Page 103 of Unstitch

I roll my eyes, because of course Max has a view on what’s going on.

‘Of course,’ I say, trying not to sound as churlish as I feel, though I’d gladly kick him in his self-satisfied shin right now, such are my levels of churlishness.

If he registers my eye-roll, he doesn’t mention it. ‘I think,’ he says as though he’s choosing his words carefully, ‘that all the adults you were exposed to during your formative years crafted a very specific message, and that message is that you ought to behave and feel and love a certain way, and to err from that path would be sinful and unnatural and degenerate. Am I right?’

I nod, and he drops his forehead to mine. I yield to my supposedly sinful and unnatural and degenerate instincts and close my arms around his body, though if something that feels this beautiful is wrong, then I must have no moral compass whatsoever. I splay my palm over the small of his back, noting that his shirt sticks faintly to his skin, such is the humidity level in the air.

‘Okay,’ he whispers. His voice has lost its harsh edge; now it’s tender and softly cajoling. ‘And I think, thanks to a variety of circumstances and learnt behaviours that could probably buy your therapist a new yacht, you decided to conform to those totally fucking wacko moral codes. Very possibly, you didn’t know not conforming was even an option.’

My eyes prick, not just at the gentleness, the kindness, in his tone but at the jolt of recognition. His theory reminds me of a conversation I had over FaceTime with my sister, shortly after our dad blew up at her and she had to have it out with him. I distinctly remember her words. No one ever told me I was allowed to reject it all.

So much doctrine.

So much dogma.

So many rules; so many lines of catechism and lists of sins, venial to mortal, catalogued so neatly for impressionable Catholic children with their relevant punishments indexed equally tightly. And right at the top of that list of mortal sins, up there with killing, were the depravities that caused a vengeful God to rain sulphur and hellfire down on the twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I’ve often wondered if the endless detail, the complex hierarchies of sin and the terrible, bloody Biblical examples, and the culture of fear and blame, and us-and-them mentality it all engendered, are a way for the Church to so overwhelm us with small print that it’s easier to adopt a policy of blanket adherence.

Let’s just stick to the contract, ordinary sinners like Belle and I say. Let’s just do what they say. Nobody wants God’s lawyers shaking paperwork at us at the gates of Heaven because we arbitrarily disregarded some clauses.

His lips are roaming over my face now, brushing along my jaw, trailing up my cheek, kissing the hollow of my temple, as if they’ve never kissed anything more precious than the skin of this exhausted, confused sinner who didn’t get the fucking memo that nothing in the entire contract was legally binding in the first place.

That he could have just torn it up.

‘The world is still a shitty place for people like us,’ he whispers in my ear. ‘It’s still tough. Still dangerous—and far more so for people who don’t look like you and me. Outside of places like Alchemy, even I still make judgement calls every day on what to disclose. What to hold safe. But it’s getting less shitty, especially in parts of the world like this.

‘And it makes me really fucking sad that you feel you can’t walk into the office of a guy like Thum, as a member of his most valued senior management team, and maybe not expect, but at the very least not hope for, basic human decency in response to your disclosure.’ He wraps his other arm around me tightly.

Just when I think he’s finished, he adds: ‘But I have a feeling that wasn’t your greatest fear. I suspect you genuinely thought it was. But your greatest fear was having to speak those words out loud to someone in a professional setting. Having to tell someone you respect that you’re in a queer relationship. Having to officially declare yourself as something—someone—that you’ve always been told is shameful, and unnatural, and unwholesome. The kind of person who probably seemed very much on the borderline of what you’ve been taught polite, civilised society is, hmm?

‘I don’t think it was about Thum, really. I think it was about finally having to give yourself permission to be that person and own it, because not only has no one ever given you permission before, but they’ve never done you the courtesy of telling you you didn’t need theirs in the first place.

‘So I won’t say well done today, but I will say this. You can do whatever the fuck you want. You’re a grown fucking man, and you have the right to march into anyone’s office and tell them who you really are. Just promise me you won’t ever, ever ask their permission.’

It’s only after he’s finished speaking, when my words fail me and I turn to find his mouth instead, to tell him with my lips and tongue how very wise, how disturbingly right, he is, that I hear the rain pelting down on the terrace outside, Heaven’s downpour just as impassioned and aggrieved as my lover’s unorthodox pep talk was.

72

DEX

The tattoo of rainfall in my bedroom becomes a roar of white noise as I pull the French doors open. The smell carries up from street level, too—that distinctive scent of oil deposits on long-parched roads being washed away. It’s a smell that’s objectively acrid, unpleasant, and yet always makes me happy, because of the associated relief it signifies, I suppose.

It’s not unlike the relief I feel at this small, temporary break in my personal storm. I’m blindly feeling my way through this thing, acting mainly on instinct, keeping this fragile, secret side of me protected as I navigate such seismic shifts.

But Max is my very own deluge, merciless and corrosive and intoxicating, washing away all the layered bitterness that so many years of secrecy and lies and denial have created and leaving me clean. Renewed.

I tug him into my room, then, with a new sense of bravado, of ownership, because he’s right about one thing. This man is a prize, a treasure, and God knows he’ll make every one of my sacrifices worth it. Despite his brand of tough love just now, I know I did a good thing, a brave thing, today, and I’m damn well going to take my prize. I’ve earned it.

I’ve earned him.

And when I look into those striking eyes of his—eyes so clear and blue they could only belong to a man who doesn’t guard the secrets of who he is, who doesn’t shroud his authentic self in cloaks woven from shame or taint—I see the approval, the permission to be as bad, as depraved, a man as I possibly can.

He’s totally egging me on with his gaze and his smirk as I paw at his shoulders and fumble with his belt buckle and shove his trousers down and wrench his shirt clumsily open. He undresses me at the same time, but his movements are elegant. Measured.

Of course they are.

And when we’re both naked, he does that thing I love, taking my eager, straining cock and laying it against the impossibly hot hardness of his own in the palm of his hand.

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