The Pursuit Of…

by Courtney Milan

  “There you veer off from reality. I am certain he did not say that.”

  “‘Let’s make him an officer. It will be his duty to watch them march. Let’s surround him with men all the time.’”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” Henry said, “and I believe he was thinking of military discipline.”

  “And did that stop you from fucking men?”

  “Well—no.”

  “You and half the infantry, I’d wager. Henry, I hate to tell you this, but your father? I am going to guess he’s something of a fool.” John laughed. “He sent you into the infantry to teach you proper behavior?”

  “Almost his exact words! In his defense,” Henry said, “he’d never joined. How would he know?”

  John laughed harder.

  “And in his defense,” Henry said, “I have become more circumspect. I’m much better at judging who is safe to talk to.” He threw that out, holding his breath.

  John looked over at him. “‘Talk.’ Is that how fancy British officers describe fucking?”

  Henry’s heart hammered in his chest. He looked John in the eyes. “What do you call it?”

  John stirred the stew and shrugged.

  “I’ve never had a commission bought for me. I’ve no choice but to be circumspect. I don’t call it anything.”

  Henry exhaled slowly.

  “I just do it,” John said on a hoarse whisper.

  Not a whisper. An invitation.

  Their eyes met again. Henry felt a tug of energy go through him. In an ideal world, Henry would have intuited the perfect thing to say, something sweet and romantic, something that matched the growing lightness in his soul. He’d have said something that somehow captured the inchoate feelings that John aroused in him, and they’d have fallen—very slowly, very romantically—into a conveniently placed bower of petals.

  Henry had never said the perfect thing in his life, and besides, it was almost winter and the closest they’d get to a bower of petals would be a pile of moldering leaves. With the wind whipping around them, even that was absent.

  So what Henry said was this: “You must have done a great deal. You’re so very pretty.”

  John’s eyes widened. “Nobody has ever called me pretty before.”

  “No? Whyever not?”

  “It’s just not…done, I suppose.”

  “And now it has been done, and should be done a thousand times over. You’re very pretty, you know. And intelligent. And—” He bit off a thousand other adjectives that came to mind. “If it were spring, I’d make you a daisy crown and prove it. But you have lovely, mobile, expressive eyes and a strong chin and a sharp jawline, and…”

  And, oh, God, where was that bower of petals! He wanted to hide his face in it. His whole body, in fact. He’d just said, aloud, that John was pretty, in a tone that let all his more flowery sentiments show.

  It was a pity there was no bower of petals. Henry could crawl inside and perish of shame. Hell, he’d settle for hiding in that pile of debris.

  “Henry,” John said easily, “you eat terrible cheese and think that Thomas Jefferson has good qualities. You’ll excuse me if I find you lacking in good taste.”

  Ouch. John said it with a smile on his face, but it hurt. It hurt with an almost painful intensity. It hurt as if John were extending an invitation for just a fuck and no more, after all their weeks together. He’d had relations that meant no more, but this—

  Henry stood. “You couldn’t be more correct. I am an utter idiot. I should never have said any such thing.”

  John looked at him.

  “I should have said,” Henry said, “that you were devastatingly beautiful.”

  John still didn’t say anything.

  “But then, I have no taste,” Henry said. “Me and my terrible taste, we’re going to get bread.”

  “Henry.”

  “Good thing you’re used to swill,” Henry muttered. “Who knows what I’ll come back with? After all, I have no good taste.”

  * * *

  It took about ten minutes of disconsolately stirring soup for John’s sour mood to fade, and for him to recognize the truth: He’d made a mistake. He knew how Henry longed for acceptance, and his words had been hurtful. However he might try to justify his sentiments, it was not right, nor was it fair, to treat Henry as he had.

  Compliments… They made him uneasy. They always made him feel as if someone was trying to get something from him. And while Henry obviously wanted things from him, those things were mutual and pleasurable and not to be argued over.

