But then he unfolded the note and read it. It was in the village apothecary’s scrawl. He got immediately to his feet, dropping the note onto the table. “I’m afraid I’ll miss dinner. Mr. Farleigh has taken a turn for the worse.” Everyone at the table murmured the appropriate words of concern. Phillip cast him a meaningful glance, but didn’t follow, and Ben was left to his duties alone.
Dinner was going to be every bit as bad as could be expected. Without Ben, Phillip was left presiding over a table of people who seemed determined to be merry. Phillip felt about as merry as a marble bust.
“Hartley, tell the story of that time you had to rescue me from the tree,” Miss Crawford said, a twinkle in her eyes.
“Do you mean the time you got chased into a tree by a lamb?”
“Be fair, Hart. It was a very frightening lamb.”
Mr. Hartley Sedgwick then proceeded to regale the table with a tale that made both Miss Crawford and himself look amusingly hapless and Ben heroically competent. Mrs. Howard was wiping tears of laughter from her eyes and Walsh sat back contentedly in his chair, cradling his wineglass easily in his hand.
Everything would have been a good deal more manageable if Alice Crawford weren’t so damned charming, if he could have pretended that he was the inadvertent means of impoverishing some kind of rural villainess. He ought to have known that any friend of Ben’s would be a paragon.
Since there was no hostess, they all retired to the drawing room at the same time. Walsh materialized by Miss Crawford’s side to help her from the table, and Hartley seemed occupied in brushing lint off his coat, leaving Phillip and Mrs. Howard to leave the dining room together.
Phillip had at first been slightly annoyed that Walsh was throwing Mrs. Howard at him. It could have been hideously awkward if Mrs. Howard hadn’t taken it in stride. “Don’t mind my brother,” she whispered. “He can’t help himself.”
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Was everyone determined to be gracious and charming when all Phillip wanted to do was scowl? As he walked past Ben’s empty chair, he saw the note that had called Ben away from the table. He palmed it, not certain what to do. Once he had settled Mrs. Walsh in the drawing room, he unfolded it, hoping that the sender of the note wrote the kind of hand that managed to stay still. But he had no such luck: the note had been written hastily with what looked like an unsharpened pencil, so the writing wiggled and blurred its way across the page.
“If you’ll excuse me,” he said to his guests. He was being a terrible host, but he didn’t care. “I ought to see to the children.”
He found Ned once again reading aloud from Robinson Crusoe. When Jamie saw his father in the doorway, he shifted wordlessly to the side, making room in his bed for Phillip. Phillip squeezed in, and Jamie dropped his head sleepily to Phillip’s shoulder. In the other bed, Peggy was already nodding off. When Ned reached what sounded like the end of a chapter, Phillip cleared his throat. “Mr. Sedgwick was called away urgently, and he left this note. Would you mind reading it for me? My eyes aren’t up to the task. They, ah, never are.”
Ned’s eyes opened wide, but he took the paper Phillip handed him. “‘Dear Mr. Sedgwick,’” he read. “‘Mr. Farleigh has taken a turn. I doubt he will last the night. Mrs. Farleigh has asked for you.’” He put the note down. “It’s signed Davis. He’s the apothecary some of the tenants use.” The boy’s forehead creased with thought. “But the Farleighs don’t have money for Mr. Davis.”
“I called on him the other day and asked that he attend Mr. Farleigh and send the bill to me.” He hadn’t meant anyone to find out. He felt like he was getting too involved with people he’d soon be far away from.
“That was kind. Here’s your note back,” he said, passing the folded square to Phillip. “Do you need spectacles, Father?” He peered curiously at Phillip, and Phillip saw that Ned knew exactly what was wrong with his eyes.
“Alas, it’s not something spectacles can solve,” he said, glancing at Jamie. But Jamie was already asleep, his head pillowed on Phillip’s shoulder. Peggy, too, had fallen asleep. Ned closed the book, whispered good night, and retired to his own bedroom next door. Phillip stayed in Jamie’s bed for a while, listening to the sound of the children’s breathing.
The night was clear and warm, still and moonless, as Ben carefully picked his way along the narrow lane. He arrived at the farm as the apothecary was leaving.
