk since last winter.
Mori frowns. “I wasn’t…,” he hesitates, “certain. I thought – I only suspected it was. A good idea.” He sounds awkward, his words half-finished fragments.
Thaniel breathes out through his nose. Once, he'd watched a man trip over the only warped floorboard on a train platform and clatter sideways off it because he’d looked speculatively at Six from the corner of his eye.
“You can tell me,” he says, angling a little towards him, so the back of his hand brushes Mori’s flank. “Even when you’re not certain.”
Mori’s quiet for a moment. From the threshold, they watch as Dr. Haverly convinces Six to let him push the thermometer into her mouth. His fingers flex and brush back against Thaniel’s knuckles. “I thought I had.”
November, 1887.
That morning, Mori had passed him a cup of tea in the workshop and said, offhandedly, that he was going on a trip for business next month and would likely be gone through the end of summer. Thaniel had nodded and said, “Oh.”
He’d had a boxing match in the afternoon, so they’d dropped Six and a packet of doughnuts from the bakery around the corner off with the Haverlys and walked to Thaniel’s gym together, their steps matching pace by pace. Thaniel had watched their shadows in the long afternoon sun. They had moved together like a crooked, four-legged beast.
The match was over in less than 45 seconds, and afterwards he’d crossed the rubber floor and lent his opponent a hand up. Fanshaw insisted on taking the whole lot of boxers for a drink at the pub across the street. Mori had stayed for one pint before he’d tipped his chin down and said quietly in Thaniel’s ear that he was going to go rescue Six from the Haverlys for the evening.
Thaniel had laughed, “I think you’ve got it the wrong way around.” Last weekend he’d found Six running the boys in drills along the side alley. They’d had perfect form when they saluted.
He’d looked around for his coat, but Mori had shaken his head. “Stay,” he’d said, and when Thaniel had started to protest, Fanshaw had slid another frothy ale in front of him and clapped him congratulatorily on the shoulder for the seventh time that evening, and he’d walked back alone much later under a sky the color of bone smoke. The winter fog blotted out the stars.
Now, the floorboard outside Mori’s door creaks, because he’s forgotten to sidestep it. He waits to see if that’ll be enough, but when the door stays resolutely closed, he brushes his knuckles along it, instead.
“Hello,” he says happily, when Mori’s face appears. There’s a candle lit on Mori’s bedside table, and it throws the room in soft circles of light. Amber touches the crest of his upper lip.
Mori swings the door open. He smiles with the crinkle of his eyes. “You had a good evening.”
Thaniel smiles back at him. He doesn’t have to say, “Better if you’d stayed,” because he’s already thought about saying it. Mori tugs him through the threshold by the elbow.
His feet aren’t exactly on board with that message, but he makes it through with Mori’s steadying and leans back against the door when it’s closed. The room tilts, just a little.
Mori considers him, then crosses to his wardrobe and pulls the extra pair of pajamas from the bottom drawer. Thaniel thinks about how if the police searched their house, there’d be no explanation for those pajamas. They’re half a foot too long for Mori’s legs.
Mori pauses with his hand on the wardrobe doors. His chest rises once, as if he’s taken a deep breath, but then he’s turning and saying quietly, “Come sit.”
“Kei,” Thaniel says, in a voice the color of lemons and gear oil. His skull rolls against the door. He pushes his braces off his shoulders. “Kei,” he says again. If they kissed right now, both of their mouths would taste like the ale from the pub.
Mori crosses to him and touches his shoulder. Thaniel stoops down and kisses him.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” he says, smiling. His breath hitches. Mori’s got his thumb on his hip. “We don’t have to say anything. I like it that way.”
Mori’s eyes go away, but only for a moment. He swallows and slides his thigh between Mori’s legs. “Kei?”