  John was in the process of constructing an apology when the dust from the road presaged Henry’s return.

  Henry, I was unfair.

  Henry, I’m so deeply sorry that I hurt you.

  Henry, I never want to see you with that hurt in your eyes again.

  Henry turned off the road and came up to their camp under the trees. John had to get this right.

  Oh, damn it. Henry had become important to him. He cared what Henry thought, felt a stab of pain in his own heart when he saw the hurt reflected in the other man’s eyes.

  “Oi, John!” Henry called as he approached, waving madly. “You’ll never guess what happened!”

  Oh, no. John was glad to see him. So glad that his heart lifted. They were less than a hundred miles from their destination. How dreadfully inconvenient.

  “Let me guess,” John said dryly. “Your traveling companion was an unconscionable ass, and you’ve obtained a cold shoulder to give to him.”

  Henry blinked at him. His lips compressed.

  For a moment, he tilted his head in confusion. Then he laughed. “Oh, ha! I’d forgotten completely! I was annoyed at you for ten entire minutes, John!”

  “Good God! Ten entire minutes.”

  “I know!” Henry set down the sack he’d slung over his shoulder and took out a loaf of bread, some radishes, and a bunch of carrots.

  “Ten minutes on just one topic,” he said, slicing bread. “How utterly single-minded of me. But then I got distracted! Guess what distracted me.”

  “Ah…”

  “No, don’t guess, it will take too long and I have no patience. I’m just going to tell you. It was cheese. That farmwife up there makes her own cheese.”

  “We have so much cheese. Why would you buy cheese?”

  “First, we’re running out. We do not have so much cheese. Second, I mean actual cheese. Tasty cheese. Cheese that one likes to eat. We don’t have any of that. I was going to buy a small portion just for myself, so I could taunt you by saying you didn’t want any of my cheese since I have no taste.”

  “Fitting punishment.”

  “But something happened. I tasted her cheese and…it didn’t taste right.”

  “It wasn’t good?”

  “No. I’m afraid…” Henry swallowed. “I must confess. I’m very afraid that it was good. Objectively speaking.”

  “Oh,” John breathed. “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “John. It has happened. My tastes have become objectively terrible. You were completely right.” He unwrapped the Cheese of Death and cut off a slice. He popped it in his mouth and chewed morosely. “I’m doomed. I like it. I actually like it.”

  “You should still be angry at me.”

  “Hush, I don’t want to be. It’s no fun.”

  “I shouldn’t snap at you when you compliment me. That was terrible. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, then, boo.” Henry wagged his fingers at him. “Consider yourself chastised. Want some cheese?”

  “Henry. I’m trying to be serious.”

  “I am too. I realized it on my walk home. I ought to have been beaten to death for my mouth long before now. I’m scarcely tolerable as a white man, and people have been trained to tolerate me.”

  “Stop talking about yourself that way,” John said. “Stop saying you don’t deserve respect or care, because you do. It’s not acceptable to me for anyone to dismiss you that way. Not at all. I
’ll fight anyone who says otherwise, especially when it’s me.”

  Henry looked over at him. Their eyes caught, held. There was something—something bright and yet inexplicable in Henry’s face.

  “Oh,” Henry said. “I wonder when that happened.”

  “When did what happen?”

  “When did your good opinion become so utterly necessary to me?”

  “I…” John trailed off. There was that word between them again. Necessary. It felt so much heavier than all the other words—lust, want, care, attention. It didn’t fit, it couldn’t fit, not with Newport so close. But Henry kept going.

  “I feel pity for my former self, not knowing you at all. I can’t garner a single ounce of regret for my childhood felonies any longer.”

  “What?” John pulled back. “Felonies? How did we get to felonies?”

  “I was sixteen when I committed my first executable felony, you know. Buggery.”

  “Ah, that.” John waved a hand as if batting a fly. “That’s hardly even a felony. Henry, we were talking about—”

  “Treason is my second felony. Being a hardened criminal dedicated to tearing down all the old institutions rather agrees with me, don’t you think?”