“I told Mrs. Farleigh I’d come back in the morning,” the apothecary said. He had the weary look of a man who had been awake far too long and with little to show for it. “There’s nothing I can do but give him laudanum.” He sighed. This was not the first time he and Ben had met at the home of the ill or dying. “He’s nearly eighty,” he said, as if that made death more palatable. And it did, in a way; people several degrees away from death tended to find comfort in the idea that the departed had lived out his full allotment of time on earth. The nearest mourners never did. There was only scant comfort for them, and Ben knew it too well.
“And he’s been suffering.” This was Ben’s part in the litany, the pretense that death was acceptable if it relieved pain. This ritual dispensed with, the two men nodded at one another, the apothecary left, and Ben went into the eerily still farmhouse. Tonight there wasn’t even the stale scent of cooking or the crackle of an unseasonable fire. He found Mrs. Farleigh where he knew she would be, by her husband’s bedside. He wordlessly sat beside her and waited.
There was nothing to do but sit. He offered to pray with her, but she shook her head, and they both knew there would be time enough for prayers in the following days. But he couldn’t leave her alone. Eventually a neighbor or relation would arrive, and when Mr. Farleigh died, it would be the women who laid him out. It would be the women who had the work to do. All Ben had to do was bury this poor woman’s husband.
All he had to do was watch as this woman had half her soul wrenched away. It didn’t matter that he was old; it didn’t matter that he had been sick; it didn’t matter that she believed he’d be in a heaven more vivid and concrete than Ben could muster up any faith in. She was still going to lose him.
So he sat, giving her his presence while knowing it was inadequate, as so many necessary gestures were. He watched the dying man’s chest rise and fall, his ragged breaths coming too irregularly. He remembered every other sickbed he had attended, every other person he had watched leave this earth, every mourner they had left behind, broken, incomplete, shattered.
He thought of Phillip, who had lost a wife but had also suffered a loss he couldn’t even talk about because it didn’t have a name. He thought about his father, who had also endured two losses—Ben’s mother and then Will’s mother. That second loss didn’t have a name either. And maybe Ben had been quick to dismiss it as less than the loss of an actual wife. But Alton Sedgwick’s grief had been real as he watched Will’s mother grow weaker and paler until she could barely hold the blood-soaked handkerchief to her mouth. He ought to have done better by his father by recognizing that his grief may have affected his ability to care for his children. Shortly before dawn, the old man’s breathing stopped entirely, and Mrs. Farleigh went perfectly still. Ben took her hand—another necessary but inadequate gesture—and recited the Psalm everyone always relied on at these times. Had anyone held Phillip’s hand? Had anyone held his father’s?
Would anyone hold his own when Phillip was taken from him? It was a senseless question, because he would never be with Phillip the way Mr. and Mrs. Farleigh had been together.
They only had the present. But they needed the present. Necessary but inadequate, his tired, overwrought mind recited back to him.
By first light, neighbors had arrived, and Ben left, promising to return in the evening.
Chapter Eighteen
Phillip would have waited downstairs for Ben’s return, if such behavior might have gone unremarked in a household that now seemed to teem with servants and guests. Instead, he left his bedroom door open, knowing he would hear Ben’s footsteps when t
he man returned home. He didn’t even dress for bed, wanting to be ready to go to Ben, if Ben needed him. But hours passed and clocks chimed and eventually Phillip dozed off in his chair. He woke at the sound of careful steps in the corridor and sprang to his feet.
In the scant morning light, he could see Ben poised by the door to his own bedchamber. His hand was on the latch, but he paused and looked over his shoulder at the snick of Phillip shutting his door behind him.
“You’re back,” Phillip whispered, when he was near enough to be heard. Ben had purple half-moons beneath his eyes and a ragged, worn-out look. “Is all well?”
“Mr. Farleigh died a few hours ago,” Ben whispered, stepping into his room and waving Phillip in.
“I’m so sorry.”
Ben made a gesture that struck Phillip as very . . . clerical. It was halfway between a shrug and a nod, and seemed to acknowledge Phillip’s sympathy without making a fuss. Phillip realized Ben, for all his youth, for all his good humor and abundant cheer, was practiced in this situation.
