brideshead ffs

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"Out of Nature" Each evening at Brideshead during that enchanted August seemed to turn a new leaf of discovery. I was prepared to sample the fine fruits of pleasure, savouring my budding affections, and allowed tales to be told as the hopes of future and past twined through the high pillars. Hours passed, languidly drawing upon the softened shadows of dusk and the fading lights that were at length pulled into darkness by veiled chariot or train. Midnight approached with a wash of fresh delights, tempting and entreating those who held both youth and languor, eager to be swept away. I was no exception. Sebastian insisted that we drink under the canopy of the night sky, clicking our glasses together and pouring from thick, green bottles, our techniques of wine-tasting long forgotten. We sat by the edge of the fountain and the stone surfaces were cool beneath me as I leaned over the water, tracing runes across its glinting, whorled looking-glass face. As I gazed upon it, the fountain’s lines seemed suddenly transformed, and it at once became a great, lumbering beast, swathed by shadow. My ears were met by the din of falling droplets and leaves that scattered within the long stretches of the orchards beyond. It was an acutely different scene than the one that clung to my heart by the light of day as I looked to it for long hours, each minute seeping into the next as the hard dashes of my pen marked its form. No, the darkness seemed to summon spectres from the clear depths, its voice a potent whisper. Even through my clouded vision, laced by wine and laughter, I sensed some spark of menace that lurked within the carved limbs of stone, though my base instinct was to drown it out with knowledge of the present. Indeed, I was aware of nothing if not the present. It seemed that there was an endless draught of wine and water, a fluidity of emotion that caught my reflection from the sheets of the earliest summer rains, casting a glint of gold across my eyes. I imagined that Sebastian’s hair looked several shades lighter, almost ashen, cradled by the light of the moon. He smiled, his head held at a rakish angle. “Really, my dear, I can’t fathom why you find it so

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After Brightshead Revisited

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Page 1: Brideshead Ffs

"Out of Nature"

Each evening at Brideshead during that enchanted August seemed to turn a new leaf of discovery. I was prepared to sample the fine fruits of pleasure, savouring my budding affections, and allowed tales to be told as the hopes of future and past twined through the high pillars. Hours passed, languidly drawing upon the softened shadows of dusk and the fading lights that were at length pulled into darkness by veiled chariot or train. Midnight approached with a wash of fresh delights, tempting and entreating those who held both youth and languor, eager to be swept away. I was no exception.

Sebastian insisted that we drink under the canopy of the night sky, clicking our glasses together and pouring from thick, green bottles, our techniques of wine-tasting long forgotten. We sat by the edge of the fountain and the stone surfaces were cool beneath me as I leaned over the water, tracing runes across its glinting, whorled looking-glass face.

As I gazed upon it, the fountain’s lines seemed suddenly transformed, and it at once became a great, lumbering beast, swathed by shadow. My ears were met by the din of falling droplets and leaves that scattered within the long stretches of the orchards beyond. It was an acutely different scene than the one that clung to my heart by the light of day as I looked to it for long hours, each minute seeping into the next as the hard dashes of my pen marked its form. No, the darkness seemed to summon spectres from the clear depths, its voice a potent whisper. Even through my clouded vision, laced by wine and laughter, I sensed some spark of menace that lurked within the carved limbs of stone, though my base instinct was to drown it out with knowledge of the present.

Indeed, I was aware of nothing if not the present. It seemed that there was an endless draught of wine and water, a fluidity of emotion that caught my reflection from the sheets of the earliest summer rains, casting a glint of gold across my eyes. I imagined that Sebastian’s hair looked several shades lighter, almost ashen, cradled by the light of the moon. He smiled, his head held at a rakish angle.

“Really, my dear, I can’t fathom why you find it so interesting.” He narrowed his eyes, glancing to his glass and draining it with a relaxed turn of his wrist.

“I’m not certain that I would be able to explain it, myself,” I said with a carefully articulated distinctness.

“Ah, well.”

I felt him shift beside me, the hem of his jacket idly brushing over the back of my hand as he dropped his cigarette into the dust, vanquishing its feeble flame. The air surrounding us seemed to grow still, softened by consideration, and Sebastian’s breath fell lightly against my cheek. By the pull of my pulse, I knew that there was no other course to take at that moment, no crossroads of growth and indecision, and so I closed my eyes as I met his mouth with my own.

There is always a certain amount of unreality that comes with the sudden realization of one’s dreams, though I realized then, as Sebastian’s palm pressed against my thigh, that it ceased to matter. It was as though the darkness had suddenly been drawn back across the terrace, however momentarily, and my mind became infused by a cloud of perception. His mouth tasted of sunshine and claret, a distinct combination of desire and hesitation that has not yet

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faded from my memory as with the passage of time.

I brushed my hand against his cheek and through the fine strands of his hair, feeling that we would live forever. Yes, from our very first meetings, as I searched for certainties within myself, I sensed in Sebastian a speaker of my own language, one who followed the trail of his own distant star.

Pressing closer, I wrapped my arm around Sebastian’s back, my hand smoothly falling across the folds of his jacket. His fingertips touched my throat as he began to loosen the buttons there with a practiced delicacy.

“Darling Charles,” he said, breaking away for a moment to meet my eyes.

I smiled, remaining silent as I leaned forward again, pausing only as I felt Sebastian’s grip tighten on my shoulder, the fabric of my shirt gathered against his fingers. There was a cry, mockingly dramatic, and I found myself sitting within the fountain, engulfed by water.

Through the haze of our shouts, merriment and surprise, I watched as Sebastian dashed a hand across his brow, shivering slightly with the touch of the damp air. Reaching into my breast-pocket, I gently pulled upon the lace of my handkerchief and raised it before my eyes. I smiled with subtle satisfaction. Drips hung from its dangling tip, lightly dotting the surface of the pool, and Sebastian laughed delightedly.

I began to stand, straightening my knees, only to come crashing down once more as Sebastian insistently tugged upon my wrist. Bemused, I shook my head. There was again a stillness to the night, broken only by the splash of the founts and the haggard rhythm of my breath.

“Sebastian?”

“Hello, Charles.” Sebastian turned, a deliberately dazzling smile grazing swiftly across his lips as he settled beside me. He touched his palm to the water's surface, pausing for a moment before allowing it to fall against my arm. Through the glaze of his eyes and the surrounding motion of the fountain, I saw a glimmer of reassurance, the haphazard note of his promise. It seemed to pause, searching for its bearings against the curtain of darkness, somehow hoping for more than just the means to an end. “Can it be you?”

"Bells and Pomegranates"

It was growing colder.

Crisp leaves fell from lofty boughs, travelling over gates and across thresholds, swerving by the charm of gyres and finally settling upon damp cobbles and lawns, crimson and copper. October’s breezes spoke something of progress as they carried the scents of cloves and dust,

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hearty cinnamon and hearths across the quad. This slow chill threatened to creep between the pages of my present as a quiet tangle of ivy, though I grasped the memories of a thousand ripened hours that were now irrevocably passed, lazy summer days whose desires I could not commit to paper.

In turn, I felt that my own spirit had been loosened by the season, my steps quickening with a string of missed lectures and long nights spent sprawled before the grill of the fireplace, my face flushed with the flickering warmth, and there was only Sebastian.

Yes, Sebastian remained by my side, long ago having abandoned all pretence of decorum.

His hand passed from my shoulder to my neck with a close fervour, his breath falling against my cheek, throat, hushed with verse or the commandments of a forgotten alchemy. There was an urgency that descended upon us, a sharpness of bearing that had not vexed us before as we sat by the fountain at Brideshead, sipping from endless glasses of wine, or even as we strolled beside mile after labyrinthine mile of oily canals beneath the lavender canopy of the Venetian sky, our arms linked.

Sebastian’s mouth moved with a starry grace, his fingers tugging upon the buttons that lay in a streak down my chest; my own hands wove through his fine hair, palms falling across the form of his spine and determinedly forward once more to rest by the smooth clasp of his belt.

As I slipped my fingers inside, Sebastian closed his eyes, rocking into my hand with a slow, purposeful motion that seemed to match the limbs of flame that danced behind the grate. I saw the secret talons of frost that spread across the window, a solitary spectre, and Sebastian’s hair as it hung in damp locks across his brow.

There was only Sebastian, gritting his teeth as our movements became less steady, his brow knit as he braced a hand to my back, drawing me ever closer with the rocking of his hips, and I roughly met his mouth with my own. My grip tightened and Sebastian opened his eyes, wide as with hunger, red rimed and glinting through a thin sheen of tears. His lips parted with a slow smile, smoke-like and sombre.

With astonishing gentleness, he cupped my face in his hands.

I felt then that I was standing upon the edge of my consciousness. Sebastian tugged the fabric of my trousers away from my hips, hands mapping my chest, his mouth soft and knowing as his hair brushed faintly across my stomach. My own thoughts seemed to pause, waiting with the bated awe of one who glimpses the dark formations of storm clouds across the horizon. I imagined that I had become versed in an eternal language, presently allowing it to mould my spirit as I swiftly tensed and dropped against the woollen folds of the blanket.

The room seemed to become impossibly still, thick and defiant with a silence that was broken only by the stilted crackling of the fire. Sebastian shifted beside me, his limbs indulgent as he displaced the silk pillows that had settled atop our discarded shirts; his hair seemed at once to be a glistening, tousled halo.

Perhaps he laughed, his frame trembling with a soft sound that was almost a cry.

As we turned together once more, there was no hesitation to Sebastian’s voice as his mouth reached my ear, its timbre as ragged as my own; there was no repentance as his body pressed

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to my back, quick breaths scattering against my neck and teeth gently biting my shoulder. “Charles.”

I awoke to the chiming of bells.

Indeed, it seemed to be the distant rolls of thunder that stood in accompaniment to my imagined storm.

It was an icy sound, something unwittingly remembered after the passage of years uncounted, as brisk and detached as the autumn winds themselves. Through a deep reserve of caution that went momentarily unchecked, I knew even then that just as such things drew upon the cusp of the miraculous, preparing to cross yet uncharted lands, they were forever fated to run amiss.

I felt as though I was gazing upon a candid photograph, at once hesitant to blink for fear that the whorls of sepia and silver would vanish.

Sebastian stood by the window, his face shrouded by shadow and his forehead pressed to the glass. His breath misted there, falling beneath the blue wisps of smoke from his cigarette and swiftly fading as he stepped back and took a gulp of champagne. Crystalline shards of sunshine were caught within the flute, giving it the inherent appearance of motion, though its fizz had faded during the long, inaudible hours between waking and dreaming.

Stifling a yawn with the back of my hand, I raised myself upon my elbows and opened my mouth to speak, pausing only as Sebastian turned towards me, his eyes hazy and strained.

Fractured yellow light fell to the curve of his cheek, splaying red across his hands, and he smiled. “Good morning, Charles,” he said gently, moving to the bed and smoothing the coverlet as he settled beside me. Sitting against the headboard, he twined his fingers together before him, allowing them to settle within the scarlet creases of his dressing gown. His cigarette poised at a jaunty angle from the curl of his lips, he arched a brow. “Shall we be wicked today?”

"The Closest Thing to Rain"

Clouds passed, clinging to the boughs of trees and bound by vines and silk ribbons as the train rolled on. Our carriage was a wash of colours, green and red, blue and yellow, impossibly wrought by the quiet murmurs of passengers. The air was hung with the scent of dust and spices, filling my senses as I opened my mouth to speak. “We’ve nearly arrived, I should think.”

Sebastian shifted against the hard, wooden planks of the bench beside me, stretching his legs before him and crossing his ankles. He nodded drowsily, clearing his throat quietly before he spoke, “That’s alright.” His summer suit seemed to glow in the fractured light, mirroring the energy of earlier hours in its white folds. He glanced to me from the shadow that poured

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across his face by the brim of his hat, blue eyes glazed by wine and fitful sleep, presently glinting with barely-masked delight as the scenery came to a halt and we lurched to a stop.

Stepping from the train and onto the platform, hands carefully tucked into pockets, my sight was greeted by the golden glow of the Italian evening. Couples on holiday, touring businessmen, and locals clad in white linen stood before the vendors as great, fantastical insects in amber, limbs still in the warmth and the damp pull of the waters. Wooden carts held silver and begonias, filling the air with the musk of our fortunes.

“Darling Charles, don’t look so serious.” Sebastian smiled, his lips gently parting. “Really now, there’s no need to worry, not to say that there was a reason for such a thing in the first place. Now that we’ve arrived, though, everything will be taken care of,” he said, his voice at once melodic and mockingly dramatic. “Was the journey here really so tiring for you?”

I shook my head, breathing deeply. “No.”

