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“One day,” he agreed, but he’d heard this once before and knew that such a day would never come.
For the rest of that week, he’d use any spare moment he found to return to this suddenly sprung Eden. There were some days when Darcy was already out there waiting for him, and other days where Bron would be out there first, unsure if Darcywould appear. But he always did. At times there was nothing to say. They lingered in each other’s presence and shared awkward glances; flicked, tapped lightly at each other’s flesh to provoke some sound—Bron’s gentle giggle, Darcy’s loud guffaw. Darcy remained irritable, preoccupied with thoughts he wouldn’t share, and taken over by a dark mood that only lightened when he stood that much closer to Bron’s body. When their fingers entwined.
“Looking at you, I feel there is nothing more right in this world.”
At one point, Bron readied himself to be kissed again, the light wind flustering his heart, feelings he’d buried deep within him blossoming like newly grown roses. But no kiss came.
Bron always managed to coax him out of his mood by repeating some of the terribly awful jokes that Ada had relayed to him that day: “What did the farmer say to the cow? It’s pasture bedtime!” But often enough, the conversation flowed as pure and smoothly as a river’s current, and the scented garden stained Bron’s cheeks red with every exhalation, with every rise and fall of his chest.
“Do you remember that feeling of being tormented by your own desires?” Darcy asked. “The demands one sets oneself to suppress them and the agonizing questions that follow?” Bron appreciated how he’d become Darcy’s ear. His confidante. He need no longer pry. Darcy shared his feelings willingly—when he was ready to. “I remember it all so clearly, and even now with such times past, when I am sitting alone, those thoughts—they creep in, demanding to take hold, and cast me back to a time and place I never wanted to be a part of. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be free of it. But looking at you, I feel there is nothing more right in this world. You, Bron, are so otherworldly, so authentic. Other people’s opinions don’t alter you. You just are.”
This he could not listen to, felt deep inside his consciousness that he had been somehow overlooked. Pasted over with some other version of himself. He corrected him. “You have such a sentimental view of who I am, and you’re wrong to think it. Other people’s opinions—they do alter me. They alter me immensely. Who I am is conditioned by what other people think I should or should not be. Those torments you speak of? I know them. Andthose questions you asked yourself—I ask them still. I’m not brave, or anything of the sort. I’m as brave as the leopard that walks out into the world with its spots proudly on display—just doing what is necessary in order to survive, and incapable of enduring the pain that comes with being anybody else.” It was a relief, saying this out loud. He felt himself about to cry and pulled away.
“I’ve upset you,” Darcy said, stepping back. “I said the wrong thing. I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“No, you haven’t upset me. It’s just a lot. People see me as some walking experiment of true authenticity. A political thing. But I am not a statement. I’m just here, living my life. Just as you are living yours. When people see me, they think they know me. But for so long I’ve heard those things they know. And how wrong they are.”
“When you see me,” said Darcy, “I know what you see. That I get to walk about this world with a buffer. Passing as straight, as male, the most powerful in the pecking order. But there is a flaw in your thinking too. Wait—” he said, for Bron was about to stop him, to oppose him. Let me finish. That while I am out to the world now, still I get to choose who I share aspects of myself with, and where and when I get to share it. But it is at the expense of walking with this extra baggage all the time, Bron. This unnatural second self I’ve always cause to wear. People make their assumptions about me, too. It’s exhausting, having to correct them. Or stay quiet, and let them think they know me.
Bron gave this some thought and wondered in his own mind if a reassessment of certain privileges was in order. “The world, the dresser; and you, their mannequin?” he chimed.
Darcy gave a sad sort of smile. “Precisely.”
Bron raised an eyebrow. “Sounds a lot like the times you’ve proposed to tell me how I should exist.”
“I am a fool, Bron. A stupid fool. Like that great Emperor Nero, I thought it would’ve been easier to have made of you like Sporus, suppress you into my fixed idea of what I thought was right.” These details were lost to him—he made a mental note to google these figures Nero and Sporus, but he could see theanguish simmering in Darcy’s eyes underneath that filmy water that he was always so good at blinking away. “I suppose I am a little jealous.”
“Jealous? What—of me?” Bron understood the framework they were working in, the wanting to be honest, the need to feel truth—only this felt absurd.
“You are the most perfect thing,” Darcy said.
Bron would not let him believe such a mistake. “I am not perfect. Far from it. What is it that you think makes things so difficult for you? You are not without power. You can be anything, whoever you want to be.”