  There was nothing to do but give up and wait for the conversation to take them back to where they’d been. John tried to lead it there. He looked at Henry and said in his lowest, most sensual voice: “Felony looks good on you.”

  “Oh.” Henry flushed. “I like it when you say it like that. Maybe I should add sedition to my list. My father will be so… What’s the opposite of proud?”

  “Annoyed? Dismayed? Outraged?”

  “It will be glorious.” Henry set his hand atop John’s. The weight burned into him. “Let me lead you into a life of crime.”

  “Lead me? You can’t lead me. I’m well ahead of you.”

  “Never! I cannot admit it. Name your crimes, sir. I must be the more dastardly.”

  “Aiding a runaway slave. Running away myself. Aiding another runaway slave. Fraud, blackmail in obtaining papers for my mother and sister.” John shrugged. “The ever-present buggery.”

  Henry leaned in admiringly. “Damn you. You’re right. You win. What excellent felonies. The best felonies. I have set my sights entirely too low! I need to break more laws.”

  “Ah.” John smiled. “I’ve been an even worse influence than Thomas Jefferson, I see.”

  “What are friends for, if not to urge you on in the commission of crimes required by all men of moral character?”

  Here was the tug he could give the conversation. John leaned in until he could see nothing but Henry’s smile, the freckles on his nose. “Is it friends, then, that we are?” Their breath danced on each other’s lips, warm and perfect.

  Henry pulled away. “Here,” Henry said in the way he had that suggested he was speaking in perfect non sequiturs—or maybe not. “Have some dreadful cheese. It’s still objectively terrible.”

  He cut a slice.

  Oh, what the hell. John didn’t take the cheese from Henry’s hand. He leaned forward and took it in his mouth, letting his lips brush Henry’s fingers.

  He knew what to expect. He’d eaten the cheese often enough.

  There was a burst of salt on his tongue, then a deep, rich flavor. Something that filled his mouth with an astonishing intensity.

  And beneath that, there were layers—something sweet, something bitter, something sharp, coming together with a complexity that made absolutely no sense at all but formed an almost perfect balance…

  “Oh no,” John said. “It’s happened.”

  “Has it?”

  “How?” John pulled away. “How is this possible? How can this happen? How did the Cheese of Death turn into…this? What did you do? What were you thinking?”

  “I was really thinking,” Henry said, “that if you were going to kiss me, we had better both taste of cheese. But I can explain. It’s simple. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that…all cheese is created equal.”

  “You are the most impossible man to try to kiss.”

  Henry just grinned at him.

  “That when any form of cheesemongering becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to abolish it—”

  “Do not continue, Henry. By no means are you to do this.”

  “Make me stop.” Henry’s eyes twinkled. “Where was I? Ah. It is the right of the people to abolish it and to institute new cheesemongers—”

  In the end, there was only one way to shut him up.

  Chapter Eight

  Henry couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed so hard. “It is the right of the people to abolish and institute new cheesemongers,” he managed to sputter out between guffaws, and he was about to go on when John set a finger across his lips.

  “Mmm?”

  John leaned in. He set the back of his other hand against Henry’s cheek. “Henry,” he said on a low murmur. “Henry.”

  “I know. You don’t need to tell me. I’m being an idiot.”

  The finger on his lips pushed in. “No,” John said. “You’re quick, and you’re funny, and you’re clever, and you don’t stop thinking about a thing just because it hurts your head. You are further from idiocy than anyone I’ve ever met. Never let anyone say that you’re stupid because you’re not in the usual way.”

  “John,” Henry breathed.

  “I can’t let you be this necessary,” John said. “We’ll be in Newport in three days.”

  “John.”

  John leaned in, so close that Henry could feel the warmth of his skin. “And yet I can’t stop needing you.”

  “Then don’t,” Henry said. “Don’t stop.”

