The Pursuit Of…

by Courtney Milan

  They should have fucked.

  Instead, they’d awoken that morning and packed their things as if it were a day like any other day.

  “Kingston?” the man at the well said at noon. “It’s twenty miles distant. Just beyond, you ought to be able to find transport across the Sound to Newport. You’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon with any luck.”

  “Excellent news,” John said.

  It was. Henry was not so selfish that he would count it as anything except the best news, the most perfect news. John had worried, and here they were. It was good. It was great.

  It was tearing him apart.

  On that last night, with Newport a three-mile walk and a boat ride away from the camp they set, they ran out of cheese.

  Their eyes met over the fire as they divided the last slivers.

  “It’s just as well,” Henry said. “It is objectively horrible cheese.” It was sublime when he put it in his mouth. “Stupid reality.”

  “I know,” John said. “I’m thinking too much of reality now. Tomorrow I find out…” Henry could almost taste his fears in that pause, the way he looked over his shoulder. He could almost imagine unknown horrors in the way John swallowed and shook his head. “Worrying won’t change reality, either. Distract me, Henry.”

  He said it the way he said the cheese was delicious, drawing out the syllables.

  “I’m no use as a distraction.” Henry sighed. “When I think of what will happen after tomorrow, I come up blank, too.”

  John just looked at him. “That’s as good a distraction as any. What will you do?”

  “Back home…” Back home, Henry was thought a frivolous, flabby fellow. One who thought a ten-mile walk sounded like an impossibility. “Back home, comfort is its own seduction. I wouldn’t even have to try, and everything would work out for me. The footmen would bow to me. Men thrice my age will take my coat and consider me a jolly master for remembering their actual names and not just calling them all Jeeves.”

  John’s fingers touched Henry’s lips, and Henry let his deepest fears come out.

  “I’ve been pretending this whole journey. I’m a frivolous fellow. I’m afraid my ideals won’t hold up to reality. How can they? The advantages I have there are…” Henry was at a loss for words, and he was so rarely without them. “…A thing.” He had no better word for it. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t keep telling people, no, no, don’t be nice to me.”

  “So don’t do that,” John said. “There must be a thousand ways to commit felonies. You’re not the sort who is meant to be rude. Don’t try to be any kind of felon but the one you are.”

  “Mmm.” Henry let the conversation lapse—something he also rarely did. He only took it up again once they’d finished dinner, cleaned up, and retreated to their blankets.

  “I don’t know who I am there,” he said. “I know who I am here, on this road, but there? Nobody there knows…”

  Me, he almost said, but he had been so many people. A frivolous child. That unthinking idiot who had taken another man’s coat without knowing the man who gave it to him.

  “Someone who knows the me I want to be,” he finally said. “The best me. The me I can be, the me I didn’t know even existed a few months ago.”

  “Have someone in mind?” John’s thumb stroked Henry’s lips once more.

  Henry couldn’t help himself any longer. He leaned forward and kissed John with all his pent-up desire, with every ounce of his being. He wanted, he wanted, to be the man who could kiss John. He wanted to be the man who thought nothing of a five-hundred-mile journey.

  He wanted to be the man who, ten years from now, saw John in the morning and thought, here is someone I can trust with my life. Hell, he wanted to give his own life over to him.

  John’s arm came around his shoulder, pulling him in. Their blankets rearranged, covering each other. Their bodies came together in the darkness, as the kiss went from lips to shoulders to hips, pressing firmly into one another. It was the best kiss. The loveliest kiss. It was hard and unforgiving like the road against their feet. It was warm and gentle, like winter sunshine in the morning melting the frost on dried grass.

  John pulled off Henry’s undershirt—cold air touched his skin, and it pebbled—but he scarcely had a chance to shiver. The other man bent his head and touched his tongue to Henry’s nipple. It was joltingly, perfectly pleasurable—that little touch, his hands spreading across Henry’s chest.

