Batter My Heart, Three Person'd God - Chapter 6.
Well, I'm just gonna keep on going, and it is Valentine's Day after all! Please let me know what you think - it makes me very happy to know folks are reading these snippets.
(Full text of the story so far is here)
“God, you feel good.”
“Your friends are going to wonder if we’re ever getting up.”
“I’m already up, man.”
It had never been like this with anyone. Tāne had wanted to linger before, but missed the desire from his partner. Sex was great, sure—pleasurable, transgressive, a revolution, a political statement, an act against oppression, repression, suited politicians, uniformed cops. He knew what to do and how to do it and how to make it good for everyone involved. He did not realize that he knew how to do this, though.
They could lie here under a downy duvet, sun coming through the curtains, not sure of the time and not caring. Love did not have to be rushed, or politicized.
“Didn’t you want—”
“You talk a lot.”
He felt the laugh in Madigan’s chest and he wanted to thread it into the sheets and embed it in the mattress.
“‘For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love…’” Madigan whispered into the press of Tāne’s palm.
“A quote for every occasion.”
“You know how to silence me.”
“I do.” But Tāne loved to hear him talk, that was the truth. He loved how words formed on his mouth and rolled from his tongue, he loved the lyrical rise and fall of his voice in strands of Auckland, strands of Dunedin, strands of something else he could not place but wanted to walk through with bare feet. He loved what poetry sufficed to express, and how it ceased to suffice at all. He loved…he loved.
He pressed so that Madigan turned in his arms and he could look at the pale, freckled face, and the gold and white sandpaper of his morning beard.
“Say it again,” Tāne said, drawing his hand through the curled hairs on Madigan’s chest.
“‘For God’s sake, hold your tongue and let me love.’”
“Yes. Hold your tongue…” He kissed, silencing himself. “…and let me love.”
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They had not had this before, in the weeks they had each other. Always early mornings, always quick showers and out the door, sometimes breakfast, mostly not. Stolen. They had stolen everything. And now, for once, thank God, there was nothing to steal.
He didn’t expect, though, the thigh that slipped so easily between his own, or the surprisingly strong fingers that found the vulnerable skin of his hip and pressed, and pressed, and made his muscles contract and ache.
“God,” he groaned, and he wasn’t sure if it was from pleasure or pain. It was like being hit on the field, or like being fucked.
He knew every facet of his own body. He had been admired for it, and betrayed by it; it had been a commodity to be assessed, and a canvas to be drawn upon. He had used it in violence, and in love, and stood on pedestals to be comprehended in parts and pieces. Yet when Madigan touched him, it was the first time anyone had touched the totality of him.
Then, there was a knock on the door, which they ignored.
But the knock came again, followed by a cheery: “Up and at ’em, you fucking poufs!”
“Oh fuck me,” Tāne muttered as Madigan shook with laughter in his arms. “Can’t she give it a rest?”
The door rattled like she was kicking it, so he extricated himself and found Madigan’s pajama trousers by the foot of the bed. They fell short of his ankles.
“Burn in hell, Geri,” he said, opening the door.
“Get bent, Tāne,” she replied, and shoved a breakfast tray into his hands. “Morning, Mads!”
“Morning, Geri!”
She turned to Tāne again with a quick up and down. “You going to Hemi’s party?”
“Probably.”
“Those pajamas suit you.”
“I hope you step on a thumbtack.”
He closed the door on her laughter.
Madigan was sitting up in bed, with a smile on its way to a smirk. “You have an interesting relationship.”
“She’s a raging bitch, and so am I.” He looked, for a moment, unaware of the tray weighing in his hands, at the prim covering of the blankets drawn up over Madigan’s navel.
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From their first morning together, when he was stumbling into his clothes at barely dawn, Tāne had never been able to look. He’d been robbed of his chances to appreciate the shock of golden hair, the freckled, faintly pink skin, the soft, unfocused expression on John Madigan’s face as he searched for his glasses in the striped sunlight. He was awake and happy and satisfied, and Tāne had done that to him, had given that to him, and yet never had he been permitted to see Madigan like this.
It occurred to Tāne now, as he walked between the door and the bed, that this room had seen each iteration of himself. He had been here with Nate, the wonderful terrible summer, and then alone, wallowing in self pity. He had come here before the move to Dunedin, a brief respite where loneliness gave way to solitude. And now today, to this almost priest with sleep-tossled hair and amber morning eyes.
It took some maneuvering to get onto the bed, even with Madigan hanging onto the tray like a juggler, but they successfully arranged themselves without pouring coffee onto blankets or laps.
“This was kind of her,” Madigan said to the toast.
“She’s a bitch, but she is kind. Always has been.”
“How long have you know each other?”
“Twenty years?” He tried to remember when Geri wasn’t in his life, and could, just barely. “She’s been there through every mistake.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“Hmm.” Tāne found himself watching the action of Madigan’s jaw. “I don’t know what it’s like to have friends like that.”