  Their lips brushed. It wasn’t a kiss, any more than a touch of a hand was a caress. It was just the prelude to one—a meeting of lips so glancing that it was barely even an acquaintance. John pulled back.

  Henry met John’s eyes, rich brown and perfect, for one swimmingly sensual moment. Then they leaned in again, and this—this was a kiss.

  John’s arm wrapped around Henry as if he could keep the entire world at bay, as if he could protect him from the end of their journey.

  Lips melded, then tongues, then mouths. Henry moved to straddle John, bodies pressing together.

  John was kissing him, and it was magnificent.

  Throughout his life, Henry had been kissed for too many reasons—because someone was angry, because they’d faced a battle and made it out the other end alive, because Henry was there and he was better than nobody.

  He’d never been kissed by someone who thought him necessary. He’d always been the frivolous one. The flighty one. He’d always been That-Idiot-Henry, and never…this. Never someone to be cherished or valued or wanted.

  John kissed him as if he were air itself, and oh, how Henry wanted. He wanted so much to be the man John was kissing. He wanted to stay on this road forever. He wanted to have no destination at all. He wanted this to be his life, dust and miles and jokes and a voyage with no end.

  It could never happen. They’d run out of cheese. John had a family and so did Henry.

  John pulled away first. “I spent all the war thinking of nothing but coming home.” He shut his eyes. “I’ve worried so about my sister. Now, now that homecoming is upon me…I don’t want this journey to end.”

  It doesn’t have to, Henry didn’t say. But it did. It did have to.

  “What am I going to do, John?” he asked instead.

  “You’re going to go back,” John said soothingly, stroking his hair. “You’re going to tell lies about Yorktown, and you’ll be good at it. You’re going to claim you struck your head and have only now recovered your memories. Your wealthy family will welcome you with open arms.”

  “Oh.” Henry shut his eyes. “You…know about that, then.”

  “Mmm.”

  “You’re not angry? I…did rather tell a pack of lies about them.”

  “Yes,” John said in a low voice. “Yo
u did, but the lies were so obvious they don’t count, sweetheart.”

  Sweetheart. It hurt, that endearment, coming now, only when everything must end.

  “I have to go back,” Henry said.

  “I know. You don’t belong here with me.”

  “No,” Henry said. “This is awful. I inherited eighteen thousand pounds from my aunt, and if I’m dead, my father gets it all. He’s terrible, John. I cannot let him have it. But how do I go back?”

  “Think of this as a dream,” John said. “One in which you’ve acted differently, but—”

  Henry sat upright. “You think I’m asking how to stop committing felonies? No, no. You have it all wrong. That is not the question that consumes me. How do I keep committing treason? It’s easy when it’s just principles spouted on an open road. But when my mother cries, when my father shouts, when my brother calls on me and tells me that I need to think of his son’s reputation—how do I go on?”

  “Ah.” John smiled sadly. “That, I can’t tell you. But every man’s brand of treachery is his own. You’ve found so much of yourself. You can find this, too.”

  * * *

  They ought to have fucked that night.

  Henry knew that. But somehow the act itself seemed so final. Intercourse of any kind would inevitably mean goodbye instead of I love you. And Henry didn’t want to say goodbye until he had to. That night, they had made a single nest of blankets.

  One kiss on the lips had turned into two. John’s hands had found Henry’s hips; their arms had wrapped around each other.

  It had only been two kisses, but the second hadn’t ended. It had gone on, breath heating, until condensation gathered on the sheet of canvas they’d stretched between two trees to shield them from stray drops. The kiss had endured until water dripped onto their skin and evaporated in the heat of their want. The entire world disappeared into that kiss until there was nothing but lust and humidity. John’s muscled body hard on top of him, his mouth hot against his, the ground hard beneath his hips. That kiss went on and on, until it was no different than breathing, until weariness caught them both up and they fell asleep, curled in each other’s arms.