Sebastian stood by my side as I first saw Venice, his arm twined around my waist, lightly guiding me toward the gondola. I was not disappointed.

I had always dreamed of the city, its wistful palazzos crumbling into the mud as birds and rats danced amidst the cobbles. There was an enchantment borne upon the air, seeping into my blood and grazing across my tongue, tugging at my cuffs and drawing me away from the hazy reflections of my past.

As I laughed into the sunshine that fell across my face, I was for the moment able to ignore the despair that pulsed through the maze of canals. The memory of political glories had been swept by the tide of centuries, married to the sea, and merged with the song of pigment and bone. The living seemed outnumbered by ghosts, though seeing the light that hung within Sebastian’s eyes brought me closer to life than I had ever been. His lips brushed across my own as we settled against the silk cushions, a moment that flew from the present as rain that evaporates before it reaches the ground. The night unfolded around us, laced by the oils of the water and the darkened beating of wings.

"Bridge of Sighs"

And so it was that I knew Venice, a palace and a prison on each hand, though I had long ago been freed from the shackles of terra firma. My steps felt elevated and pure, clear across the cobbles as Sebastian and I came to linger in the cafés of the San Marco Piazza until afternoon stretched into dusk. The air was heavy with spices and dust, brine and memory, and I wished with all of the vigour of youth that the hour would span the breadth of eternity; it was only a lingering strain of prudence that inhibited my silence.

“Ought we to be getting back?” I heard myself ask as we settled into a gondola. Its body was as black as night and quite as melancholy; the silk cushions were the colour of the sunset. My cheeks flushed.

Sebastian exhaled a thin plume of smoke. “Why?”

“We were to dine at eight-thirty.”

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“It is really very vulgar to worry after the time, Charles,” he drawled, “and to act as an unfrocked schoolmaster when you are not one at all.”

“I should hate to upset your father.”

“Oh. Don’t worry about that.” His voice was crisp and cool against the languid chatter of the city, sharp as the note struck by a knife on a fine wine-glass; his lips were still sweet with the peach that he had bought from a street-vendor at noon, his breath an echo of the soft summer breeze. “I never do.”

I felt the warm, comforting weight of his hand on my own. “I know.”

The sea seemed to glow as a mirror of the sky; facing outward, moving on, there were immeasurable distances above us and immeasurable distances beneath. Shadows lengthened, draping a great whorl of darkness over the sprawling faces of the façades.

“What shall we do tomorrow?” Sebastian trailed his fingers through the water; the swift grace of his wrist shattered the reflection. His hand wove through a vast collection of marble spires, all pierced with tiny lights and set upon the shining surface, and he caught my eye.

“Oh, anything.”

Sebastian lit another cigarette. “Cara has seats at the ballet.”

“Does she?”

“Yes.”

I paused for a moment, and then ventured, “It sounds lovely.”

“There will be Englishmen, weeping and clutching their hands together and wrinkling their brows in ecstasy. The only consolation is the wine served afterwards.”

“Ah.”

“But Papa has a speed-boat, of course. We might first take it out across the waves, if you’d like,” he said languidly, a glint in his eye. The sun had at last fallen below the horizon, and the world seemed laced by gold. “You’ve driven one before?”

I shook my head.

“Really, Charles. What have you been doing all of your life?”

“Waiting,” I said, and Sebastian laughed.

It was madness and magnificence, and the aura of decay only served to deepen my charm. I smiled, knowing with the certainty of instinct that the rain would soon be upon us.

When set against beauty, came a whisper in my ear, what is mortality?

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------------------

I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,A palace and a prison on each hand;I saw from out the wave her structures riseAs from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:A thousand years their cloudy wings expandAround me, and a dying Glory smilesO're the far times, when many a subject landLook'd to the wingèd Lion's marble piles,Where Venice sate in state, throned on her     hundred isles!

Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto IV, I

"The Workings of Chance"

Tucked amidst the University’s ancient buildings, the Botanical Gardens seemed a bastion of youth and beauty. It was true that I had never before crossed its threshold, but as Sebastian twined his arm around my own and we started forward over the ruddy path, I felt that it was a place which spoke to the very centre of my being. The heavy resonance of the gate’s iron latch fell against the gentle song of unseen nightingales, and my mind was driven to fashion a melody in its wake. I was suddenly overcome with visions of medieval palaces and castle courtyards, of heroes who become one with their conquests, and it was only by some distant turn of chance that I heard the gentle lilt of Sebastian’s words.

“It’s odd.”

I turned to him, bemused. “What is?”

“My being here with you. It’s a perfectly charming place in all the usual ways -- and of course one meets people here with a certain joie de vivre, if you know what I mean -- though I sometimes come alone to stand beside the trellises when the grounds are empty and still. I rather like being in a place where no one knows me but the rain and the air.” Sebastian met my gaze, solemnly holding it until I coerced myself to look away. “Don’t you?”

I frowned, considering my words, and finding none, I said simply, “Yes, I suppose so.”

We paused before a great stone arch, lingering between shadow and light, and a length of ivy brushed against my cheek. The leaves were smooth beneath my hand, pliant as I twisted a thin, green vine around my fingertips. I took a deep breath. The air was filled with the scent of damp soil and new life, heralding nothing if not promise.

“How often do you come here?” I asked at length.

“Oh.” Sebastian almost smiled as he said this. He tightened his grip upon my arm, a comforting weight that filled my thoughts with excitement yet uncharted; his eyes were bright and earnest. “At least once a week, I should say.”

“I think it’s lovely.”

“Good,” he laughed lightly, “because I will be bringing you back.”

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I almost didn’t answer, so caught up in the moment was I, though after a moment had passed, I said in a soft, breathless voice, “When?”

“Whenever I feel that the moment is right.”

“I see.” Our friendship seemed to have been previously ordained by some higher power whose existence I could neither accept nor deny, and I upheld his proposal without a moment’s hesitation, moving forward with the same easy steps that I presently took within the gilded protection of the garden walls. I reached into my pocket for my cigarettes, but paused as Sebastian raised a languid hand.

“Wait,” he said. “Let me give you one of mine.” Drawing his fair brows together, he pulled his case from his jacket. Its carved, silver face glinted in the fractured light that passed through the overhanging lattices, and he opened it with a practiced turn of his wrist. I smiled as he lit two, inwardly thrilled to see the warm curl of his lips.

“Thank you,” I said. We smoked in silence for some moments, neither of us fearful of the unspoken words which hung between us. There was a familiarity to our pace, one that seemed to be borne upon the back of the wind, steady and sure, one that cannot be seen as fleeting until it has already passed with the irrevocable knowledge of age. The happy hours which stood before us seemed to grow with an infinite potentiality, quiet and eager in the golden air, never to be reckoned and reasoned or cruelly numbered by one hundred or two. “Sebastian?”

“Yes, Charles?”

“I’m glad to have met you.”

His eyes widened. “Are you sure?” he asked in a fine, clear voice.

It was an admission. I knew this. I smiled at the press of his hand against my own and dropped my cigarette onto the ground, extinguishing its dim ember with my toe. “Yes.”

The season would soon come to reach its pinnacle, and the scent of the gillyflowers would seep into my rooms as Sebastian tapped on my door with the first strains of evening’s muted resolve. I would wait for his call.

-------------------

The lyric in question ("...no one knows [me] but the rain and the air...") is from the song "Fruit Tree" by Nick Drake.

"What You Will"

I sensed Sebastian’s entrance before I saw him, cradled as he was by the doorframe, one arm up to sustain his weight and the other steadied on his hip. He was already dressed; the white

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linen of his shirt was parted at the throat to reveal a triangle of golden skin.

“Did I wake you?” he asked. And then, without waiting for an answer, “Good. You realize I shan’t allow you to sleep through the best hours. Really, Charles. If you expect to remain here as my most esteemed guest, you oughtn’t give the impression you’d rather be elsewhere. It’s deplorably dull.”

“Not even Paris?” I replied as he approached the bed. And of course Sebastian had often left me to my own devices until well past noon; whether he guessed at how I’d paced my room, and then the space before his own, until I heard the familiar sound of his hand upon the door, I knew not. Neither his eyes, still half-glazed from sleep, nor his posture, set off as it was by the spring in his step, betrayed him. Sebastian simply smiled and drew on his cigarette, much as he did now, a hand on my thigh which rose to pull back the coverlet.

“Especially not Paris.”

“Ah. I fear I am in need of something to fortify my affection for this place.”

“Indeed? And what of your drawings?” Sebastian’s smile grew. Then he swung down to kiss me, his hands gathering the hair at the nape of my neck. I tasted smoke on his lips, dry and ashen, and also the lingering tang of midnight wine. “Really, Charles,” he said again, his breath warm against my cheek. “You are a bad influence. If we don’t hurry, all our plans for the afternoon will be ruined.”

I raised an inquiring brow, but made no reply. Instead, I reached out to pull Sebastian towards me once more.

Then, a little later: “Charles?”

“Sebastian?”

“May I have your attention?”

“To the fullest extent.”

Sebastian stood, straightening his collar, and crossed the room to tip his ashes into an overturned conch. “This is your final warning,” he drawled with a seriousness which failed to reach his eyes. “If you don’t come this instant, I shall be forced to go it alone.”

I pushed up against the headboard. “What is it?”

“Blackberries.”

The word came out like a bird chirp, and just as complacently. The word came out like it was the most normal thing in the world, and it was.

“Where?” I asked.

“In the thicket behind the tennis courts, of course,” he said earnestly. “Mummy always ordered the groundsman to keep the path clear, and Papa ordered him to leave it wild. He said it was good for the hounds – something about natural habitat. There was a dreadful row. I

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don’t know how the poor bushes ever survived their association with such a quagmire. The gossip alone was surely sharp enough to wilt their leaves.”

I took a breath, but only said, “Is it far?”

“Not far.”

“I’ll not be a moment.”

Sebastian waited for me to dress, his gaze flickering to and fro from the parted curtain. In the morning light he appeared at once youthful and tired: sun hung like cobwebs in his smooth hair, and shadows pooled beneath his eyes, blue and dusty rose. Beneath the window sprawled the open grounds, flora and fauna awash by August sky.

Eventually I tied my shoes, shaved and checked my reflection, and eventually we made our way past the paddock, beyond the hothouse and chapel.

The blackberry thicket was just as I imagined. Each twisting limb hung heavy with fruit, merging here and there to create a lawless mass which belied the closely looming spectre of Brideshead.

Sebastian plucked several flushed berries from the vine, but paused before setting them to his tongue. “Julia and I came here often when we were young, and later Cordelia too. She was always the best at finding hidden patches. I don’t know what we would have done without her.” He met my eye, briefly, before continuing, “Bridey never joined us. Didn’t want to muddy his knees, he said. He always did worry too much.”

This recollection, though hardly a confession, filled me with a longing for that which I had never had. I couldn’t imagine an upbringing so rife with possibility: my own home in London had been clean and cold, its corners off-limits to the playful footsteps of children.

I rolled a berry round my palm, savouring the sticky wetness it left behind. “Well,” I said, and swallowed it down, “I am glad your mother lost this particular battle.”

“Are you?” And then: “Do you suppose she did?”

“Well, we’re here, aren’t we?”

Sebastian flicked his cigarette onto the verge. He let out a low, rueful laugh. “Unless, of course, I’m merely a ghost in someone else’s dream.”

“A dire thought.”

“Hmm.” Sebastian popped several berries into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully before he replied, “I should think things might actually work out.”

I frowned. “You would trust another in such a way?”

“What makes you think I trust myself?”

With that, Sebastian grasped my scarf, pulling me against him before taking us both headlong

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into the thicket. The tiny thorns were swift to scratch my arms, but any pain was swiftly subdued by olfactory pleasure: all around us rose up the heady scent of damp earth and vegetation, its vibrancy all the while crested with the sweetness of myriad blackberries. Indeed, so potent was its flavour that I nearly redoubled, clamouring within the deepest memory of bygone years.

And then Sebastian’s mouth was on my own. His tongue wound past my parted lips, and I tasted upon it not wine or smoke, but the glistening draughts of summer.

He worked his hands down the buttons on my shirtfront, and then those of my trousers. I gasped at the feel of his warm, skilled fingers against my hips; gently, gently he freed my hardening cock, smoothed his thumb across the tip, and gave a few swift strokes.

“Whose dream?” I managed, craning my neck forward. Sunlight scattered through the brambles and cascaded over Sebastian’s neck and shoulders, down and down to the small of his back; when he looked up, his face was flushed and grazed by shadow.

“Who do I trust?” came his breathless, laughing reply.

thornsmoke

*

After the Flood

The war never ended.