“Really? You seem close with Mordecai. And...oh, fuck, tall bloke, teaches social sciences…”
“Brother O’Sullivan. Yes, I don’t mean no friends. I mean friends like that. It’s funny, we call each other brothers and there’s so much we can never say.”
Tāne thought back, to that day in the canteen when he’d seen them, Madigan, Mordecai, Murphy, O’Sullivan, an Irish quartet of fair, solid men, settled in their vocations. At a school where rugby reigned, Tāne had never felt so alone.
He cleared his throat. “Do you want to go to Hemi’s party today?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“You don’t have to do it all for me, you know. If you don’t want—”
“Tāne.” Madigan’s free hand settled on his arm. “I want to. I want to know your friends.”
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I’m not Nate. The sentiment echoed under the spoken words. That was the answer to the question Tāne kept imposing on this. Was he trying to sell Madigan on some life he didn’t want, making him go to parties he hated, meet people he could never like? Just as he had with Nate?
But I’m not Nate. And it was true that two men had never been so different. Put them in the same room and it would extend into a long and uncomfortable silence. Even their appearances—Nate, dark and sculpted and incomplete like one of his own carvings, John, fair and bright and abstract, impossible to get ahold of, yet strangely solid. Nate who lied and lied, whose entire life was a fairy tale of his own making, and John who always told the truth and laid foundations on faith like it was the most stable thing in the world.
Nate who never wanted to be here, and John who kept saying he did.
It struck him so hard and so suddenly that he came over dizzy. They could have this. Mornings. Breakfasts. Long nightly conversations about sexual preferences. Spots of jam on the duvet. Flowers on the windowsill. The smell of coffee and John’s cologne. The sun coming up through their curtains, the spread of John’s hand across his coffee mug, the spot of butter on the corner of his mouth. The ache easing in Tāne’s chest.
“I’m sorry,” Tāne said finally. “I think, after yesterday…”
“And I’m sorry about that. I feel different today. Better. Like something’s shaken loose, you know?”
“I know. Arse-eating will do that to you.”
“…Christ, Tāne.”
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Madigan laughed and kept laughing, shaking hard enough that the coffee sloshed in his mug.
“It’s not that funny, man!” But God, he wished the laughter would never stop. He wanted to hold the threads of that laugh in his hands and weave it through all the tunnels in Madigan’s heart until they sparkled with seams of gold.
“That’ll be our recipe. Whenever you get wound too tight, I’ll just eat your arse.”
Madigan leaned back, still laughing. “You could market it as therapy. That’s more or less how they invented vibrators.”
“What?”
“Victorian era, I think. Vibrators were used as a therapy for hysteria. All of those tight-laced women with husbands who couldn’t or wouldn’t get them off, so they went to a doctor who did it for them.”
“How the fuck do you know that?”
“I have been educated in more than psalms and sonnets in my forty-eight years.” He smiled, a new, slightly wolfish grin that made Tāne’s skin flicker like a live wire.
He’d been pursuing this sensation for weeks and had only felt it in fits and starts, in the early mornings when John lay in his arms, and in the languid kisses after they fucked. Pure relaxation and pure exhilaration in those brief moments when John let himself uncoil and all the walls slid into the sand on which they were built. Now there he was, looking wild and golden and finally fucking relaxed.
“I’d like to paint you, but I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Madigan shifted to look at him. “Paint me?”
“You wouldn’t do for realism. Abstract. Color and light. And darkness. Just there, at the edges.” He reached out to trace the dark halo at the wisps of John’s hair and the shadow of his jaw. “Blue. Lots of blue. And gold. The sky and the sun. Heaven.”
“You don’t believe in heaven.”
“But you do.”
“I don’t know when you’re making fun of me.”
“Not you, John. Never you.” He poured out more coffee and clasped the heavy lacquered mug to his chest as he sat back onto the pillows.
“I haven’t wanted to paint in a long time.”
“Any reason?”
Plenty, but mostly silences where there should have been words. “I was never much good at it,” he continued. “Didn’t go anywhere.”
“You said that yesterday, and I don’t agree, but…well, if a boy isn’t any good at rugby, and he likes it, do you tell him to stop playing?”
“Stop? No. Maybe don’t tell him he’ll be an All Black.” Tāne sighed. “Point taken.”
“Anyway, I like your art, what I’ve seen of it.”
“Thank you.”
“And if you want to paint or draw again, I think you should. …I’m sorry, that sounded a bit domineering.”
“I don’t mind a bit of domineering.”
“…Noted.” And once more the live-wire smile, skipping across Tāne’s skin.
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Tāne barely had to lean to kiss the shell of John’s ear, or to nose into the bed-warmed curls of his hair. John turned and gently captured his lips. “Coffee breath,” he whispered.
“Sorry, haven’t brushed my teeth yet.”
“I like it.”
“You like my sour morning breath?”
“I like that we’re sitting here long enough for me to taste your sour morning breath.”