“That’s easy for you to say—” The words quivered as they left Darcy’s lips.
“And what’sthatsupposed to mean?” He pushed him for an explanation when, again, his words faltered. “Why is it easier for me?Youenter the world everyday as you please, and yet its toxicity continues to have you keeling at the thought of what other people see.” He continued on like this, batting Darcy’s arguments away until they fell to pieces. “You say you are jealous? Well, I am jealous of you. Had I been as privileged as you, I might have developed the skin to take on such comparisons.”
When he turned from him, Darcy grabbed his arm and pulled him so close that he felt his own body stammer, a bird fluttering in some shaking grip, powerless and easily crushed. He wouldn’t just nurse away Darcy’s discomfort. But to separate himself from him now was impossible. If he latched on, everything would be right in the world. It had to be. He would push the iron bar that weighed on Darcy’s heart until it gave way. The closed off valves, which prevented him from seeing, truly, who he was, would fill his veins with blood in the place of lead.
He imagined what he could look like through Darcy’s eyes: a pathetic, small thing alone in his bedroom, undressing and exposing himself to the mirror, in which he’d look upon the curving of his hips, the lankiness of his body with something of a yearning. The same mirror which he himself would look into,the same body he’d take in with much unkinder eyes. Was it the boyishness that Darcy adored of his figure or was it the truth of his spirit, his androgynous style? The feminization of his entire persona that had captivated Darcy on the dance floor. What version of him did Darcy desire?
“For years I have struggled to admit to myself the very things that seem to have formed you,” Darcy confessed. “For months I have struggled with the feelings that arise within me whenever I step outside the very doors of this house, always looking up to the window in the hope of getting even a glimpse of you. You must know how I feel for you, Bron.”
“I do know,” he admitted, and was shocked to hear the ease with which he revealed this. “At least I think I do.” In his heart he knew Darcy’s pull toward him. But the tangles Bron spun in his head were as fine and delicate as gossamer, prone to come apart with every other thought. And yet, he hadn’t always got it right—he’d also thought he knew how Harry had felt.
Bron reached out to him, delicately, knowingly, and he felt Darcy’s body resist him, tensing. Bron stopped, thinking he had gone too far, and turned his head away.
But Darcy gripped him by the arm. “Wait.” Touched him tentatively with the other, knuckles brushing at his cheeks. He took breaths that made his core shake. “My own little governess.” He laughed. “Please, let me reassure you of your feelings by expressing to you my own.”
Darcy pulled him in closer, and Bron felt the firmness of his muscle, his nose against Darcy’s, and the downward sweep of Darcy’s lids, close, as the lashes tickled his cheek. Darcy smelled strongly of leather and myrrh. His lips, when they touched Bron’s, were soft, but soon they were wet with need. The evening light had turned to dusk, and under the shadows of the trees, Bron could make out little more than his outline.
When they pulled apart, Bron brought his head to Darcy’s chest—so tall he stood suddenly!—where he could hear the beatings of his heart. They leaned against the stony balustradeand held each other for what seemed like both minutes and like hours. His insides unfurled into a pulsating rhythm that beat for him to move even closer to this man, who was both his fear and his desire, his shame and his pride. And in the light evening’s gloom, he would accept that whatever was happening could not be real, occurring only in the seams and slips of space and time.
They kissed again, fiercely now, the heat Darcy invoked in him burning down his throat, an unquenchable thirst that singed a hole. It spread to his arms—his fingers flexing to grab Darcy closer—into his loins, clogging his veins, feeding the itch of longing he endured throughout the day, a discomfort that forced him into the fetal position at night but which, at that moment, made him curve around Darcy like a leaf bending toward the sun.
Darcy pulled away to take in a deep breath, and Bron thought he’d lost him forever. But Darcy guided his head again to his shoulder, and they settled into the quiet. The quiet which brought them closer together, a gap in time that allowed them to just be. While Darcy contemplated their surroundings, Bron considered the weight of his head, how long it would be until he’d have to pull away again.
“Do you see that chestnut tree far back over there, behind the fence and overhanging the stream? They say a servant stabbed herself there in the early nineteenth century. She’d made the journey on foot, all the way from Hertfordshire to that spot you see just there, returning to her lover, the master of this house. She learned quite quickly of his true feelings, that he didn’t want her anymore. She begged in agony for him to love her, just as he had before she’d left him.”
