Page 16 of The Prestley Ghost
He slumped back against the church, an act which was likely some sort of blasphemy. His trousers weren’t too messy, because Alex had pulled them open, being helpful. Most of the sticky consequences had ended up on the ground. He tried to collect scattered thoughts.
Alex kissed his neck again. “You did say you wanted depraved and disreputable.” He sounded tired, though.
Charles, alarmed—Alex hadn’t sounded tired before—attempted to touch him, to hold on. His hand went through aslim shoulder, an embroidered sleeve.
“I can manage a while longer,” Alex said, and his face and eyes were the same, not having faded, “but it does take some energy…I can offer more, though. If you’d like, sometime.” His hand, more fleetingly real, caught Charles’s, pressed it to an obvious hard jut of stiff arousal, made manifest. “I can absolutely focus on that. Or the other way round, if you’d rather those positions.”
“Both. Either. Whatever you like. But…do you need to rest? Or…”
“Maybe, for a few hours. It’s more or less like sleep. I don’t dream, though.” Alex paused, introspective. “I don’t think I do.”
“I’ll find you,” Charles said. “Or…I’ll figure out how to let you into the house. I don’t know. I just…” I don’t want to lose you. I can’t lose you. Please don’t tell me I need to banish you, to send you away. He couldn’t say that.
Alex blew him a kiss from pale fingertips, and vanished, not abrupt, but in a quick swirl of washed-out color, as if relieved of shape. Charles stared at the air. Touched his own lips, kiss-tender. Fumbled with his trousers.
The mist remained, but it wasn’t cold. His stomach made a sound; he hadn’t finished breakfast. He couldn’t not laugh: startled, alive, hungry, wanting and wanted, tremulous with reprieve, amazed at himself and Alex and whatever they were together.
He should go and talk to John. His brother deserved that, after this morning and after everything else, as well.
He’d have to explain. All of it: that he had indeed been seeing Alex, even letting a ghost touch him, seduce him, tell him that he was worth liking.
But he thought that maybe he could do that. Maybe he needed to do that: because he did not know what to do, if his jobwas to banish Alex, or at least remove the ghost, as promised, because he did not want to do those things, and yet he wanted his Alex to be tranquil and at rest and fulfilled, too, and he could not reconcile all those aching bewildering needs.
He found his discarded umbrella around the front of the church, first. He went home through the twinkling hazy mists, across the lane. Thomas opened the door, goggled at him, shouted, “Your brother’s home! And all wet!” and hastily retreated, not paid enough to deal with the more troublesome mediumistic aspects of the new rector’s household.
The tap of John’s cane echoed fast; his brother was running, or near enough. John arrived breathless in the front hall, demanded, “Why are you soaked—you should change, you’ll be ill—where were you? Never mind, tell me after you’re warm—” and actually tugged at Charles’s greatcoat. “Give me that.”
“I love you, you know,” Charles said. His brother stopped mid-gesture, eyes and mouth wide and worried. “Charles—are you already not feeling well, I can send Thomas for the apothecary—I know you don’t want my assistance, but you’re my brother and I won’t lose you too—”
“I’m not ill. I promise.” He handed over the coat when Thomas materialized, after rescuing his book, Alex’s book, from the pocket. John was scrutinizing him as if unconvinced, but also resigned: as if knowing full well that any concern would be deflected or rejected outright.
Charles took a deep breath, and said, “I think I have a problem, and I need your help.”
And John’s eyes got even wider, and he started to speak, stopped, swallowed, restarted. “Yes. Of course. What do you need?”
* * * *
The afternoon, in the library, lay quiet around them. The rain came and went, desultory, incurious. John, sitting next to Charles on the overstuffed sofa—it’d been the closest, and it fit them both—said, eventually, “That’s…certainly a problem.” He’d listened silently while Charles rambled about poetry and promises and wanting to help, and only blinked once at the admission of mutual desire—Charles left certain details out, given that this was his older brother—and nodded when Charles had said the bit about Alex not harming anyone. “He seems…kind.”
“He is, and I want him to be at rest, and I know you promised the village, and I can’t stop all of that just because I like him.”
“It sounds like more than that.”
Charles bent forward. Elbows on knees. Both hands over his face. “I think I might be in love with a ghost with zero inhibitions and a libertine past and eyes like sunshine and also no apparent desire to move on and about fifty million complications, yes.”
“Well,” John said, after a considering second, “that sounds about right for someone you’d fall for, yes,” and Charles kicked him, because that was the uninjured leg, but gently.
John laughed. “So you’re doing better.”
“I feel better, around him. Lighter. I don’t know. He makes me happy.” He sat back up. “I don’t know what to do. You know about research. Tell me something.”
“Hmm. You said he doesn’t seem to have anything unfinished, so normally we’d do something with the body, which we do have, but that doesn’t solve your problem.” John nudged him back. “Which isourproblem, because I like the idea of you being happy. It’s been…some time.”
“I know,” Charles said. “I know. I…think I might be better, about that, too. But not about this. It’s impossible, isn’tit?”
“No. I’ve been thinking about Mesmer and the theories of fluidic substance, and also the old Agrippean argument that a soul and body—some sort of physicality, anyway, to give shape and comprehension to experience—have to exist in harmony. I’d meant to do something with it for Eleanor’s journal, but—what if your Alex isn’t meant to move on, but to stay? He doesn’t have anything to finish, but maybe that’s not what it’s about.”
“What?”