At night I dreamt of gunning down a child; of seeing the small body arch against the shot and collapse to the wayside; of passing with granite eyes, marching on to some unknown destination. That vision lingered long after we turned in our guns and dismembered our camps to be packed away, and it was not alone. Again and again I dreamt of gunpowder and burning fields, and I could not rest.

 They sent us home, but I did not want to go. Europe had become a stranger to me. Her dazzling, urbane facade peeled in the aftershock of the war. She had let the gilt fade from her jewelled merriment and had donned a sober dignity that became her far less well than had the gaudy brightness of my youth. I did not want to see it, did not want the streets I had haunted exposed for the cheap grey alleys they were. I wished for nothing more than to preserve the world where I had once hunted delirium and intoxication like beasts.

So, like a child, I ran, blind and dazed, for the furthest reaches of civilization. I wrote to my agent with proposals for a final portfolio: Ryder's Africa. Long before he replied, I had

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already gone.

Once on the boat I gave directions to my banker and my lawyer, establishing my plans for a tour of Africa, date of return undetermined. Having done so, I settled into the routine of an anonymous traveller. I avoided my fellows and dined alone in my own cabin. Often I would do no more than lie back and let the rhythm of the ocean settle into my bones.

Days slid into each other until even the passing hours seemed remote illusions.

Midway through the journey, I felt a desire that had not existed for so long that it seemed a lover's ghost when it returned. It descended on me unexpectedly, unfurling on a heavy, bright morning. I woke, dry-mouthed, with bones that ached as though a desert had scoured them clean. My hands trembled; the boat shifted clumsily on a wave and I stumbled out of bed. I knelt before my trunk, flinging scraps of everything I had packed across the room until I found it at last: the sketching pens I had bought on a whim.

I had no thought as to what I might draw, only layered ink over paper and watched a familiar shape take root. The face burst out of a dark loop, a curving line that became the delicate plane of a cheek. From there, knowing what - though never who - I tore out of the blankness of the page, I threw myself wholly into my work. I traced the lashes, so sharp as to gleam like hooks; I sketched the fragile hands reaching upward for some fled secret, some tantalizing promise, some unseen death; I breathed and a stolen smile curled out of the silent white expanse, caught in that hesitation between cruelty and delight.

All day I drew, distilling shadows into a human soul.

When night stirred, I sat back on my heels and stared at it.

I had created a being who was at once familiar and strange, being neither Sebastian nor Julia yet both. It was older than either of them had been; the half-turned gaze, though dazzling, nested in the tired lines of an older face. The cheek was haggard and thoughtful, as though captured in memory. But it was Sebastian as I had known him long before he had been distorted into a stranger, with Sebastian's insouciant grace in the smile; and it was Julia as she had been in those luminous days of reawakening. It had Julia's weary look, undaunted by all that she had suffered and worn with such grace that it seemed to be neither after all.

Despite my efforts, I could not determine which of them it was. When I firmed the cruel promise about the mouth, the face seemed to take on an air of flippancy that was entirely Sebastian; when I added a gleam to the eye, the whole of the face seemed to soften into Julia's features. I had loved each and each had passed; in the wake of both those terrible loves, one seemed to become the other. I could not distinguish them. There was one fact that had not changed, and I would not accept it.

At length I set the sketch aside and did not think to touch it again.

 

My arrival seemed to work a deep change on me immediately. It was as if the African sky, shining like a sapphire hollowed to a shell, had unlocked some secret I had hidden for fear of seeing the war destroy it. I dreamed still, but in the day I could paint again - anything from the ruins of burnt villages to a boy's dark and brilliant hand, planted against a tree standing alone

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in a wasteland. I hired guides and ventured deeper into the wilderness, wrapping my paintings in waxy flowers and vines of ivy dense as serpents. Through paintings I awakened fallen cloisters, retracing the baroque designs of statues and arches on canvas. I filled my designs with tangled jungle nights; I swelled them with fire and drums and the brutal, primitive colors that seemed to run through the landscape like blood.

Because of how deeply I travelled, months would pass between each shipment of paintings to New York, and months passed again before I heard back from him on the subject. Ryder's Africa seemed to be a project divorced entirely from the line of paintings I had started; it was a sedate book of quiet paintings set in another world. I was not Ryder; I had grown into someone else entirely, a stranger to war and civiliation alike, and each painting came closer to offering me a name.

I did not realise how closely I had been skirting the southernmost tip of Africa until I talked my next destination over with my guides and realised that I was no more than a few towns away from Sebastian's chapel.

That was how I thought of it - not God's house but Sebastian's, dwelling between the white cloisters and the sea.

The knowledge of how close he was seemed to exert a kind of magnetic pull on me. Weeks would pass when I did not think of it at all, and then in the bright sunlight of another day I would find myself turning the idea over in my head again. I could not describe the feeling that accompanied it, only that it was so strong that its exact emotion seemed undeterminable. Anticipation? Revulsion? All the words I knew seemed to fall short.

Another few weeks passed before I started on the route to the chapel. I stayed a few days in the nearby village, pinning stray flickers of beauty to paper, delaying the moment when I must go and find him again. What had Cordelia said about him? /He looked terrible, rather bald with a straggling beard, but he had his old sweet manner./ Having seen him with Kurt, I could not imagine what disrepair he must have fallen into without to care for, and I found that I did not want to. But the idea persisted; so I rose from amid my paintings and went to look for Sebastian at last.

 

I arrived at the monastary house at midday. It was an unassuming building - painstakingly put together and very majestic in its stony way. An air of holiness seemed to cast a pall over it, dimming the hard promise of its lines to frailty. Past the stroke of its flat roof I could see a white tower rising. Wind carried the murmurs of the sea back to me, and a faint breath of salt. But no human voice sifted from the noise; no man's face peered out from the door to greet the stranger who had arrived at their doorstep.

It took me several minutes to find someone. I wandered around the house, down a rocky, crooked path to the empty shore and back again. At last, in the clearing behind the house, I came across a bald old man tending to his garden. He did not speak English; it took us several minutes of gesturing and jabbing to come to a clear point. The name 'Sebastian' seemed to strike a chord. His whole face brightened, and he indicated to me by sign and broken word that I should go up the stairs of the white building and head right to the end of the hall.

I followed his instructions, which led me to a closed door. I tapped.

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"Come in," someone called, and I opened it.

It was a small room, whitewashed and bare of shadows. Sebastian was lying on a small cot and gazing up at the ceiling.

I had not expected him to be as beautiful as he was in his youth, and he was not. Age had laid cobweb lines across his features. He had thinned down to mere bones; as he rested his head on his hand, his wrist seemed so fragile as to snap with another sway. Silver gleamed through his thin, feathery hair and shone against his sun-dark skin. Between Cordelia's visit and mine, he must have shaved off the beard, for I could see shadows of it but the dense stubble that marked one was nowhere to be found.

I sat heavily on the chair beside his bed. He did not seem to notice. I said: "Sebastian."

His head turned, and I felt a shock of recognition bolt through me. Those were the same wry eyes, though more faded than I could remember, and there, in the beginning curve of his mouth, the familiar smile alighted as he looked at me.  "Oh, hello, Charles," he said in that same easy way, and sat up. "Has somebody else died?"

"What do you mean? Have you heard something?"

"No, not at all. But it's frightfully clear that you can't have come on your own business."

I allowed myself to relax for the first time into the stiff wooden chair. I had exchanged only two letters with Cordelia after the war, confirming the survival and continued health of the family. Her letters had carried an air of determined warmth about them - a restrictive, adult fire that left me estranged from the girl she had once been. I had responded with painfully brief letters. It must have been clear to her that there was no more that I could say, for she had not written again. "No, no one's dead. Everyone seems quite well, considering. Cordelia's become a nurse."

"A nurse!" This news seemed to amuse Sebastian tremendously. "Well, at least Aloysius will not have sacrificed himself in vain. She used to treat him terribly, you know."

"No, I didn't."

"Oh, she did. She would pretend that he had a dire illness and she must tend him to the end of his life. Her ministrations put him out of temper with me for days."

A silence seemed to open up between us. Sebastian turned his attention elsewhere. Rising, he took three great strides across the room and stood at the cracked, filthy windowsill, staring out to the sea. He looked up only when I touched his shoulder, and his very glance seemed to say that he had forgotten that I was there. "It's quite beautiful here," he said. "You must see the bell tower at sunset."

"As a matter of fact, I have."

"You still paint, don't you?"

"I do."

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"I thought it was burning the first time I saw it. The lines of the tower thrown against the dark, all pearl and fire."

"You sound like an artist yourself."

Sebastian laughed, soft as gold. "A little late for that." He lifted his hands, which were thicker and more brown than they had been in his school days. They were trembling, and with a shock I recognised the signs.

I seized his fingers. My shaking echoed his, and I gripped them tighter as though pressure might be enough to still us both. "How much have you been drinking?"

"Not quite as much as I used to, so you can stop looking at me so reproachfully. It seems to have taken its toll all the same. How lucky that I didn't bank on my hands to make my fortune."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"Do? /Do/? Charles, this isn't something one can simply scrub away as with an error on a painting."

"But you can do something about it. You can stop it from getting worse."

"Oh? Are you going to make me, then?"

I dropped his hands as though his skin had suddenly flared to fire and stared at him. Wariness had risen up in his eyes and lay there like a hard veneer, reflecting my own blankness back at me. It surprised me so that for a moment I could not think of what to say. "No," I said at last, measuring out my words. "You're a grown man, Sebastian. You know perfectly well what you want, and nothing I say will change it."

"And here I thought it was your intention to be a helpmeet to everyone you came across."

"I was very young then."

Sebastian's eyes flicked low. Deliberately, he said: "As was I."

 

I stayed that night. Sebastian seemed to have relented towards me enough to allow me that brief favor. The priests discussed this action among themselves in a confused torrent of languages before grudgingly unearthing a room at the back of the mazy house for me. I did not mind. In the morning I rose and went to go speak to Sebastian again, only to find that he had disappeared. He did this quite often, one of the priests informed me in broken English laden with a multitude of accents. I mustn't expect him to stay. The English lord knew his way around the land and would return in due time. If I would care to wait and perhaps perform a few chores--

"But has he gone off to drink again?" I demanded. The priest shrugged his shoulders and turned back to his duties. Clearly the mad Englishman did not understand.

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In fact it was three days before Sebastian reappeared. He burst through the doors in the middle of prayer, waving a bottle in apology. The priests turned to look at him as one, their eyes hooded with reproach. He caught at my hand and swept me through a side-door, out into the vegetable garden and past. The moon silvered his skin, and the dim light dissolved the twenty years that pressed on his skin like a net.

We walked through the darkness just so, making our clumsy way down to the beach. On the shore, Sebastian squatted and threw rocks into the water. Each sank without pause. I stood by and watched the gleam of malicious light on the bottle he insisted on carrying. On the way, he had offered to share with me. I had refused; the harsh tang of rough alcohol still stung in my eyes.

Hurling a last rock viciously into the water, Sebastian stood. He tucked one hand into a pocket and looked out at the invisible horizon. "Did you fight in the war?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Tell me what it was like."

"Dark. Uncomfortable." I searched for words, but there were none. War had carved me and plucked out all my kindness, and I found that I could not face it in such a way as to show him so. "You wouldn't have liked it."

"Of course not. But I imagine that you must have travelled a great deal. I would have liked that, I think."

"You would have, but you wouldn't have wanted to stay for long." Sebastian had never paid great attention to the misery of others, but sorrow affected him as it would affect anyone. He disliked it - in himself most of all. I imagined him in the middle of a battlefield with strife and violence running amok. No, Sebastian would have never survived the war. He would have steeled himself against it, thrown up all his defenses more and more until at last something strong enough to break him arose, and then he would have been utterly shattered.

He stared at the bottle. His dark hands seemed to curl about the neck like a noose, rough as rope. Then, with some force, he said: "All right."

"What's all right?"

"Oh, Charles. Don't be a fool. If you've changed your mind then say so. Don't play these games."

"You used to."

"Well, I don't anymore. In fact, I've quite lost patience with the roundabout." When I only looked at him, he said, "Well?"

Gently, I took the bottle out of his hands.

 

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It occurred to me later that I had never asked him whether he wanted me to stay. Sebastian had been right. We were old and long past all these sophistries.

 

Long after, he asked: "Why did you come, Charles?"

I thought of my logical thoughts, so scrupulously designed and calculated. In the hard sunlight they seemed to dim, folding into ghosts of reasons I thought that I had long discarded. Why /had/ I come?