  Henry let out a little gasp, then a larger one. His hands spread across the other man’s chest. Down his ribs. John didn’t object when he pulled away long enough to get the man’s smallclothes off. He bent down and tasted John’s erection, licking, sucking, hollowing his mouth around the man’s penis.

  “Oh God.” John’s hands slid through his hair. “You’re incredibly good at that.”

  How many times had Henry thought of John at night? Of giving himself over to him?

  More than the miles they’d traveled together. Every time they moved, the blankets shifted. Cold air hit them in short blasts, but Henry’s body was a furnace of need now.

  “I want you,” he said. “I want you inside me. Do you—do we—”

  He never got to finish his question. He never needed to.

  John turned over, fumbling in his pack. Henry knew what he was looking for. Oil, its uses all too familiar… There. He turned back, sitting on his haunches, and hauled Henry to straddle him.

  John’s mouth was hot on his throat. Henry leaned down and inhaled the man’s scent, wrapped his arms around the man’s shoulders. Their naked hips pressed together.

  “God, I want you,” John said and tipped his head up.

  They kissed again. It was dizzying, scarcely being able to see the man. Feeling the heat of his fingers running down Henry’s back. His head bowed against Henry’s chest.

  John’s fingers followed Henry’s spine, down, down. They paused. Henry could hear the clink of the glass stopper, then the cool oil, slick against John’s fingers, pressing against him, opening him up. His cock twitched against the other man’s abdomen.

  “You like that.”

  “God. I do.”

  “Let’s try a little more, then.”

  John’s hands steadied him. Guided him onto the head of his cock. Henry exhaled, sinking down. Down. Feeling his body open up so intimately… Feeling that pressure, so right, so perfect…

  “God.” He caught John’s face in his hands. “You’re perfect, John. You’re so utterly perfect.”

  They kissed again. They didn’t stop kissing.

  John’s hands came to Henry’s hips. They moved, awkwardly at first, learning each other, learning the rhythm of each other’s thrusts. Then less awkwardly—John wrapping one arm around Henry’s waist, his other hand finding Henry’s aching cock. His fingers felt like encouragement, and Henry gave himself over to the feel of them. Their shoulders grew hot, then slick with sweat. Every thrust was a perfect pleasure, stoking fires that could never be banked.

  Had he thought the air cold? It was hot and humid, scented with their mixing musk, the silence broken by John’s gasps of pleasure.

  Henry was doing this to him. Squeezing him. Riding him. He could feel the other man’s muscles tense. Feel John’s arm squeeze him. He felt a spurt of heat, heard John let out a groan of surprise, then thrust hard, hard inside him.

  He rode out the other man’s pleasure, the groans, until John was a gasping, wrung-out mess.

  “Henry.”

  “Yes?” He could not hide his own delighted pleasure.

  “How close are you?”

  “Very close. I should say—”

  John cut him off with a kiss. He hadn’t yet withdrawn from his body. His hand closed around Henry’s cock with an almost possessive groan. He pumped once, twice, his kiss hard and demanding. Henry thought of the feel of John inside him, thrusting, groaning, being laid bare…

  Very close. He was very close. He was—oh God. He spilled over the edge, his wet semen pa
inting them both. For a second, his mind could not function. There was nothing but that achingly perfect pleasure. The absolute joy of touching someone he knew so well. Someone who trusted him. Who believed in him. Someone who thought that he could be so much. It couldn’t be better.

  Then John kissed him. “Let me find a cloth.”

  It was better. There was a little water still in the canteen, and even though it was half-freezing, having someone take care of him with such tenderness, being able to return the favor… It undid Henry. More even than the sex.

  They curled up in the blankets afterward. Their arms, curled around one another, spoke all the words they had not yet said.

  It hadn’t been goodbye. It had been everything Henry wanted—desire, affection, a promise of what they could have.