When the door shut behind them, Phillip drew Ben close, trying to offer whatever small mote of comfort or understanding or even fellowship he could. Ben felt solid in his arms, strong and broad and hearty, but the way he sighed as he sank against Phillip’s chest made Phillip feel like he was holding something unspeakably fragile.
It was Ben who reached behind Phillip and turned the key in the lock; it was Ben who changed the embrace to something warmer, kissing below Phillip’s ear, sliding his hands to Phillip’s hips.
“You must be tired. We don’t need to,” Phillip said, but it likely didn’t sound terribly convincing because at the moment Ben had him pressed against the closed door, their bodies flush together and their mouths a hair’s breadth apart.
“I lost track of where want crosses into need a while ago, Phillip. But this feels a lot like need. I need to be with you.” He pushed his hips forward, as if Phillip needed this explained to him. “Together with you.”
Phillip’s blood heated. “That can be arranged,” he said gruffly before cupping Ben’s face in his hands and kissing him. Ben seemed to melt into his embrace, his strong body going almost boneless in Phillip’s arms.
“We don’t need to fuck,” Phillip growled. The silence stretched long enough for Phillip to worry that he had shocked Sedgwick with his language. “There are people who don’t, you know. And that’s enough.”
Ben nodded. “I want to fuck.”
Oh God. He somehow made the word sound sweet and filthy all at once, and it went straight to Phillip’s groin. “I want that too,” he whispered, and tipped Ben’s chin up for a kiss. He wanted everything. He wanted closeness and honesty and safety and time, and out of those the first two were the only things he could even partly manage.
They fell onto the bed, clothes in a heap on the floor, Ben’s weight a welcome presence on top of Phillip.
“Yes,” Phillip said, arching helplessly up towards Sedgwick’s body. At the sweep of Ben’s tongue inside his mouth, Phillip let himself acknowledge exactly what he wanted. “I want you inside me,” he said.
The other man went still, and Phillip feared he had miscalculated. “I thought we’d do it the other way around,” Ben said, his voice hardly more than a whisper.
Phillip ran his hand up Ben’s back. “So had I, at first.” Now they were both whispering. “And I’ve never . . . I’ve never been the receiving party.” Which seemed a laughably formal way to discuss getting buggered but Phillip found himself wishing for lovelier language than he knew.
“But you want to?”
Phillip’s chest felt tight. “With you, yes.” It shouldn’t cost so much to admit it. Hell, it shouldn’t feel like an admission at all. He had fucked men and they had liked it; he didn’t think any less of them for it, but it seemed too open, too vulnerable, for Phillip himself to actually want. With Ben it didn’t matter, though—he was already about as vulnerable as a person could get; mere physical vulnerability hardly seemed to signify.
“Well, I’ve never been either party, so it seems only right and proper that you ought to do it to me first. That way I at least know something of what I’m doing when we do it the other way around.”
There would be another time. Phillip’s mind latched on to that with disproportionate relief. “All right,” he said. “I’ll fuck you, then.” He felt Ben’s cock twitch against his belly. “You like when I talk like that?”
“I like everything about this.” Ben kissed Phillip’s neck, then his collarbone. “I like you. So much.”
Phillip continued smoothing his hands up and down Ben’s back, as if soothing him, but really he was the one who needed soothing. He felt that this would be irrevocable, that this next hour or so would either burn every bridge he hadn’t yet destroyed, or build new ones to places he hadn’t ever been.
He rolled them over and felt Ben’s sigh of pleasure as Phillip settled over him. Phillip kissed each of Ben’s palms in turn before holding his hands to the mattress and kissing him deeply on the mouth. He kissed down Ben’s body, licking the scruffy underside of his jaw and sucking on the place where his shoulder met his neck.
Ben sighed, resting his hand on Phillip’s head. Phillip flicked his tongue over one flat, tawny nipple and felt it pebble beneath his touch. Ben’s hand tightened in his hair. Phillip ran his lips along the taut muscles of Ben’s chest and abdomen. He tried to make every touch, every kiss, every caress into an offering, and he knew it fell short. But he kept doing it anyway.