An echo of Cordelia drifted back to me. /He'll be a great favourite with the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking;he'll disappear for two or three days every month or so, and they'll all nod and smile and say in their various accents, 'Old Sebastian's on the spree again,' and then he'll come back dishevelled and shamefaced and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel./

I could not think of it as Cordelia had. It seemed so absurd, so profane and brutal, that something as beautiful as that faraway youth should be reduced to a scrap of trembling bones. I pictured him as he might have been - might still be - ages hence, red-faced and unshaven and alone at the end of the world.

"I want to know how it ends," I said.

Sebastian stared at me as though I had gone mad. Then he threw back his head and laughed - a familiar, glittering laugh.

"Oh, I suppose there are worse reasons," he said.

potatofiend

When I was twenty, in those languid, winsome days of tempestuous autumns and epicene summers, when the seasons settled firm and sultry over an England upon whose roads a motor car was still a comparatively infrequent sight - when I was twenty, permitted for the first time to be lonely in a world whose vastness is now lost forever, I understood entirely the concept of joy in solitary abandon. Time seemed to move more slowly then, in that backward pocket of rural Sussex, where ten miles of empty space still felt a long way when traversed in the dog-cart with the footman at the helm; and longer still when viewed from a bedroom window as the sun was setting. They became a symbol, those fields, in later years; the downs that drifted steady and slow, ploughed and picketed and patchwork-stitched like a blanket crocheted in careful squares of yellow and brown and green. They became a legend, painted in bold pre-Raphaelite fashion on a thousand picture-postcards, an idealistic vision of an England that the youth of a nation might consider worthy of their blood. The campaign may have been, in its ruthless optimism, successful; but the England it depicted was, by that time, no longer anything more than a memory. It was not the England of their generation, but of mine - and, by the time I had come to recognise its value, it had long since perished in the smoke of the War they said would never arrive.

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No such ignorant hesitance had I, though, in perceiving the serene magnificence of Brideshead! To the sublime perfection of its sculpted towers and grand gardens, youth allowed me no blindness; the singular stretch of country in which the house reposed - for it could hardly be imagined as doing anything so undignified as to stand - became to me almost as a cerebral haven, to which I might, and often did, retreat. Brideshead, in both its solid and remembered forms, has been many things to me through the long years since that pivotal moment of my adolescence when first it snatched my soul as I caught sight of it through the lime-trees, on a morning when the clouds billowed behind with a gauzy translucence in the empty summer sky. Brideshead has acquired, indeed, a soul of its very own. In those days, though - those days of blissful, unclouded inactivity in a time of desperate decadence - in that summer, the house had, for me, but a single significance.

His name was Sebastian Flyte, and he was as young as I and very much more beautiful, and I was in love with him. Of this last I am sure he was perfectly aware, and I suppose it provided him with hours of amusement. I remember suspecting this even at the time, but I could not care unduly, for he was one of those young people to whom laughter is as natural as breathing, and for whose continued entertainment many others would gladly give their lives, were they able to find some suitably amusing manner of doing so. Sebastian was not the sort of boy for whom one could cultivate a tragically Gothic feeling of unrequited love. This is not, I hasten to add, to suggest that he was difficult to fall in love with - quite on the contrary, he had a face so unthinkably perfect and a manner so disarmingly gay that to glimpse him from across a street was to stumble into his thrall. At any one time, one might reasonably expect perhaps half the undergraduates of his college to be spending the precious hours between lectures and Hall in composing passionate odes in his honour.

Love, though, for the young, has often a funereal quality about it; a sense of self-imposed distance between oneself and the love-object, in the manner of those poems of courtly love produced by the troubadours of the Middle Ages, fawning and fading over some unattainable beauty. When a young man loves unrequitedly, it is his wont to attempt to exist for a period in a cloud of misery and aloof dejection, watching the beloved with soulful eyes and a sense of secret pride in the increasingly dramatic pallor of his own complexion, rendered white through a studied lack of food. Such melodrama is the pride of the species. Sebastian's admirers, however, were obliged to forego such Gothic trappings. Sebastian had a way of looking, a manner of speech, which made one feel as if his entire interest were vested devotedly in this conversation, whether it be concerned with tea or Troilus and Cressida, and which left one enveloped in a feeling of unshakeable bliss entirely unbecoming of a tragic lover. Associates of Sebastian Flyte were obliged to forfeit any right to unhappiness.

Things were always so at Oxford, at Brideshead; and there were others, other people against whose blunt insignificance Sebastian shone all the brighter for being shifted into shadow. There was something about him that captivated, that claimed entirely, so that, as with the house itself, one felt as if he had acquired full and resounding possession of one's soul. There was an extreme naïveté about him, for one thing, that demanded protection; and a fragile innocence whose angelic facade was entirely compelling even while one knew it was false, and that only the previous evening he had been found drunk and disordered in the first quad at Trinity, with champagne in his hair. Sebastian was a contradiction; but when I was with him, I felt he could have been a depraved axe-murderer and still I should have loved him, as long as he was Sebastian Flyte.

It did not come quite to that. It still astounds me to think of what it did arrive at; of what he became; and so I do not think of it, as far as this is possible. I remember Sebastian, turning

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ineffectual cartwheels down the long croquet-lawn at Brideshead before catching sight of me and immediately resuming his feigned limping passage across the garden, groaning a little for effect. That was in the days when it was only just becoming a respectable thing for young ladies of the upper class to paint their faces, and Sebastian, intrigued as ever, had decided that whatever Julia could do, he might try; and so when he turned his face towards me, the wistful heroics of his expression were rather marred by the fact that he had rimmed his eyes dark that morning, with kohl and a distinct lack of skill.

It was the only real summer. This, too, I find difficult. That was the summer of Sebastian, when he kissed me in the garden with the fountain bubbling behind, calling me darling, darling Charles and combing gentle fingers through my hair. A lifetime has passed again since the year I met him, for we were only boys, and now middle-age has descended upon me with all the suddenness of a spring thunderstorm; and still the shadow of Sebastian remains. One summer, we spent together. One summer.

When I stood on the brow of the hill on that grey-swept morning, with the lorries and carts and horrid ephemera of C-Company bustling behind, Brideshead was silent, and glowering, with the turrets casting shadows on the clouds. Winter, now; the winter of everything. It was an empty old house, long abandoned, and to my men, there was no reason why it should have any more significance than the last place we had so unthinkingly occupied as our base. It was silent; it was still. There was nobody there.

I said this to myself; said it over and over as I stood in the incongruous quietude with only the ticking of engines in the far distance threatening to interrupt my thoughts. There was nobody there. I did not know where Sebastian was, nor had I known for a long time. The last time I had heard of him, he had not been Sebastian, but somebody other; somebody far older than the years of his life, with thinning hair and a broken smile; somebody I did not know. The house gazed back at me with a dignified plaintiveness in the dark, empty eyes of its windows. That man was not Sebastian.

A thin swathe of greying green stretched between us, the castle and me; and I remembered suddenly the morning of that summer when I had asked him why it was called a castle when, quite clearly, it was no such thing. Now it stared at me, slow and solemn, with years of such memories in its stillness. I knew where Sebastian was, and I had always known. He was there, there in the garden where the sun still shone, by the fountain whose stonework now crumbled away, a film of mossy debris coating the surface of the water. Brideshead was not a place, not this place; Brideshead was an ideal, and a thought, and a dynasty. I remembered Brideshead, because it lived inside me.

Behind me, the men were shouting, whooping and laughing and tossing things to and fro between themselves over the dull roaring of the engines. The house, away across the valley, surveyed them with pale disapproval, like an elderly gentleman who has given up on youth. Slowly, then, so that I barely noticed it at first, it began to rain.

laura smith

Communion

This is not the Sebastian he remembers. Gone is the soft skin and the delicate features, the fair hair falling around his face. Most of his face is obscured by the thick growth of beard, the

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bristles a rough mix of blond, dark and grey hair. He looks older than his near forty years, worn down by drink and something Charles thinks might be shame.

Charles sits next to him on the low pew, staring ahead at the bare altar. “Hello, Sebastian.”

“Hello, Charles.” His voice is rough, from drink or disuse, Charles cannot tell.

“You’ve come home.”

This is where my family lives. He can hear Sebastian’s words from long ago so well, he almost doesn’t hear his response.

“Is this home, do you think?”

“As close as I’ve ever come.” He glances at Sebastian’s hands, clutched around a prayer book. “What brings you back?”

“Brideshead is where the Flytes all come to die.”

“Are you dying, Sebastian?”

“I’ve been dying since you met me, Charles.” He doesn’t turn his head or smile, but there’s something in his tone that almost curls Charles’s lip into a smile. “Hadn’t you noticed?”

“It was true, what you said, you know.” Charles stares at the book as Sebastian opens it, the words swimming in his vision. “I should never have met your family.”

“Whose charm has captured you most?” His voice grows weak, tired. There is resignation in it and, if nothing else, that proves to Charles that he is not the same man anymore. Charles wonders if Sebastian ever really was that man. “My mother? Cordelia? Julia?”

Charles laughs softly, the sound frightfully like a sob. “Can’t you guess?”

A slight smile splits his beard, his face offering a glimpse of the young man. “Me?”

“Always you, Sebastian.”

He closes the book and sighs, bowing his head as though in prayer. “I’m so very tired, Charles.”

“Come to the house. Nanny is there.”

“Is she?” He sighs again and places the book on the pew between them, his hands falling to his thighs. “Dear Nanny. She would despair of me, I think.”

Charles reaches over and rests his hand on Sebastian’s. “Let me take you to the house, Sebastian.”

“Do you know the most amazing thing about Catholicism, Charles?” He looks up, his eyes bright with something that could be tears or the strange fanaticism that religion brings over them all. “You can commit any sin and God will forgive you, so long as you are contrite. Isn’t

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that the loveliest thing?”

“It seems quite a way to live, Sebastian. Do anything you like.”

“Yes. And you would think contrition really isn’t all that much to ask.”

“Not so much, no.” Charles stands, helping Sebastian to his feet. Sebastian’s arm is thin and frail, enough like his father’s that Charles suddenly believes that Sebastian spoke the truth about dying.

Sebastian laughs softly, though there’s no humour in it. “You’d be wrong, you see. That’s what they don’t tell you. That’s the grand secret to it all.”

“What is, Sebastian?” The men are away, no doubt released to other duties by Hooper’s incompetence. Charles guides Sebastian through the pallets scattered on the once polished floor to the stairs, helping him in the climb, refusing to think how close they are to the Chinese drawing room. “What is the grand secret?”

“Contrition. I can’t be sorry, Charles. Not for all of it.” His voice falters and then recovers. “How am I to be sorry for you?”

“Am I a sin, Sebastian?”

“Oh, Charles. You are my greatest sin.” His steps falter and he leans into Charles. Charles slides an arm easily around Sebastian’s waist, feeling bone where there was once solid flesh. “Did you not know that?”

His voice is rough. “Was what we shared a sin, Sebastian? Loving is a sin?”

Sebastian doesn’t answer as they reach the second floor, the trip slow and measured out in Sebastian’s unsteady breaths. They pause at the landing and Charles watches as Sebastian’s gaze wanders, lingers.

“I must look a fright,” he whispers, his hand stroking the hair at his chin. “Perhaps my rooms…if they are still that? A shave at least. Don’t want to frighten Nanny.”

“Of course.” Charles guides him down the hallway, though Sebastian knows the path just as well. The dark door is closed. Their last farewell behind this door had been painful and, in so many ways, final.

The room is much as Charles had last seen it. He’d been careful to avoid it when he was at Brideshead without Sebastian, and the tell-tale signs of that Christmas long ago remained. The crystal decanters of port were missing though, the silver trays bereft without the weight of them.

Charles lets Sebastian lead the way to the adjoining bath, watching his hands as he turns on the dim light. For a moment, Charles sees the reflection of summers past in Sebastian’s eyes, dressing for dinner, undressing for other appetites.

“Sit,” Charles says softly, the hand on Sebastian’s arm guiding him down. He drapes a towel around Sebastian’s neck and runs the water, letting the steam gather around them like

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memory. Sebastian’s things remain and Charles easily finds the pot of shaving cream and the thick bristled brush. Beside it lies an ivory backed hairbrush and Charles pauses to run his fingers over Aloysius’s elegantly engraved name.

“He is gone, you know. Like everyone else.” Sebastian sighs quietly, sadly. “Gone.”

Charles mixes the cream with water, stirring it to a lightly scented lather before applying it liberally to Sebastian’s face. Sebastian had always eschewed the newer razors, preferring to slide the clean open blade against his skin. Charles fits a new blade into the straight razor and grips the smooth handle, using his other hand to tilt Sebastian’s head to the side.

The razor scrapes loudly in the silence, cutting a swath through the thick growth. Charles works slowly, methodically, just the lightest touch of his fingers turning Sebastian’s head. Sebastian’s eyes are closed, his breathing steady and even as the razor bares his face, the skin pale as the hair falls away.