Mori’s cock is a firm pressure against his leg. He rubs against it, tentatively, still smiling, though the corner of his mouth – hurts. Just that point. Feels stretched and thin. But his bones feel loose and full of honeycomb, so when Mori looks back up at him, he can lean in and kiss him again, can guide him towards the bed, can shove his trousers down his thighs and hitch his shirt up, and fold forward over the bed, onto his knees, down to his elbows, reaching back to guide Mori’s hand to his flank, so he’ll hold him, so he won’t forget to hold him - close and without letting go.
When Mori moves inside of him, he feels all the breath stutter cleanly from him, and he pushes his mouth against the bed so that he won’t make any sound.
Afterwards, Mori reaches for a clean handkerchief from the drawer in his bedside table and draws it between Thaniel’s legs.
“It’s okay,” Thaniel says, not wanting to be a nuisance. He smiles. “I can do it.”
Mori lets him.
October, 1889.
The house in Cornwall creaks when the breeze goes through its open windows. Thaniel likes the sound. It’s the color of their morning tea when Mori makes it for the both of them and brings it to him in bed with the white sheets still fanned around his waist. Bowls of Peruvian limes are scattered around the house, and in the back garden, there’s a statue taller than him with corded bits of thread looped around its palms.
“Is it like the prayer rags?” Thaniel asks, scooping Katsu up before he can crawl a spindly pattern up the statue’s legs. It feels – dishonorable, for some reason.
Mori shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, like the words are unfamiliar. Thaniel supposes they are.
They find a crate of pithayas in the larder and when Thaniel splits one in half, Six makes a face at it and says, “That’s wrong.”
“Come on, petal,” Thaniel says, gently. “You know better than that. Just because it’s unfamiliar doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” she says, with an expressive tilt of her brows, a move she picked up from the Americans at the legation and expertly crafted to her own face somewhere between Knightsbridge and Cornwall.
“Alright,” Thaniel says, shrugging. “If you change your mind about giving it a try, you just let me know.”
He brings the other half to Mori, reading on a bench in the courtyard. There’s a copy of Middlemarch stashed against his leg. He’s forgotten most of the endings of the books he’d never read, so they’d spent one dusty morning in the bookshop on Filigree Street before they’d left again. Six had come home with an armful of manuals and had bumped her nose against Thaniel’s hip, just once, on the walk home.
“Boring?” He nods at the book, passing the pithaya half and a tea spoon to Mori.
Mori shakes his head. “I was – distracted,” he admits, not looking at Thaniel. He nods towards the trees. Thaniel looks out. In the thinning distance, there’s a patch of brown-tailed deer, nudging gently at the grass and occasionally flicking their ears. “They just – showed up,” Mori explains. “All of a sudden.”
“Oh,” Thaniel says. He sits on the bench beside Mori. “Out of nowhere, hm?”
“Yes,” Mori says. He presses his thigh back against Thaniel’s, a seam of warmth through their clothes. “Out of nowhere.”
Their bedrooms don’t have an adjoining door, so Thaniel’s slippers make soft, lilac-colored patters on the rug in the hallway that night. He taps, gently, on the door to Mori’s room and lets himself in when Mori’s amber voice calls out in answer.
The walls are painted cornflower blue. Mori hates it, but it reminds Thaniel of the sound of Six’s breathing when they first got her and they used to listen at her door, ears pressed to the wood and Mori’s fingers drawing circles on the small of his back.
Mori sits up in bed.
“Were you sleeping?” Thaniel asks. His fingers go to the sash on his dressing gown.
Mori shakes his head. “Thinking,” he says. His eyes track Thaniel’s hands, then climb up to his shoulders when Thaniel lets the robe fall to the floor. He smiles. Thaniel crawls up on the bed, on his hands and knees. Mori’s smile deepens; his eyes are like half-moons.
The first time he’d knocked on Mori’s door after Yokohama, Mori had been blinking awake when Thaniel had opened the door. “Are you alright?” he’d said, after Thaniel had stood in the threshold for too long, the sudden realization skidding over him that Mori had – before – always known to be waiting on the other side.
Now, sometimes Thaniel nudges him awake, inch by inch, with slow, middle-of-the-night kisses.
