More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 15 - June 15, 2023
A cloud must have drifted away from the setting sun, because suddenly Captain Dacre’s eyes were lit by a shaft of sunlight. “Oh!” Ben said. “Your eyes are blue. I hadn’t noticed earlier.”
“Does it matter what it’s called?” He genuinely didn’t know, had indeed deliberately avoided thinking about what it might mean to find love and companionship and desire all in the same person, because to form that thought would mean to acknowledge a future he would never have.
Phillip could hardly stand it. He wanted to swat the birds away so he and the vicar could have some semblance of a normal conversation. He couldn’t be serious and stern with a man who had ducklings in his hair, or who talked to baby birds like they were guests at a tea party, or who seemed to dearly want Phillip to smile.
He was handsome, Ben supposed, if you liked angry men, which Ben wouldn’t have thought he did.
Damn the man for trying to make him laugh and nearly succeeding. Phillip didn’t have defenses that could withstand this sort of assault.
He tended to think that when the Bible condemned something practically everyone did, whether it be tossing oneself off or eating pork, there was likely some nuance that had been lost either to history or to translation.
The vicar seemed to have his own personal ray of sunshine following him about, casting light in his path and drawing people to him, while Phillip was ever under a storm cloud.
His father furrowed his brow, as if trying to recall who Percival and Francis were and why they mattered. Ben resisted the urge to draw a family tree.
This wanting felt like such a part of Ben’s soul that it had to mean something, had to carry with it its own kind of moral gravity.
He’d happily wave goodbye to duty, to order, to everything he had ever wanted, because this was more, and better, and true.
If we can all quietly agree that eating pork and shaving aren’t sinful, I don’t see why we can’t extend that same grace to men like us.”
Their lips met with more urgency than finesse, and Phillip didn’t care because he had gone too many years with too few kisses, and he had gone his whole life without Ben, and now he had kisses and Ben and he had never felt better.
This was some unholy combination of desire and friendship and something else, because apparently when you took workaday lust and combined it with affection and threw in garden-variety honesty, you got something new and totally different.
“Bugger deserve. To hell with it. Who are you to decide who deserves what? Some people are starving and others are eating peeled grapes and you can’t mean to tell me that either group deserve a damned thing. You don’t get to tell me what I deserve.”
Oh, damn it. Damn Sedgwick and his easy charm and his general loveliness for ruining Phillip’s peace of mind.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Was everyone determined to be gracious and charming when all Phillip wanted to do was scowl?
“The important thing, Mr. Sedgwick says, is to remember that during brown studies our minds are not particularly honest. That if you want to know the truth, you need to wait.”
It struck him that if Phillip was in want of money or a house, Ben would give him whatever he could, and gladly. And there would be no shame in Phillip accepting it, because that was what it meant to have a life together. It meant holding hands and jumping together into an unknown future.
“This is all new to me. I’m in a new world without a map or a chart, but you’re my compass, Ben, and I know we’ll find a way.”
They kissed slowly in the shade of the oak tree, as if they had all the time in the world, because maybe they did. But the knowledge that there was a place where all of them belonged, a place where they could be safe and welcomed and together, made him feel like this was even more his rightful home than it ever had been.