Charles steps back to survey his handiwork before wiping Sebastian’s face with the corner of the towel. “Not quite finished,” he murmurs as Sebastian stirs. “That just got us started.”

The corner of Sebastian’s mouth curves upward in a faint smile and Charles looks away so that Sebastian can’t see the pain, the loss in Charles’s eyes. Sebastian was never half-measures, and this man before him seems nothing but.

Rinsing the razor first, Charles sets it down and lathers the shaving brush again. This time Sebastian automatically tilts his head, trembling at the touch of the bristles. Charles splays his fingers along the length of Sebastian’s neck as his other hand shaves him. This time the blade slides over skin, and Charles stops as Sebastian shivers.

“Are you all right?”

Sebastian opens his eyes and Charles catches his breath in his chest, lost in the piercing gaze as he has been so many times before. Sebastian’s lips curve into an honest smile and he nods, turning his head into Charles’s hand as it slides up to cup Sebastian’s newly shaved cheek. “Oh, yes, Charles. Better than I’ve been in a long time.”

They remain like that for a moment until Sebastian’s eyes start to drift closed. Charles clears his throat and wipes the last remaining hints of shaving cream away. “Come on, perhaps you should rest before we go see Nanny.”

“Yes,” Sebastian sighs, and lets Charles help him to his feet. He seems more tired, drained, though he’s done nothing at all except sit. He leans against Charles on the short walk to the bed. The sheets are crisp and clean, as if Sebastian has only been gone a short while. Charles eases him down and slips off Sebastian’s shoes, tucking him under the covers easily. Sebastian shivers despite the heavy covers and his clothes. “Don’t go.”

Charles sits beside him on the bed, his hand against Sebastian’s cheek, his thumb stroking the curve of it. “I’m right here.”

He closes his eyes and moves his head, rubbing against Charles’s palm. “I do not think I would like Heaven,” Sebastian says quietly. “No one I truly love will be there.”

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“Cordelia shall be in heaven.”

There’s a soft laugh and Sebastian shakes his head. “Cordelia will be the one God sends to preach to those of us in Hell. I imagine I’ll see her far more often there than I would in Heaven.”

Charles laughs as well, though his face grows serious as pain flickers across Sebastian’s eyes. He closes them for a long moment, his breathing somewhat laboured. “I have been truly horrible, you know. Decadent and debauched, which could not be helped, but horrible to you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No. It matters.”

“Sebastian…”

“God…it does not matter that God does, Charles, not really. Not so long as you do. You forgive me,” he gasps softly, his breath catching, “don’t you, Charles?”

Charles fights the sting of tears that cloud his eyes and nods, leaning in to press a soft kiss to Sebastian’s forehead, resting there against him. He feels the last slow exhalation of breath that leaves the raspy lungs and chokes back the threat of a sob. “Yes. Yes, Sebastian. I forgive you.” He leans back and presses his thumb to where he’d kissed him then slowly traces the sign of the cross over his beloved Sebastian. “And God…God does as well.”

„Something wicked“

Sebastian’s rooms are always filled with fine things, which is why Charles is usually so careful when he manoeuvres them between the tables and vases and decanters on their stumbled way to the bedroom. But sometimes, like tonight, it is so full of passion and fire and the desire to disregard everything but this - though in truth, neither of them is capable of doing so.

The lights are off and the room is dark, Sebastian no doubt having had the curtains drawn to offset the effects of the previous night’s champagne at the celebration of the end of Trinity term. They stumble over something and go tumbling to the bed. Sebastian laughs, the sound like whiskey poured over ice. He wriggles beneath Charles’s weight and tugs him closer.

“Kiss me.”

It’s not a request so much as a demand that Charles has every desire to fulfil, and he does, capturing Sebastian’s mouth with his own. It tastes of heavy port and light champagne and they’re both terribly drunk and will regret it only for mere moments in the morning until the first glass of wine sobers them both up. Sebastian’s tongue is warm and heavy on his and Charles captures it, sucks on it light and teasing until Sebastian moans into his mouth, his body reacting in other ways, less vocal but no less heard.

Pulling away, Charles wrestles with his jacket, shrugging it off his shoulders. Sebastian had already made short work of Charles’s buttons on the journey from door to bedroom, and his

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shirt follows easily after, though Sebastian’s roaming hands make the task harder. All the better, Charles thinks with another kiss at Sebastian’s parted lips, for the trouble it takes.

His hands find Sebastian’s jacket and shirt in equal disarray – he would be remiss not to take advantage of an opportunity presented – and he guides them open and off Sebastian, tugging him away from the bed to strip away the outer layers as well as the thin undershirt that Sebastian wears. They are flesh on flesh, and Charles shudders slightly at the warm feel of Sebastian’s skin, like he’s been left out too long in the sun.

He knows what he wants tonight, given determination and courage of sorts by the lazy night and fine drink, the tedious party that had gone on around them while he and Sebastian had traded quips and bon mots until Sebastian’s eyes had taken on a particularly wicked glint and he’d leaned in and whispered, most indelicately, what he wanted Charles to do to him. It had caused a blush Charles could not blame on the port and Sebastian had laughed with delight and gone on to embellish with more and more delightful and depraved acts.

But it is this that Charles wants, that Sebastian wanted before his wit got too clever for the room. He slides down Sebastian’s body, fingers trailing over bared skin and fine hairs. Sebastian’s nipples are tight and hard with the cool air of the room and anticipation, his eyes hot as he watches Charles slide further still, sinking to his knees at the end of the bed, his hands curved under the waistband of Sebastian’s trousers.

“Charles…” He raises himself up, the intensity of his gaze enough to make Charles’s body surge with newfound heat. His voice shakes with the same tremors that stir his fingers as he reaches down and strokes the back of Charles’s hands where they rest against his stomach. “Charles.”

It is, he supposes, one of the prayers that Sebastian sometimes offers up, the familiarity and ease of repetition giving the simplest of words a kind of reverence. Charles unbuckles Sebastian’s belt and undoes his trousers, tugging them down the lean thighs. Sebastian sprawls on the bed like the gorgeous hedonist he is and Charles stares at him for a moment, finding perfection in the sweep of skin, the arc of muscle, the curve of cock.

“Sebastian,” he whispers, wondering if, in his agnostic tongue, it sounds anything like the prayer that Sebastian routinely offers up. He wants his taste and will steal it if need be. Sebastian shivers and his lips part, his tongue sliding over them as if seeking the residual taste of the evening. Charles leans in and breathes against the hard flesh, the low rumble of desire in his throat given voice as Sebastian’s body reacts, stiffening further at the attention.

Charles turns his head, his breath at the base of Sebastian’s shaft, his tongue daring to brush the skin drawn tight with arousal. Sebastian’s body jerks slightly at the sensation and he seems to press harder against the bed, though his hips rise toward Charles’s mouth.

His tongue runs the length of Sebastian’s erection from base to tip, rasping slightly against the flesh, his mouth dry from anticipation and need. A shudder runs down Sebastian’s spine and he groans, his breath stuttering past his lips. Charles reaches out, trailing his fingers along the foreskin, tugging it slightly to expose the sleek head. He licks his lips, letting the tip brush Sebastian again, finding himself bereft as Sebastian jerks away, shifting and tripping off the bed in a frantic sort of haste.

“Wait," Sebastian gasps. "You must…you must wait.”

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“You wanted this,” Charles reminds him breathlessly, frustrated in the face of rejection. “At the table. You want this.”

“Yes.” Charles isn’t sure he hears the word, whispered so low and heavy, thick with desire. “Yes.” Sebastian is shaking his head, though Charles is unsure if it’s a reaction of its own or simply a result of the shaky need that seems to infuse the rest of Sebastian’s body. “I do. I just…you must wait.”

Waiting doesn’t seem an option, though Charles sinks back on his heels as Sebastian turns away from him, searching the room for something Charles can’t see.

“There you are.”

It’s the knowing sing-song quality of Sebastian’s voice that nearly steals laughter from Charles’s lips. Sebastian can whisper the most wicked of things in Charles’s ear, can do terrible things to Charles’s senses and defences in the car or in darkened hallways, but he cannot do anything in the disapproving, glassy stare of Aloysius.

“What a naughty boy you are,” he continues, tucking the stuffed bear under his arm and walking toward the main room. “Setting yourself in the middle of the floor for attention. Just for that, I’m afraid you’ll have to spend the night by yourself. No. I’m sorry. It’s the only fitting punishment.”

He comes back moments later, still naked and near-perfection, though there’s a frown Charles can see in the light from the other room. “I’m sure he’s very contrite.”

“As he should be.” Sebastian’s frown changes soon enough as he gets on his knees in front of Charles, sly grin replacing it easily. “You’re not contrite, are you, Charles?”

“Not in the slightest, my dear Sebastian.”

“Still naughty then?”

“As a schoolboy.” He kisses him softly, as though starting again, only letting Sebastian pull away to sit on the edge of the bed, lean back to watch in a sort of relaxed haze as Charles rests his hand against the base of his erection, curving around it and leaning in. “You, however, have been distracted.”

“I have. Terribly so.”

“I shall have to remedy it.” He breathes against the skin again, feeling it respond. “Drench you in wine and drink champagne from your skin.”

“You’d waste too much. Try again.” There is laughter in his voice and his eyes drift shut slowly as Charles’s hand and mouth move around Sebastian’s cock, stroking him to hardness once more.

Charles brings his hand down, the flesh in his grip pulled back to expose Sebastian completely. The promise of wine or champagne is unnecessary now, drunk as he is on the scent of Sebastian’s skin, the headiness of his taste. Charles’s tongue darts out again, then he

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takes Sebastian in, revelling in the heavy weight on his tongue.

His hands stroke along Sebastian’s thighs as his mouth moves in its intended course. Sebastian’s body is like a wire, wound round parted hands and drawn taut. He massages the spread of flesh beneath his fingers, digging slightly rough against the tender give of skin near the apex of Sebastian’s thighs, tangling in the dark blond hairs that shadow Sebastian’s cock, the slippery wet of his own mouth coating flesh and hair and palm as his hand strokes in tandem with his mouth.

“Ch-arles,” Sebastian’s voice is thick and low and desperate, and Charles cannot help but press his tongue to the underside of Sebastian’s length, suck hard against the rigid flesh. Sebastian’s hands scramble at the bed linens and his hips follow the urgent slide of Charles’s mouth. His words have failed him, descending from sharp wit to soft nonsense, Charles’s name given a place of honour on his lips.

He slides away as he feels Sebastian nearing the edge, the action drawing a mewled protest from Sebastian’s lips. He does not hear it, cannot hear it, for fear he’ll he sink back to his knees and take Sebastian in again. But this night is for him as well, and so he loosens his trousers and sends them toward the floor, his own hardness eager and wet at the thought of Sebastian’s near-sated flesh.

The ointment is in a small pot that Sebastian keeps on his dresser. Everyone assumes it’s pomade for his hair or lotion, and Sebastian takes no small delight when someone quite noble or self-important uses it for anything but for what it is intended. Charles has never made such a mistake, but he credits his successes only to Sebastian’s low pleas that have echoed in his ears every time he’s had occasion to use it.

“You’re wicked,” Sebastian moans softly, one hand reaching out toward Charles. “Positively wicked.”

“That, my dear Sebastian, is the most delightful thing about me.”

“Who says such a horrible thing?”

Charles smiles down at him, his hand stroking his shaft slowly, coating it. “You do.”

“You see? I’m always right about such things.” He pouts with a delicate push of his lower lip, the tempting sight made more so as he lifts his legs, angling himself up. “I have a deep and abiding affection for wicked, you know.”

Charles's cock fits tight against Sebastian’s tensed muscle. He leans in and nips at Sebastian’s still present pout, smiling as his mouth opens in protest, the sound lost to the groan of pleasure as Charles penetrates him. “Deep, most assuredly, Sebastian.”

“Oh…oh, and wicked.” His eyes close, his mouth opens on heavy breaths. “So wicked.”

“I could stop.” He lies with a smile, and wonders if it is a lie when they both know the truth so well. He cannot stop. Even this early into whatever this is, he is well aware that stopping is never an option.

“If you stop, I shall die.” Sebastian’s voice is different like this, deeper, older. He’s not the

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soft, easy school boy when Charles is inside him, but a man. A man made of choice and need and defiance. The words sound strange – a child’s words and threats given voice in a tone that almost makes Charles believe him. “Never stop, Charles.”

“Never, Sebastian.” He kisses him again as Sebastian reaches between them and begins to stroke himself, matching his movements to the roll of Charles’s hips. The kiss ends and they both push closer, and Charles closes his eyes. It is a vow he knows he will break and wonders if it makes the words mean less right now. “Never.”

