It Takes Two to Tumble (Seducing the Sedgwicks, #1)

by Cat Sebastian

He had expected to see his children for the first time in two years in a setting that was slightly less arboreal.

“Does it matter?” Ben asked, addressing the question to Dacre, to himself, to God, to any other benevolent presence who might see fit to provide guidance. “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.

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.

But looking over at the captain, he couldn’t help but think that touching this man, seeing what happened, might carry its own kind of rightness. 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.

Alice always told him he had the aesthetic sensibilities of an infant: he liked summer, and baby animals, and fruit tarts.

Peace, Ben knew, was a series of small things, each insignificant but together making landmarks for a life:

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.

Whatever was between them, even if it was transient, was good and sweet and right. Life was filled with things that were both good and impermanent, he reminded himself. Flowers in bloom. Children in their infancy.

So he sat, giving her his presence while knowing it was inadequate, as so many necessary gestures were.

He felt that this would be irrevocable, that this next hour or so would either burn every bridge he hadn’t yet destroyed, or build new ones to places he hadn’t ever been.

“Although I suppose it’s just as well to resign. It must be unpleasant to affiliate yourself with an institution that holds your particular vice in such low regard.” “Don’t call it a vice,” Ben said fiercely. “Bother it all, Hartley. I hadn’t really thought of it that way.” He knew that his brother was invoking this line of argument to make him feel better about resigning, but that made it no less persuasive. “If I were secretly a portrait artist, I wouldn’t join up with one of those groups that believes graven images to be abominations. Perhaps because I wouldn’t want other artists to think I despised them. Perhaps because I’d worry that after too long in their company I’d begin to despise myself.”

“He says that sometimes our minds tell us all the ugliest things. That everything we do is useless, that everyone we know is better off without us.” He hesitated. “After Mother died I had a number of brown studies.” “Yes,” Phillip said. He put his hand on Ned’s shoulder and the boy did not flinch away. “As did I.” “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.”

“Until we were together, I hadn’t really understood what it meant to love a person, to worship someone with your body,” Ben said. “That’s what you have to swear to do in the marriage vows, and I can’t make that promise.” “Is that what happened between us?” Phillip’s voice wasn’t skeptical, only curious, but Ben felt put on the spot, called to explain something he didn’t quite understand. “I’m fairly sure that’s what I was doing, but I can only speak for myself. All I meant was that it meant something to me to be with you. And—” he took a deep breath “—I know I mean something to you, and I felt that when we were together.”