  It had been a promise of an illusion, like saying the cheese was delicious. No matter how their bodies had lied, the truth was simple. Henry looked into John’s eyes afterward, trying to find the right words to say.

  John found them first. “You’re going back.”

  “I’m going back.” Henry shut his eyes. “You’re necessary, John. I need to know that I’m necessary, too. That I can be…” He trailed off.

  He didn’t have to finish the sentence.

  John trailed his fingers along his shoulder. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he whispered, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of…”

  John trailed off, shutting his eyes. For one heart-stopping moment, Henry wanted to be the thing John was pursuing. He wanted to be on that list of vital necessities. He wanted to dream that he could be so important.

  “Home,” John said instead. “The pursuit of home.”

  It wasn’t home in the Declaration, but happiness. Happiness was here. It was evident in the flutter of John’s fingers down his arm, the way their bodies fit together. Happiness was laughing with a man who let their conversation ebb and flow and never called him an idiot for the rapidly turning tide of his thoughts.

  Happiness was this journey, and it was coming to an end.

  Henry shut his eyes and tried to imagine going back to England. Back to his family. Nothing, still.

  “Go,” John whispered, brushing his hair back. “Pursue.”

  Chapter Nine

  They watched the sunrise together the next morning—a riot of pink and yellow and blue, tingeing gray clouds with hues that Henry could only remember seeing in a painter’s palette. For a handful of minutes, the world was vermillion and gold, the unreal dream of a sleeping god.

  Henry held John’s hand throughout, clutching it as if it were the lowest rung on the ladder to heaven.

  Then the sun rose. The clouds were gray. The dead leaves on the ground became just that—so much decaying plant matter. The dream, it appeared, was over. And because Henry was an adult and not a child, he just made himself smile. “Well. That’s that. Let’s be off, then?”

  Their last hours together had begun.

  They spoke as if it were any other day.

  They had an argument on the merits of dogs and cats, and whether cats ought to have four or five toes on their feet, and if bulldogs were cute (“So ugly they’re cute,” Henry explained, while John insisted they were just cute without being ugly in the first place).

  They spoke, and scattered farms gave rise to one village. The village tapered off but never quite seemed to end—there was always another house on the horizon, until finally the houses grew closer and closer, and the air smelled more and more of the sea.

  The wind whipped around them as they approached the dock, bringing with it the scents of salt and seaweed and smoke.

  “Does it smell like home?” Henry inquired.

  John just shook his head. “It should, I suppose.”

  Henry negotiated passage and paid. John made an abortive gesture to his own deflated coin purse, but Henry ignored him, and John let him ignore him.

  The waters of the Rhode Island Sound were gray and green, the waves just rough enough to keep the voyage on the pinnace interesting. Their path charted around one island, sailed between two others, desolate and craggy with shores of dark brown rock. They sailed close enough to occasionally make out yellow grasses broken by the occasional forest of tree stumps.

  “What happened to the trees?” Henry asked.

  The boat’s captain spat. “Fucking British.” It was his only comment.

  “Fucking British,” Henry agreed, and John shot him a smile.

  It wasn’t much. John’s hands curled into fists on his knees. His jaw set, and no amount of Henry’s cajoling conversation could soften his expression.

  They landed in Newport later. The sun was shrouded by clouds, and Henry had no idea of the time. His legs felt strange on the solid wood of the quay; the world spun dizzily for a moment before his body remembered land again.

  Newport had the look of a city that had seen better days. Many better days. Weathered stone buildings with slightly less-weathered squares on their walls suggested absent metal plates, undoubtedly ripped down and stolen for the British war effort. Henry had ordered it done himself, in the early days of his commission. But if the walls of the Newport buildings were stripped bare of all possible invitation, they seemed positively friendly in comparison with the inhabitants.

  Perhaps the two of them did look somewhat shabby from the road. Perhaps they were watching John. Perhaps they were gawking at the two of them together.

  “Companionable bunch, aren’t they?” he whispered to John as they made their way up a muddy thoroughfare.