“Icarus falling”

The only time Sebastian didn’t talk about God was the only time Charles actually thought he might exist. Charles might think it amusing if he gave it thought, though he tries very hard not to think around Sebastian. Sebastian isn’t made for thinking, he’s made for feeling, doing.

They’re doing nothing right now, which is something else that Sebastian is terribly good for and at. The chimneys rise up around them like a foreign landscape, a small city of their own in the countryside. Sebastian is spread out on the blanket, naked and tanned in ways that other Englishmen never seem to be, sprawled and wanton, in the way that Sebastian always is. He looks at home, despite the setting, lying on a blanket big enough for them both, though Sebastian insisted they have two blankets and more room and more wine, and Charles had not felt inclined to disagree with any of it at all.

There is a soft breeze, and soft voices somewhere in the distance, sounding miles away even through the great megaphones of the Agricultural Show. Charles can hear them faintly, gently drifting over the grasses and purple flowers, up along the great walls of Brideshead and into the drifting clouds, but it all seems rather far away and imaginary; the only real things around are Charles and Sebastian and the sun and the blankets and a really very good wine.

“I shall stay like this always,” Sebastian declares, as is his way. Sebastian doesn’t say anything or muse on something. He demands and declares, definitive statements that brook no argument and are as likely to cause a temper tantrum as a pout if they’re disagreed with. “Naked as the day I was born until Nanny bundled me up in something horrid and blue and carted me off to the nursery. Under the sun and steeped in fine wine and good company.”

“The sun will not always shine, I believe you told me, Sebastian,” Charles remonstrates gently, his amusement plain.

“No. It never seems to shine here for long, though it is brighter with you here, Charles.” He turns his head and smiles, and it’s really a lovely smile, filled with mischief and promise and something slightly dark around the edges that draws one in like a mystery begging to be solved. It’s always that darkness that pulls Charles closer, tugs him in.

“You are a creature of flattery, Sebastian. Made purely of it and giving it freely.” He reaches over and brushes his fingers across Sebastian’s lips, unable or unwilling to keep from feeling the soft sensuousness of them. “I have no bearing on the sun.”

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“Not the sun then, but the shadows.” He shifts to his side, and Charles lets his eyes run over the lean, muscled frame, the tanned skin. “You chase them away with your sensibility and forthrightness. It’s terribly good of you, though I fear someday I shall hate you for it.”

“You’ll hate me, you think?”

“Hate you and love you in equal measure, no doubt, as all good boys do.”

Charles chuckles softly. “And are you a good boy, Sebastian?”

“Oh, absolutely not, Charles. Ask anyone.” He leans in and there’s suddenly no distance between them. “Though if you ask me, I swear I shall tell you, and only you, the unvarnished truth.”

“I have asked you.”

Sebastian smiles wickedly and cleverly, and he really is far too beautiful to be real. “And did I not answer you, Charles?” He does away with what little space remains between them, his lips warm and wet hot on Charles’s lips. A low moan slips past Charles’s lips, and he reaches for Sebastian, needing to feel that skin, revel in his brightness.

Sebastian matches him kiss for kiss, soft hungry sound for another. They kiss and touch as though it is their first time, learning muscle and flesh and tangling in hair cut nearly too short for such things. Charles moves closer, setting Sebastian to sprawling on his back again, the limpid sunlight bathing them both as he angles between Sebastian’s legs and sets their bodies together in a slow, easy slide of skin on skin.

There’s another low moan and Sebastian breaks the kiss, gasping for air and fumbling for the wine. He drinks from the bottle and lets it trail from the corner of his mouth, leaving Charles no choice but to chase the burgundy down his flesh and then back up, finding another kiss exactly where he expects it, only sticky-sweet with grape and the taste of laughter.

They move in an easy rhythm, their bodies used to this and to each other. There are other times for other things, but the heat and the haze of the day call for nothing more that this slow stroke, the easy glide. Charles feels Sebastian hard against him and presses down, slides along his length. Sticky and thick, skin slicked with oils they’d poured on one another earlier to darken their skin as though they might brag that they’ve been to the beaches and villas of Spain or Italy instead of the wilds of Wiltshire this summer.

He slides a hand between them, shifting so Sebastian is caught between Charles’s hand and arousal, stroking him with increasing intensity. Sebastian’s head is thrown back in pleasure, his neck exposed like a column of fine architecture, like a living sculpture to mould with his hands.

Sebastian tastes of sweat and talcum, of flesh and sun. He tastes of the warm burn that fires in Charles’s breast and belly, at the base of his erection as his hips act of their own accord, meeting Sebastian’s eager thrusts with his own. There’s the reminder of last night’s fumbled lovemaking in the dark, the hint of wax from where the candle tipped and dropped the heated liquid onto Sebastian’s skin, and Charles wonders if this is what Icarus tasted like, wings singed and melted by the sun.

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A heavy breath brings Charles back to himself and to Sebastian, to the moment. He feels the muscles stiffening beneath him and knows Sebastian is close, knows the tell-tale signs. It is here, in this moment, that Charles lets himself believe, for an instant, in God, as surely Sebastian is a fallen angel in glorious agony as he gives himself over to his body’s basest need. Ever since the first time, he’s expected God’s name to fall from Sebastian’s lips, and every time he is disappointed by silence that ends only with Charles’s name whispered in a kind of reverence Sebastian never gives to God.

He follows Sebastian over the edge soon, the heat and the easy slide brought on by the thick moisture leaving him little choice. He lies there, braced above Sebastian, staring down at him as though he sits on high. He should be grateful to be revered, he supposes, but the only thing it makes him feel is fear.

Gods can fall, Charles thinks as he kisses Sebastian once more and then rolls beside him, letting the sun warm away his sudden chill. And, as he is no god at all, he’s terrified the fall will kill him, as he hasn’t Sebastian’s angel wings to catch him in mid-flight.

Too Short a Lease

“It is, quite possibly, the laziest day of summer.” Cordelia’s voice is thick with the heat that seems to vibrate in the air all around us. She sounds sleepy or drugged, drunk perhaps on blackberries and wine like Sebastian and myself. I can see Sebastian’s smile from the corner of my eye, and wonder if I should be wary or aroused, or a combination of the two, as is my wont where Sebastian is concerned.

“I do think you’re right, Cordelia.” There’s never any malice in Sebastian’s voice when he speaks of or to Cordelia. It’s always honest affection, and I’m sure she’s the only one, save for Nanny perhaps, who never feels the bite of his wicked tongue. “Which is rather depressing, I think.” He rises up on his elbows, looking down at his little sister with his smile curved, a hint of the wickedness in it. “For the laziest day to be over means summer is almost gone.”

“It does.” Cordelia’s eyes are closed, and I wish that she would open them, see the light in Sebastian’s eyes. I want someone who knows of these things to look at him and tell me if I’m correct from my scattered and likely misremembered readings from the Bible, that Sebastian is like a fallen angel, dangerous and deadly and beautiful beyond compare. “Sad, really.”

Sebastian shifts onto his side, elbow bent and head resting on his hand. I mimic his posture, watching with eyes hungry for the sight of him. He has discarded his shirt at some point, soaking up the sun into his pale skin like some bohemian, like a gypsy, his pant legs rolled up to his knee. He reaches over slowly, though the speed seems like a trick of the heat. “Don’t be sad, Cordelia.” He touches her then, just the barest brush of his fingertip between her breasts. I can see her breath shift, catch and then start again, slightly faster. “We could do something. Make the day less lazy. Give us hope for the future.”

“You don’t believe in the future, Sebastian.”

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He smiles at her, and I realize I need no help in identifying him. He is Lucifer, risen and intent on destruction. “I suppose you’re right, Cordelia, to some small extent. The future, so far off and distant, seems but a dream.” He touches her again, his finger tracing a line from the base of her throat to the collar of her dress and down along the flat of her stomach to where the skirt blossoms out like a flower, its petals curled around her legs. “But this summer stretches on forever. A future I think we can all believe in.”

I watch Cordelia lick her lips, her eyes closed even tighter, as if refusing to see what Sebastian is doing. Myself, I find I cannot look away. His eyes are bright and dark all at once, intent shadowing them in ways that makes my own breath catch, my heart race. “S-so.” She licks her lips again and exhales, the breath shaky. “If we do something, it’s possible, perhaps, that tomorrow will be the laziest day.”

Sebastian’s fingers slide up to the collar of Cordelia’s dress again and rest there for a brief moment, one of them tracing the delicate skin above the lace. “It is, I think, quite possible.” Sebastian’s voice has grown thick as well, and desire seems to hang around us like ripe fruit, forbidden fruit. He undoes two of the buttons, pulling the fabric back to expose Cordelia’s skin. It’s pale and unspoilt, though there’s a rosy flush staining it as Sebastian’s hands touch her. He moves on to more buttons, intent, as always, in his goal. “Don’t you?”

“I...I’m not sure.” She licks her lips again, her breath stumbling and I can imagine the rapid beat of her heart beneath her skin, wonder if Sebastian can feel it. I wonder if perhaps he’s forgotten I’m here, if she has. But no. She turns her head, her gaze falling to me. Her eyes are bright with emotions, ones easily read and others I have no names for. “What do you think, Charles?”

My name sounds like a caress on her tongue and I reach out as she extends her hand toward me. Invitation is writ plain on her skin as I lift her hand to my lips. I can taste her rapid heartbeat against my tongue, and I cannot look away as Sebastian turns his head to me. His invitation is in the burning heat of his eyes, singeing my skin with a glance. The answer to the question is so clear, what I should do and what I should say, but instead I place another kiss on Cordelia’s wrist, my eyes locked on Sebastian’s.

“Unanimous then,” Cordelia breathes, turning her face back toward the sun. I watch her for a moment, trace her profile and commit it to memory, my eyes painting her image in my mind as they move down. She is not beautiful, at least not in the way that Sebastian and Julia are beautiful. Her beauty lies in her voice and the soft touch of her hand, in the acceptance she gives everyone, the fierce loyalty she has, a lioness protecting her cubs.

But in this moment, there is the same beauty, reflected perhaps from Sebastian’s closeness, from the intensity of his gaze as he parts her dress, tugging it free from her shoulders, down her arms. She arches her back, letting him undress her, and I can’t help but be captured by the sight. She is untouched by sunlight and likely by eyes other than Nanny’s or her mother’s, perhaps Julia’s a time or two. Or perhaps I am wrong and Sebastian has done this before, but there’s something in his own gaze, a sense of wonder in those deep blue eyes that speaks of discovery.

“So lovely, my Cordelia.” He bends his head, his breath feathering over her skin. His lips are stained dark, a hint of purple tinting the red as he parts them and places the faintest of kisses on Cordelia’s stomach. “My sweet, innocent Cordelia.”

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“Not so innocent, Sebastian. You’re not the only heathen in our house. The Sisters despair over me.”

“Over your brain, sweet thing,” he assures her, his mouth moving over her skin, raising gooseflesh despite the heat. “You see reason instead of faith and it frightens them. This…this is something altogether different.”

“Is it so different, Sebastian?” Her voice is lighter than air, soft and gasping into the breeze around us. “What do you think, Charles? Would the Sisters approve?”

“I think the Sisters are far too demanding should they find fault in you, Cordelia.” I’m still holding her hand, and taste her wrist again, and there’s something faint on her skin. Perspiration, perhaps, but it tastes of whiskey or wine, something intoxicating.

She laughs and it’s as breathless as her gasps, desperate for air as Sebastian’s kisses move up her skin to the slight swell of her breasts. They’re small and perfect, creamy white with the hint of pink at the nipples, the skin hardening like rosebuds before dawn. “Sebastian has been giving you lessons in dripping honey from your tongue, Charles.”

Sebastian laughs as well, then flicks his tongue across Cordelia’s nipple. She gasps again, and this time it’s raw and throaty, beyond her years. Sebastian closes his mouth around the hard flesh, suckling it gently, his white teeth framing the pink as his tongue bathes the flesh.

“O-oh, Sebastian.”

He closes his eyes after a quick glance at me, letting his mouth truly close over her. She shivers beneath him and arches up, her body like milk cream rising to the surface, pulled up by his mouth, his need. I pull back slightly, watching the tableau before me as Sebastian shifts, his body over hers. Her legs, darkened by days spent with her skirts raised, chasing us through brambles and fields, running for picnic supplies or hiding from Sebastian’s invented monsters and imagination, curve around Sebastian’s, and I can’t help but notice the difference. She is dark where he is light, his pale skin nearly the colour of his khaki trousers. Her legs stand out starkly against his, sliding against his calves.