Tonight, though, Mori pushes the sheets to his waist and meets Thaniel in the middle of the bed, carding his fingers against Thaniel’s shorn skull, making a low noise in the back of his throat and kissing Thaniel back like he’s never done it before, like everything’s new again, even though they never really had a chance for things to get very familiar anyways.
They kiss on their knees until their mouths are smudged with it. Mori’s mouth goes the color of a plum when it’s kiss-bruised, and Thaniel has been tinkering lately with a bit of music that sounds just like that – the color of plums plushed to sweetness.
He drops back against the sheets and coaxes Mori on top of him. “I want you,” he says, and it’s – like being opened up from the inside out. His knee cocks out an angle. Mori thrusts between his legs. Lately he says things and realizes his mouth has run away from him again. It’s like a madness.
He’d stood in the legation and said, I can’t breathe when you’re not here, and now it’s like he can’t stop saying it. He passes the salt to him at dinner and their fingers brush and he has to stop himself from saying, You’re my favorite person in the whole world. He catches Mori falling asleep over his book in the study and can hardly bite his tongue on the words. I don’t want to leave you, he thinks, a hundred times a day, when his breath hitches in his chest.
Afterwards, Mori lays his head on Thaniel’s chest and listens to his heart. His hair is black as squid ink. Thaniel touches it and mouths the words, I love you silently, until he realizes he’s saying it aloud, but only because Mori presses his mouth to his chest and says it quietly back to him: “I love you, too.”
March, 1890.
The house on Filigree Street seems to breathe a sigh of relief when they return from Cornwall that spring.
“Don’t get too excited,” Thaniel tells the walls, privately, standing in the kitchen. Upstairs, Six is in a betting match with the eldest Haverly boy about who can throw a raven’s feather strong enough for it to reach next door’s rooftop. Mori had already managed to dissuade them from their original plan, which had miraculously involved a startling degree of glass crockery.
The bowl on the table is empty, but in the morning Mori will have already gone out for the good tea and lemons and the green apples Six likes and a loaf of soft bread and by the time Thaniel comes downstairs, the bowl will be full of lemons again and Mori will pass him a cup of tea and touch his hip, just once. Six won’t notice or, frankly, care.
He passes by the workshop where Mori is running a dustrag over the top of his desk. “Alright?”
“Yes,” Mori says, throwing a smile over his shoulder. “I brought your trunk upstairs,” he tells him, distractedly.
Thaniel shoves off from the threshold. “You didn’t have to do that,” he says, though that’s not entirely true, and they both know it. He gets winded going up the stairs empty-handed these days. The workshop is full of windows. He touches Mori on the elbow, just once. “Thank you.”
Upstairs, his trunk is set at the foot of his bed. He pauses against the door frame and wishes he’d remembered his cup of tea from the kitchen, if only for the steam. He goes to the windows, where swathes of sunlight catch the dust motes. When he moves into the light, it catches on his skin instead, and the lengths of his eyelashes.
He hears a soft sound from the doorway and turns. Mori’s knuckles are on the frame, gently tapping. In his other hand, he’s carrying a cup of tea. Behind his legs, his trunk is framed in the doorway.
“I thought I might,” he says, and touches the back of his neck.
Thaniel cocks his head.
Mori steps into the room. “Your room is bigger,” he says, after a moment. “We can switch the beds out, if you like. And I could still keep most of my clothes in my – in the wardrobe, in the other room. If you like.” He spreads his hands helplessly. “Whatever you like.”
Something swells inside of Thaniel. Something made of the color of the sky in Cornwall; and the dusky pink of Mori’s fingertips at night in bed, when he draws them over Thaniel’s belly and chest; and the electric green of Filigree Street cobblestones the first night he’d wound his crooked and dusty way to Mori’s door.
“I’d like that,” he says, simply, and Mori smiles. He pushes the door shut with the back of his heel.
When he kisses Thaniel, the room hums gold.
+++
The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you and that you’re standing in the doorway.
The Mountain Goats