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Philip thrusts once, twice; he looks supremely confident, and a little ironic, as if he wishes people to look at him, fucking as a king does, no one’s boy, and yet laughs at himself for it.
On the third thrust, something shifts, and gives, and Richard cries out softly, and can feel Philip’s slender fingers twitch and shake as they grip him.
“Quiet,” Philip says, to Richard as well as to himself, for when he speaks the strain is clear. His boy’s face is bathed in a hot sheen of sweat.
“There are limits to what a king can order,” Richard tells him, or thinks he does; he is coming apart from sensation, from Philip’s cock, its slick deep reach, its angle and attack upon his reason, his will, his seat of self.
“When I’ve reached them, you’ll know,” Philip answers smoothly, and covers Richard’s mouth with his. His tongue can call Richard back into being from shattered fragments, fucked-out shards. Here I am, he knows, even as he shudders and moans into the king of France, this is how I loved you, this is how it felt.
Here, in the bright moment, he knows what Philip’s exquisite control costs him, feels his urge to rut hard, to hurt and to punish, to mark and to claim. And yet, such smoothness, a performance of skill: noblesse oblige. Richard feels the lesson — a different revenge. And then, another sharper shift, and he loses it once more, is less than a human, is a void that can yet arch upward, searching for love.
And when the thrusts have lost their individuality, and all is movement and trembling, the original chaos we all strain back towards, and even Philip makes harsh inarticulate noises to prevent all-unwary affection from leaving his lips — there it is, and Richard touches it. He feels complete, not half or lacking, not mutilated or missing pieces. He surges up to kiss Philip before it leaves him, but barely a touch of heat and wet warmth does for him, and he spills.
*
Richard does not presume, afterward, that Philip will want him to stay, but he seems bent on it, on a duplication of past nights. His eyes are fixed backward, on the desolation from whence they came, so Richard must stay, and play the drama out.
“Truth be told?” Philip murmurs, his face near on the pillow, yet still far off. “I’d lock you up if I thought it wouldn’t provoke an international incident.”
“What prison could hold me?” Richard ponders, seriously.
“I know of one.” Philip gives a wanton, stagey twist to reveal more golden flesh, and Richard nods, and laments his lost, or never-existent, sense of humor.
“You must always beware what you lock up, my lord,” Richard tells him. He wants to avoid, but cannot ever quite avoid, a lessoning tone. But Philip is flush and full with contentment, and takes it in good spirit.
“Was that your father’s mistake, then? To lock up his love?”
“Yes.”
“What becomes of it?”
“It grows scales, and fangs. It sprouts leathery bat wings. I can’t advise it.”
“Your mother is still a striking woman, I thought at Christmas. You could have done with inheriting her chin.”
“Nothing is a monster,” Richard says, quietly, working it out for himself, “until you treat it as one. We give our monsters the very power to sting and flay us, and they, good souls, oblige. My father thought that in her tower Eleanor would have no purchase over him. He’d achieve the great and final separation. All very well, so far as bricks and mortar go. She could not lay a finger anywhere.” And Richard taps Philip, once, on his bare chest, right on a bruised bite he’d given the boy-king himself.
“But I wonder if the tower in his mind did not grow and grow, and the woman in it too, after her fashion. There is nothing more terrifying that the world can offer, than what we’ve loved and wronged. A reckoning awaits, more awful than war.”
Philip looks on, and nods, his face carefully blank. Finally he says, “And if I locked you up in my keep, and visited you with sweetmeats to keep you from pining, and watched you daily for talons and a tail?”
“I don’t know what a compromise is,” Richard tells him. “I never have. Monster me, or set me free. You take little risk, after all. Where else would I go, if not back here? Your smile is prison enough. Or its absence, when you hold it back.”
Philip nods, and does not smile.
*
Much later, after fitful sleep and shifts against each other, an hour or so before the grey dawn, Richard whispers into the back of Philip’s head, half-hoping he sleeps: “Philip, do you love me?”
When he does not respond, there’s nothing Richard feels half so much as relief. But then, Philip begins to speak.
“Since last we were together, I’ve thought a good deal about it. Not personally, you understand, but academically. What does loving do? If love is an instrument, what uses can I put it to, and how should I hold it correctly?”
Richard runs his fingers through Philip’s hair, and listens.
“I reached a conclusion, you’ll be glad to know.” He pauses. “There is no greater power my love holds than when I take it away. For no matter the great assurance you have in its presence, your possession of it, there is nothing easier than saying, ‘It was all play-pretend. You never had it. It could have never been yours, and you were never further away from it than when you pressed yourself as deep inside me as you could reach.’”
Philip props himself up and turns around to face Richard, whose face is deep in shadow.
“It is remarkable, when given its due intellectual consideration,” he continues, “how complete is our ignorance of the minds and hearts of others, when a little, little statement, spoken anyhow, in anger or calculation, in performance or passion, can scuttle our firmest convictions of how we are loved, or were loved once. And poof! We rewrite our histories, with added helpings of decay and misery. To ask if one is loved, therefore, is to open the door to the downward spiral, to eventual entropy. Even if the answer gives you a momentary happiness.”
“Could not, though,” Richard breaks in at last, “could not the revision make a happier story? Could we not rewrite our histories thus: ‘I thought he did not love me, but then he assured me that he always had, from the first moment he ever et cetera et cetera, and I had never been, even for a moment, out his thoughts’?”
“You admit my main premise even there,” Philip says, a hand on Richard’s hip. “That the lover is essentially not to be trusted. If he is not a liar outright, he is mutable, protean. Your monster in the tower, liable to grow wings if not watched, or if watched too closely.”
Richard makes a low sound in the throat, neither assenting nor disagreeing. “Clever,” he says, at last. “I wonder if the clever shouldn’t be allowed to love. We could make decrees.”
“Lovers should be outlaws,” Philip answers. “There’s sense in it.” He leans forward and meets Richard’s lips with his, with infinite gentleness, opening him one moment to warmth and sweetness, closing him off the next. Richard feels himself on the brink of a great discovery he would never quite be allowed to make.
“Could you live here?” Philip whispers, finally.
“Make my home on the mountaintop, with the eagles? Swaying in every breeze?” It’s not an answer, and Richard does not try for a better one.
They settle back against each other to rest.
“Philip,” Richard says.
“Mmm."
“Is the solution to your riddle that one must not ask, or tell, or deal with love in words? That we must rely on signs and clues, like huntsmen on the track?”
“Oh, probably something like that,” Philip says, carelessly. “I hadn’t gotten that far.”
His fingers tighten around Richard’s wrist. A clue, or a reflex. A chain you could easily break, or choose not to.