Sebastian groans around her, moving his head with slow deliberation to Cordelia’s other breast. Her eyes are closed against the sensation and her body shivers with it, overloaded, as I know the senses can get beneath the onslaught of Sebastian’s tongue. I reach for my pencils, the packet of papers I keep with me, tucked down in my satchel or in the picnic basket that seems our constant companion. I pull them free and lick the tip of the pencil, sliding it against the paper with a scratching sound that speaks of rough stubble on untouched skin.

I trace their forms, now melting together like one in the August heat. Sebastian's hair tumbles down against her flesh as he leaves her breasts, letting his mouth travel down to the slope of her stomach, tracing paths I cannot see with his tongue. I sketch out Cordelia's arms as one extends above her head, fingers splayed against the edge of the blanket while the other hand threads though Sebastian's hair, making fanning waterfalls of the strands as she strokes through it.

Her neck is arched and her jaw strong like Sebastian's, her lips parted. Her eyes are closed but her lashes lay like soot against her cheeks, dark contrast to her skin and the pale pink of her tongue as it traces over the swollen flesh of her lower lip. She is plump like a berry, ripe for

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picking as Sebastian traces his hands and mouth over her, searching for the stem to sever her from the vine.

Cordelia's voice carries on the wind, soft pleas and words I am uncertain that she actually knows, begging Sebastian to touch, taste. She is spread beneath him like a feast and I cannot help but stare as he dines on her. I try to capture the subtle movements with my pencil, the fact that his touch never leaves her, that the stroke of his hand along her side is almost brotherly in intent, despite the fact that his other hand slides beneath her back to guide her higher so he might divest her of her dress completely.

The sun feels too hot on my skin and my pencil feels soft against the paper, smudging and smearing the sharp lines into lazy strokes that seem better suited to this pursuit of pleasure. Sebastian is uncontained in lines, more a motion I try to convey as he eases away from Cordelia, setting her dress and underskirts aside. There is little between them now, underclothes that hide the last bastion of her womanhood, and I wonder if it will remain. Sebastian seems lost, and I wait in the shadow of fear for it to all fall apart as he scrambles back to ground he knows, he understands, he controls.

Instead, he shifts closer, his body fitted to Cordelia's, and kisses her. I feel the heat like shame in my groin, burning at the sight of them as she winds her hands into Sebastian's hair and holds him against her, her leg curving over the back of his. Want and wanton and not Cordelia at all, except this is Cordelia as Sebastian sees her, beautiful and desirous. It is how we all see ourselves through Sebastian’s eyes and I can no more fault her for the need than I can myself.

He moves down her again with purpose now, laziness a thing forgotten as his fingers curve under the fabric. He is a warrior now, ripping the shield away from his enemy for conquer. I know this Sebastian far too well, but he surprises me with tenderness as he guides the material down and places the softest of kisses on the curve of flesh. Cordelia gasps and arches upward, her knees falling wider apart in offering.

"Summer stands no chance," Sebastian whispers against her, his tongue snaking down to the tender flesh beneath. Cordelia groans and I remember the first time I felt Sebastian's tongue on my flesh and groan in time with her, dropping my artist's distance and crawling over to her, my mouth on hers to capture that once more.

She kisses me fiercely and I taste Sebastian in her, that fight and fire that burns so brightly and will burn us all to ashes long before the end of days. One of her hands is in my hair, holding me to her and refusing to surrender control, as the other tries to hold Sebastian against her, like taming a stallion that has only known the wild.

Endless time passes until surely it must be autumn or winter, another summer gone, but it is still this moment as Cordelia shudders beneath me, her mouth falling from mine as she gasps for breath, Sebastian's name stealing away what she holds in her lungs. I turn my head to watch him taste her, drink her down like the finest champagne only for once, there is appreciation of what he tastes on his tongue, savouring the flavour instead of simply consuming it.

I reach for Sebastian, unable to hold back any longer. His hair tangles in my fingers, his mouth is hot on mine, sweet as spun sugar with the taste of Cordelia. Want rises up like the heat from the black of the roof, like brimstone and sulphur underpinning the sweet smell of summer crops and drying grass all around. I push at Sebastian’s braces, guiding them off his

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shoulders and down, letting them fall at his hips as he kneels before me, still between Cordelia's spread legs.

He pushes me back before I can catch him, guiding me down to the blanket as he eases over Cordelia and lays me down beside her. I can feel her watching me, as she must have felt my eyes on her. Sebastian braces himself over me, and I can feel the brush of her skin as she turns on her side and slides her hand in the space between us, unbuttoning my shirt and baring flesh to Sebastian's hungry mouth.

"How does it feel?" she asks softly as Sebastian bends his head to my neck, kissing and suckling the skin there. "When he kisses you?"

"He's kissed you," I manage, my voice thick with desire as Sebastian's mouth moves over me, heat and wet in his wake.

"Not like he kisses you. He's so gentle with me." She laughs softly as Sebastian's teeth rake my skin and I arch upward, rising toward him like he's Helios, the sun behind him shining like a golden halo. "Tell me how he kisses you. How he feels."

"His mouth is hotter than the roof, teeth sharp." I fight for breath to keep talking as Sebastian's fingers weave over my skin, undoing my trousers and undressing me. It's like fire in my veins as his fingers touch me and the world goes away, even Cordelia's presence narrowing to the faintest hint of shadow against his glow. The light touch disappears as Sebastian moves down me, disrobing me with rough, demanding fingers.

"So hard for him, aren't you, Charles?" Her voice is so matter-of-fact as Sebastian pulls away to discard my clothes. Intent is burning in his eyes and it is clear that he'll be inside me soon. I can feel my body respond to the thought. My groin tightens, heat pooling at the base of it, muscles tightening and waiting for Sebastian’s fingers to breach them, push past them until I’m ready for him. “Will you tell me how he feels?”

Sebastian’s laugh is low and throaty as he reaches for the picnic basket. He is no fool, my Sebastian, and never ventures anywhere unprepared for an adventure. There is always wine and cream and oil for the bread and I know something will slide, warm from the sun, against my skin.

I turn my head to look at Cordelia. There’s darkness in her eyes, sin stealing away the innocence that normally brightens them. There is a moment of clarity, of regret that vanishes as Sebastian’s fingers move against me, and any remorse dies in the heat and pressure as he eases them inside.

“Tell me,” Cordelia breathes, moving closer so I can feel her breasts against my arm, hardened nipples rubbing against the sun-touched hairs on my skin. “Tell me how he feels.”

“Like fire.” My laughter is weak, unsteady as Sebastian moves his fingers inside me, thrusting slowly. I can only see shadows, backlit as he is by the sun, but I can imagine his smile, imagine the satisfaction I know full well he derives from rendering me helpless.

Cordelia laughs and it’s a delighted laugh, a child on Christmas morning surrounded by bright paper and ribbons. The dissonance of it nearly takes me out of the moment until Sebastian’s fingers slide deeper, curving slightly as he pushes another inside. I groan, unable to stop the

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sound, and it trembles a low bass to Cordelia’s soft peal of joy. I groan again, panting roughly, my breath caught on a low whisper. “God.”

“Oh,” she whispers to me, breathing against my skin. “It’s like a prayer, Charles.” She turns her smile to Sebastian and he leans in and kisses her. It’s soft and delicate until she moans and opens her mouth and then I can see his tongue touch hers. My eyes fall closed then as Sebastian’s fingers continue to thrust inside me, the hungry sound I hear him mutter against his sister’s lips fuelling every hard stroke.

“Sebastian. Sebastian.” I cannot help but breathe his name, panting it roughly into the overheated air. I open my eyes again, treated to the sight of Cordelia’s ripe, swollen lips parting from Sebastian’s as he turns his head to me. Heat is burning along my veins, pulsing so hard and hot I feel I might combust from the inside out.

“Yes, Charles?” His voice is cool, but it serves to add fire to my blood as I feel his fingers leave me. There’s a sense of loss, bereavement even though I know what is to come. I watch Cordelia watch him, remember what it was like to see Sebastian for the first time. He’s golden like an angel, gilded in white blond.

“Please.”

It is the pleading that always makes Sebastian tremble, the one weapon I have over him that he cannot fight. He groans low and settles more firmly between my legs, and reaches down, guiding himself into me. I cannot breathe during the moments it takes him to fill me, cannot do anything but feel Sebastian as he pushes deeper, deeper until he is inside me and he is all I can feel.

We are alone in that instant, the rest of the world fallen away so that it is myself and Sebastian like giants straddling the planet. The world is ours and ours alone to do with what we wish, what we will. Of course, for us, the only will we have is for this, for more, for whispered words and hard thrusts and the tightening of flesh and for release.

“Touch him.”

I huff a gasp, wrenched from the moment by Sebastian’s voice. I have forgotten Cordelia despite the desperate heat of her eyes and the wide wonder that she exhales as she watches. We are sweat-soaked and burning, the sun roasting out skins as Sebastian moves, as I wrap my legs around his calves and thrust against him, tight around him. Sebastian is all I see, but I cannot help but feel the tentative touch as it traces along my arousal, feeling the hard flesh so lightly in stark contrast to the hard thrust of Sebastian as he begins to let loose his control.

Sebastian says my name, his voice rough with passion, with hunger and it echoes down my spine like a primal cry. I shudder in response, need surging through me, caught by Cordelia’s hand as she wraps it around me and begins stroking. Her touch is too tight and too gentle and I thrust into it, gasping her name and his like a mantra, like Cordelia’s honoured prayer.

“Stroke him,” Sebastian growls and Cordelia obeys, as caught in his thrall, as I am, unable to resist. We are like a three-headed beast of need, drenched with heat and wet, and more as Sebastian stills inside me, a different heat rushing through me. I groan in time with him, my body tightening further still until I jerk in Cordelia’s hand, my climax spilling out over her still moving hand.

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Sebastian slumps down against me, his face buried in my neck. It is too much heat, his skin singeing mine, but to move is beyond us both. I lift a hand to shield my eyes to the sun and look at Cordelia tracing patterns up Sebastian’s back with her wet fingers, marking him as mine or ours or perhaps he has been all along regardless. If anyone, I share him with her, as she has always held his heart.

“There,” Cordelia sighs finally, shifting to lie down beside us, her head on Sebastian’s shoulder for a soft kiss and then mine. “Summer stands no chance now. Another lazy day will have to come along.”

I wrap my arm around her and kiss her temple lightly. It seems incongruous given the past hour we’ve spent, but right all the same. “I believe you are right, Cordelia.”

“Let summer bring them,” Sebastian whispers roughly, loud enough that we can both hear, yet still a secret for all that. “And we will chase them all away until it has no choice but to last forever.”

Sebastian

There are stories that the family tells about the day he came to live with them, about how he was sitting under the Christmas tree after the entire family had returned from the chapel and Sebastian had taken one look at him and claimed him as his own. They’d tried to discourage him – it was a present for Cordelia, after all – but he wouldn’t be dissuaded and had said with his slight lisp and all the authority he could muster: “I thall name him Aloythiuth.”

After that, they were simply inseparable. Neither strayed far from the other, though Julia would occasionally steal the bear away and hide him, sending Sebastian into full-blown rages, tearing the house apart as though someone had stolen his own child from his arms. Julia never tired of the game, of watching Sebastian lose control, so Sebastian began finding ways to keep the bear constantly at his side. He insisted on a small porcelain tub for the bear, sitting beside his as he took his bath. He slept with him and kept the door locked against Julia’s sneaking.

The only time he was allowed out of Sebastian’s hands was when he let Cordelia hold Aloysius, clutching him with fat baby hands and gnawing on stuffed hands and feet and ears. Sebastian would always watch her, smiling in ways that he reserved for no one else, save the bear. They were like his two toys, he rather thought, though deep inside, he was not fool enough to think that they needed him any more than he desperately needed them.

He knew there was talk as he grew older. Worried old women clucking their tongues about a young man with such a strange attachment to a stuffed toy, but he had little time for them, sweeping past them with an entitled air. The very rich can do most anything, he’d learned at his father’s knee and his mother’s skirts. What would brand the poor ready for the asylum would merely earn him a shake of the head and muttering of eccentricity. So he carried the

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bear where he went – part good luck charm, part security blanket and, in truth, the only friend Sebastian was completely sure he had.

Adrift

There are a variety of churches that Sebastian avoids as they tour through Venice, and an equal number of museums and statues. Instead, he lays in the gondola with the bottle of wine and stares at me with eyes that see far too much and too little all the same.

“What are you smiling about?”

“You.” He presses his bare foot against mine and lets his eyes drift closed. “Sitting so very far away, studying me as if I were something carved in stone.”

“No, you’re no sculpture, Sebastian.”

“Oh?” He takes a sip and passes the bottle over, his lips red from the wine before he licks them clean. “What then? A painting? Will you sketch and paint me, Charles? Immortalize me?”