  A small smile touched John’s face. “Always. It looks…different. It’s been years since I was here, you know, but I spent a good decade in Newport. It’s odd not to recognize anyone.”

  “I can pretend to know someone, if you like.”

  “Mmm?”

  “That man there? He’s a chimney sweep.”

  John looked over at the fellow, then back at Henry. “He’s six feet tall.”

  Henry shrugged. “I never said he was good at his job.”

  John’s swallowed cackle of mirth was precisely what he’d been hoping for.

  “That woman there? She’s a knight. An actual medieval knight.”

  “But…”

  “I don’t know how it happened,” Henry said. “One day, she didn’t die, and that’s not so unusual is it? She’s just continued not dying ever since.”

  “I do recall her,” John said. “She sells fish.” He gestured and they made their way onto an even muckier side street.

  “Everyone needs a believable story to tell the masses,” Henry said with a shrug. “Even undying medieval knights. After all that fighting, I imagine fish would be peaceful.”

  John just smiled again—a pretense of curved lips—and pressed his hands together.

  “Now, that man—”

  Before Henry had a chance to make up a story, John shook his head. “We’re here.” He turned, descended a few steps to a cellar door. He shut his eyes.

  “John,” Henry said. “It will be—” He cut off his reassurance at the flare of John’s nostrils.

  “Don’t make up stories about my family. You don’t actually know, and…” John’s hands clenched. “You don’t actually know.”

  No. He didn’t. Henry bit his lip and hoped for the best. John inhaled, raised his arm, and knocked.

  The silence that followed seemed interminable.

  Nothing. Nothing. Then the scrape of iron on stone as a bolt was drawn, followed by the irate protest of poorly oiled hinges.

  A white man, gaunt and dark-haired, stared at them from the doorway. His gaze passed over John as inconsequential and landed suspiciously on Henry behind him.

  “What the devil do you want?” It came out on a snarl. Even from here, Henry could smell the alcohol on the man’s breath.

  John’s fist clenched harder. He let out a pained breath, his o
nly sign of disappointment. Someone who didn’t know him wouldn’t know he was upset. They wouldn’t understand the set of his jaw, the angle of his ears. John was reeling.

  “I’m guessing,” Henry heard himself whisper, “and—I’m not sure what makes me think this—that this isn’t your sister.”

  John cast him a repressive glance. “Good guess.” For a moment, he just stared at the doorway in shock. Then he shook his head, coming back into himself. “No. Sir, I beg your pardon. I’m looking for the previous occupants of this—”

  “Don’t know them,” the man said. “Never heard of them. No use asking.” With one last suspicious glance in Henry’s direction, he slammed the door.

  “Well.” Henry frowned. “Um. Now what?”

  John inhaled. His hands were still clenched, but he raised his chin defiantly. “Now,” John said, “we go to Mr. Allan.”

  “Mr. Allan?”

  “Noah’s former master.” John exhaled. “He thinks well enough of me, and if—when—they departed, they would have left word with him.”

  “Right.”

  “There’s no need to panic,” John said, almost certainly talking to himself. “There are so many possible explanations.”

  “For instance—”

  “No,” John said. “Please don’t supply them. Talk of anything else.”

  They made their way to the other side of the city—up a bit of a hill, from which they could see the ocean spread before them, a wide expanse of gray glitter broken by islands and dotted by French ships—before turning into a shop. The bell rang; John waited.

  A rustle sounded in the back room, and a minute later, a big, burly man made his way into the front. He paused in the doorway before smiling and taking another step forward.

  “John. You’ve lost far too much weight. You’ve made it back, then.”

  “I have.” John bit his lip.

  “John, I’m sorry.”

  “No.” John’s face crumpled in agony.

  “I tried to convince them they could stay, that we could sort matters out with the constables, but things were getting bad, John. I did what I could, but…”

  John’s head had snapped up on the words safe to stay. “They’re alive?”