Ben was, frankly, slightly concerned. Even though he devoted an unconscionable amount of time over the past week to imagining Phillip inside him, the first touch of Phillip’s callused fingers against the skin below his bollocks made him shiver in a way that wasn’t entirely pleasurable. Even the warm wet heaven of Phillip’s mouth on his cock wasn’t enough to completely distract him from his misgivings.
When Phillip produced a jar of some kind of salve from his clothes press, Ben nearly changed his mind. But then Phillip sat on the edge of the bed and kissed Ben’s knee. “There are a lot of other things we can do,” he whispered.
Ben shook his head. He knew Phillip would be satisfied with more of what they had already done. But Ben wanted this. It was just him and Phillip. There was nothing about this act that could be scarier than actually falling in love with the knowledge that they would soon be parted—that, hell, everyone was parted, everyone lost one another at the end. “I want you,” he said, smiling despite himself. When Phillip returned to stroking slick fingers over his entrance, Ben let himself relax into the touch. And when Phillip slid a finger inside him, Ben was able to accept it after only the barest moment of hesitation.
But then—“Oh, hell,” he groaned when Phillip slid another finger inside and did something that made Ben feel like he had been lit up like fireworks.
“Yes,” Phillip urged. “Yes. That’s why I wanted you to fuck me. That,” he said, as his fingertips twisted over that place again. “Oh God, look at you.” Phillip’s eyes were darting between Ben’s face and where his fingers slid in and out of Ben’s body. “Yes, just like that. Let me in.”
That was what Ben wanted too. He tried to relax even further into the sensation. “I want more.”
“Not yet. I don’t want to hurt you.” He slid another finger in and pulled at Ben’s cock with his other hand. “You’re beautiful.”
And Ben felt beautiful, which had to be a silly thing to think about oneself especially with another man’s hand halfway inside him, but with Phillip’s gaze on him like that, how could he doubt it? “Now,” he pleaded, lifting his hips in an effort to accept more of Phillip’s fingers. The sensation was intense; it was too much and yet he wanted more of it. He wanted everything Phillip had to give.
Phillip made a noise that was awfully close to a growl and slicked himself up with the salve. When he brushed the thick head of his erection against Ben’s body, Ben had another moment of near panic.
Then Phillip pulled
away. “Roll over,” he ordered in that commanding but gentle tone of voice Ben loved so much.
“Yes, Captain,” he said as he turned over, and was rewarded with another growl. Phillip pulled Ben’s hips up and used his knees to spread Ben’s legs a bit further, and that slight show of command made Ben feel that he was safe, in good, experienced hands. Phillip’s hands stroked down Ben’s back, his lips skimming kisses along Ben’s neck and shoulder. This time, when Phillip started to press in, Ben didn’t flinch.
“You have to let me in,” Phillip murmured, his voice rough. “Let me be in you.”
At the sound of his voice, Ben would have done anything. He tried to relax his body enough to accept this new, strange, and not entirely pleasant sensation. One of Phillip’s hands was on his hip, holding him steady, but the other came to caress the back of Ben’s neck. And that felt lovely, too lovely, and when he felt soft lips brush against his shoulder, he thought maybe this odd experience might not be all bad. Even if it was uncomfortable, it was worth it, and it would be over soon enough and then maybe—
“Oh damn,” he groaned. Phillip had hit that place inside him that felt like it was made of liquid pleasure. Ben could feel the sensation spiraling through his body, up his spine and down to his toes. It happened again, and all Ben wanted was more. The presence of Phillip’s length inside his body was still foreign and strange but somehow the intrusiveness of it melded with the pleasure, and Ben found he craved both equally.
“Hush,” Phillip murmured, his voice rough. “We have to be quiet.”
They were being quiet, as quiet as two people could be, but Ben pressed his face into the mattress to muffle his sounds of pleasure, twisting his hands into his sheets. Phillip’s body was strong and hard behind him, his fingers digging into Ben’s hip as he thrust slowly in and out. Ben realized he was holding back.
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