“No. Not paint. Better though. Sculpture is too static for you, paint flows, but…no.” I take a drink and ponder the thought as we drift along the canals, pants rolled to our knees and vests unbuttoned and opened, ties loose around our necks and straw hats perched jauntily on our heads. Sebastian is bathed in sunlight with his head back and lips parted on a smile. He’s like a sacrifice to Dionysius or Hyacinth offered up to Apollo. “Collage, I think.”

“Collage?” He murmurs, his voice as sun-drenched as the rest of us. “Bits and pieces of things scattered here and there?”

“Not scattered,” I explain, shifting my position in the small boat to lie above him, stare down into those deep blue eyes. “Arranged in such a way that even those things that don’t make sense, those things that seem so contrary are perfectly aligned.” I kiss him softly, tasting wine and warmth, Sebastian’s tongue stroking mine. “A kaleidoscope of colors and textures. Soft and hard, dark and light.” I kiss him again, wondering as I do each time, how I ever managed to stop.

Sebastian laughs against my mouth, and shakes his head, kissing me again. “You see more in me than there is, Charles.”

“I see everything in you, Sebastian.”

His grin is wicked and promising and heat pools in my groin and I know better than anything else that we are not long for this gondola. “Can you see yourself in me?”

“Yes,” I breathe against his mouth and then pull away, urging the gondolier toward the shore.

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There is privacy somewhere, though if we do not find it, Sebastian will find another way to fulfill my promise, lost in the dark and narrow alleyways of Venice.

I shiver with desire and want, with anticipation and try hard not to think how much I hope that privacy will elude us.

melodylemming

Charles woke up one sunny morning to find Sebastian leaning daintily into his personal space.

"Murrgelfifffemmornining-ish," he murmured, looking into the entrancing depths of his dearest friend's eyes.

His eyes, so blue.

Or were they silvery purple? It was hard to tell with such a hangover. They may even have been pink and lime-green polkadotted.

Charles was not awake.

Yet.

"Awaken, my dearest Charles!" Sebastian exclaimed, leaping upon Charles and pummelling him with delicately tanned fists and a slightly less delicate half-finished bottle of champagne.

"Ow," Charles whined in ungrateful reply, thrilling a tad at the way Sebastian's knee was painfully digging into the hollow of his throat. His vocal cords protested at this cruel, cruel treatment, and with a thump, Sebastian rolled off the bed and onto the floor.

He reappeared, dreamily touseled and drenched in the remainder of his bottle of champagne. It fizzed, a soft golden mist surrounding his head and making him look like one of those pathologically priggish boy saints Charles was absolutely sure Sebastian had prayed to devoutly as a young boy kneeling in Nanny Hawkins' nursery tower. In a fit of religious fervor, Sebastian clasped his hands now and fell upon Charles with a rousing cry fit to wake all the Saints as they slumbered in their nastily Catholic Heaven.

"You are such a Catholic beast," Charles murmured, probing delicately at his teeth and wondering if he was getting a bit of a cavity.

"I know I am," Sebastian said in a husky voice, eyes damply glowing from beneath his lowered, champagne-filled lashes. "I can't help it, you know. Bridey wishes he were such a beast."

"He's a beast of an entirely different sort," Charles mumbled, attempting to sit up. He failed.

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"And don't fret, Sebastian. You're the sort of beast I like, anyway."

Sebastian blushed rosily, as he was wont to do when flattered. "You're a dear, Charles, to put up with me. A dear, dear, dear, dear, dear. A dearest darling, of the best sort."

He removed himself from the bed and fell back into the ever-widening pool of champagne. Charles glared down at him, but without much malice. The sky was blue outside; it was a day of the most beautiful sort.

A day to dream of. Charles was sure he had, at some point. And though Sebastian may not have appeared in that dream, it was alright, because he was going to play a very important part in the day. He always did.

"Aloysius and I have a fresh bottle of champagne, a basket of strawberries, and some big glittery crosses!" Sebastian exclaimed with new delight in his voice, taking Charles by the wrist and yanking him forcefully into the cool morning air. "Let's go on a picnic and never, ever come back! I dare say Mummy won't notice."

"Alright," said Charles. "Let's."

And that was what they did. And then they ran off to Paris. They had a rather dirty garrett where Charles was a starving artist and Sebastian decorated everything in charmingly moldy velvet. He had an excellent touch with drapes, and they were extremely popular among the Bohemian set. Aloysius gained a name for himself and, in his French maid's outfit, kept the place picturesquely half-clean. Sebastian learned to make coffee and gave up all hard liquor, preferring to sit on Charles' knee and embroider stockings, which they gave to the small orphan girls who clustered beneath their window.

Life was sweet, and, in case you hadn't realized, they lived happily ever after.

potatofiend

Eden

Oxford, I realise now, is quite possibly the most beautiful city I have ever been granted the opportunity to visit. Oh, Venice is splendid too, in its way, and my days there were made the more luminous by Sebastian's very presence, but Oxford is something else entirely. It never occurred to me during my time there that the lofty arches through which I walked, book-laden, on my way to various lectures, had been traversed by great men from Edward III to Wordworth. I never paused to reflect that the very nature of the university town - populated at its heart almost entirely by students and their basket-bedecked bicycles - was something ancient and unique. Perhaps the magnificent aesthetics of the old, elegant buildings, the dreaming spires…perhaps they penetrated my artist's brain even in those formative years. I remember gazing from the window of the library over the slate roofs, silvered with the previous night's rain, and declaring with all the decisive solemnity of youth that I should never see anything more affecting; but that was in the beginning. I had an eye for beauty, certainly, and at Oxford I had found something infinitely more entrancing than the fabulous intricacies of cold stone and dead sheet-slate.

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The something, of course, was Sebastian Flyte. Sebastian was, as I have said, quite irrefutably the most handsome fellow in his year, but beyond that, he was the most enchanting creature in all of Oxford. It was almost as if he were emitting some kind of strange and inevitable light, a glow that emanated from his very core and sought to permeate the safe, mundane cocoon of university life.

To begin with, the Oxford routine had seemed to me something so far removed from my days at Alma Mater as to be inconceivable, but after I had exhausted the novelty of numbing my mind with sweet champagne I came to realise that the step really was not such a big one. Young men passed through Oxford as a rite of passage; they studied, or they did not, and three years later they passed out of it again, if not with a fine degree then at least with their dignity intact. They would subject their sons, when the time arose, to the unmitigated circles of hell that were their preparatory and public schools - this, of course, in a fit of sentimentality - and then they, too, would become Oxford men. It was a slow, drifting circle, unbreakable and wholly unremarkable, and against this background of tradition and monotony Sebastian shone like a glow-worm in a well shaft.

In term-time he was a bundle of eccentric charm, his hand always warm in the crook of my elbow and his hair caught through with sunshine even on cloudy days. At Brideshead, isolated on the moors like the tragic, eponymous hero of some misbegotten Victorian novel, he was too beautiful to bear.

The long vac that we idled away together there was nothing short of blissful. It was the first time that I had ever been both free of an occupation and quite exempt from the presence of the paternal unit, hovering at my elbow and making tentative suggestions, as was his wont when I was at home for the holidays. Julia was gone almost before she arrived, leaving behind her only a dim, perfumed shade in my mind, the impression of a brisk and organised girl who seemed to me a paradox, being possessed both of Sebastian's beauty and of a caustic tongue quite alien to his nature. On this occasion I was thankfully not obliged to delve into the complexities of her character.

For weeks, the two of us were quite alone, save Nanny Hawkins, and my brain quite refused to acknowledge her presence. It was not that I disliked her; on the contrary, I thought her a delightful old lady, but she was the sort of person who could be shut into a little box in one's mind just as she was shut into her little corner in the house; even when one was with her it was possible to forget that she was really there at all. Sebastian, on the other hand, conducted himself in a manner even more flamboyantly entrancing than that to which I was used; he waxed lyrical at frequent intervals about the pain his fractured foot was causing him, but both of us knew that this ceased to be more than a childish game of pretend after the first week or so. We were too happy to care, and make-believe was an integral part of who we were then - or rather, it was who Sebastian was in his entirety. Sebastian's heart was infused with fantasy from core to peripheries, and it had been leaking slowly into my own since the evening he presented himself so rudely at the window of my rooms. I could hardly comprehend that there had once been a time at which I had not known Sebastian; I dated my existence from the materialisation of that drunken party in the quad, as if everything that had come before had been merely a misguided dream. Sebastian was everything.

He never seemed to realise how beautiful he was. We would lie in the long grass on hot, languid afternoons and he would gaze into the indeterminate distance, watching the billows of cumulus bloom in the blue like great white roses. I was always far too preoccupied with examining his face to waste precious time on such trifling things. He was beyond Adonis,

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beyond Paris, and I worshipped the elegant line of his profile and the bright blue of his eyes with a strangely chaste intensity, as a man might devote himself to his deity. Indeed, Sebastian was mine, for I had no other then.

His hands were soft. I knew this, for I had felt them often on my own, and against my cheek, and warm at my waist through my shirt. He was always touching me in passing: brushing a hand fondly through my hair; slipping a guiding arm about my waist; even kissing me sometimes on the top of the head before we parted in the evening. This was decidedly bad form for an English gentleman of the old school, but then Sebastian was of no school but his own, and of this I could be nothing but glad.

One afternoon, towards the middle of that glorious August, I had deigned to devote my attention to the architecture of the building, and Sebastian was watching me as I traced its hard outlines onto my notepaper. The paper wasn't the correct sort, and the pencil was too hard, and everything about the lines seemed stiff and cold and wrong. The castle was beautiful, but it was dead. Sebastian sat a little behind me on the grass with an arm looped about my neck, peering over my shoulder, and the warm mist of his breath on my ear only served to emphasise the point. I sighed, and he shifted a little.

"Really, Charles, you needn't stick at it if you don't want to. I don't know what you began it for in the first place; it seems a dreadful bore."

I laughed softly, and laid the pencil softly down. "Am I being a bore?"

"Oh, no, not you," he assured me lightly. "I said the castle was a bore, and that it would probably kill you if you did nothing but look at it for long enough. Or at least, if I didn't say that, I meant to."

I turned a little, just enough that I could glance into his eyes over my shoulder. "I shan't give up...it's only that I've rather lost the motivation for drawing now." I neglected to add that the urge to draw him remained foremost in my mind.

He stared steadfastly back at me a moment, and then kissed my cheek. I had known him too long to think this strange, and merely smiled. He said, "Dear Charles..." Then he promptly fell silent, and his eyes were earnest and wide on my own.

The sun was shining behind him and his hair was positively gold with it. I began to feel that if I did not avert my eyes I should make a fool of myself beyond all hopes of reconciliation. "Sebastian..."

"Charles." His voice was firm; it was the voice he used to berate Aloysius when the bear had committed some fatal error. I opened my mouth to say something, although my brain had not yet selected a phrase from my currently depleted vocabulary, and he smiled. The smile was my undoing.

I suppose I kissed him, although I maintain to this day that it was an involuntary act. Only the most insensitive of men could have withstood the expression on Sebastian's lovely young face, the softness in his eyes and the white of his teeth against his lower lip. Anyway, it didn't matter, because he was kissing back with all the fervour of the proverbial public-school gentleman; eager to experiment and innocent of everything but the most vice-ridden fantasies.

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His mouth was soft and his hands were warm; both I had known already, and both I learned again willingly as his fingers fluttered over my face like tentative butterflies. His mouth parted to my own and I turned my head, pressing deeper, shifting until the awkward clashing of teeth had been dealt and dispensed with. He was warm in my arms, Lilith's angel in cricket whites, and white-hot heat exploded in my chest, flooding my head with dreams.

I love you, I love you, I love you, and I always had; his whisper drifted to my ears like a benediction. He leaned his forehead against my own when we broke apart, his lips blushed red from kisses, and we stared at each other. It was merely the intensity of the situation that caused our silence, for I felt no fear. I had loved Sebastian ever since that first afternoon in the Botanical Gardens, at least...sometimes I thought I must have loved him forever.

His voice was unsteady. "Darling Charles. I love you."

I nodded, and kissed him again. Aloysius regarded us haughtily from his position as sentry atop the discarded bath-chair.

The grass was long and soft beneath us, infused with all the warmth of that splendid summer, and everything was Sebastian. He was the Muse that guided my hand, the heat in my veins, the slow throb of blood in my brain. Other people were inanimate beside him, and here there were no other people. Sebastian was the spirit, the motion, the essence.

That vac was as close to heaven as I have ever been. It seems a pity to me now, as it seemed irrelevant then, that every paradise must lose its most glorious angel.

************