Tāne wanted to kick the breakfast things to the floor and drag this man back to bed and keep him there long enough that there was no school and there was no city and even there was no Geri or Miriam or an afternoon or an evening, just this morning, perpetual.
And at the edge of that desire was anger. Could it ever be like that? Could it ever be like it was last night, when John begged for Tāne’s tongue? Or was this just the price for loving as they loved, to only ever have stolen mornings?
He’d promised himself when this started that he wouldn’t plan for tomorrow, so he reached out and padded a bit of butter from the corner of John’s mouth. Then he leaned back and held his cooling coffee to his chest. “Tell me more about Victorian vibrators.”
They got up, finally, though Tāne would have happily lingered in bed all day. He tried, and failed, to suppress the affection as he watched John dress as Madigan.
In the times he’d worked for schools, and certainly at St. Gilbert’s, he had separated teachers into two categories: the Absent Minded Professor—mussed and messy and forgetting his glasses on his head and his lit pipe in a desk drawer—and the Fussy Little Guy, whose every movement was just so, with pin-neat clothes and classroom and mind. And then he had gotten to know John Madigan better, and found a third, far more intriguing type, a combination of both, with a touch of Romantic poet and transcendental philosopher and stand-up comedian. He’d never seen a man capable of flinging his clothes halfway around the room, yet who brushed his hair and shaved with such alarming precision. Which just reminded him not to put people into categories.
“Christ, how many cardigans do you own?” Tāne said after Madigan pulled a fourth from his suitcase.
“Not enough,” Madigan replied, then looked at the striped one in his hand. “Maybe just a button-down for today? Or…” He dug around some more and produced a blue T-shirt.
“Probably better if you’re going to spend any time traipsing around the farm.”
“Already ruined those other trousers on the rugby pitch,” Madigan agreed, and God in heaven, the man pulled out a pair of jeans and started humming “Burning Up” as he went into the bathroom.
“Didn’t know you liked Madonna…”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
Which settled it. Tāne was going to marry him.
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He’d not had much sense of time, and when he finally checked his watch as they stepped out into the sunlight, barred by the overhanging trees, it turned out later than he thought. The kitchen was empty but still smelled of breakfast, and they finally found Geri out back in the kitchen garden, smoking a joint at a white plastic table and watching the celery grow.
“Kia ora,” she called, waving at them. “Finally got up, eh? Or is that rude?”
“Very.” Tāne reached for the joint as she held out, but hesitated with a weird schoolboy rush of embarrassment at smoking pot in front of a teacher. Then Madigan did another unexpected thing in a rapidly expanding series of unexpected things. He took the joint, inhaled, and passed it to Tāne, who found himself gaping at the cloud of pot smoke held and released from Brother Madigan’s lungs.
It was Geri who started laughing. Madigan quickly took it up, and finally Tāne brought himself back to himself and managed to take a mild puff that was frankly more embarrassing than anything.
“Hidden depths,” he heard Geri murmur as she kicked two plastic chairs away from the table and towards them. “Miriam’s gone down to the coops; she said to tell you that Richard Nixon wants to meet you.” This to Madigan, who for a moment looked blank, then blinked himself back into the present.
“The rooster!” he said.
“That’s the boy. Watch your fingers, he bites. Not unlike Tricky Dick.”
John must have seen the question Tāne looked at him, because he went a bit red. “We had a pet rooster, when I was a boy. I told Miriam about him. So I’d like to…”
“Go on, babe, just don’t get bitten.”
He couldn’t help himself; he watched Madigan leave, hair stirred by the breeze, and pale, freckled arms almost reflective in the sun, until the brightness of him vanished around the corner, down the slope to the coops.
“So,” said Geri.
“So.” Tāne did not look at her as he sat, but he knew perfectly well the expression on her face.
“…A priest?”
Tāne held up a finger. “Not a priest.”
“Oh, you’re going to split hairs about it? Christ, Tāne.”
“Not him either.”
She laughed properly then, that big, chest-deep laugh that made the world expand. “Alright, fine!” There was a pause in which much was said. “It’s serious.”
“It’s serious.”
“And he knows that.”
“Yeah. I don’t know how much he likes it…” That sounded unfair. He knew Madigan thought this would end eventually. Even as barriers collapsed into the sand, the stones that made them were still there. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come to a place where his life kept ending and beginning, bringing his lover with every religious hangup in the book, and some he was making up for himself. It was pushing them towards some start or stop moment. But it was still blissful and beautiful and he couldn’t break out of it now if he tried.
(BTW, I have cast Rachel House as Geri, in case anyone was wondering.)
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i think the time from 11pm to 3am should last longer
Stede: I defile beautiful things :(
Ed: 👀🫦
my mutuals can do that too but you dont see any snapple facts about them
Labyrinth Poster by [artist Kevin Wilson]
'Coldcock' has to be one of my favorite ways of saying 'knock someone out in single punch'.
Yeah, he just frozendicked that guy!
I know the word 'cock' means a lot of other things besides penis, but that's the funniest interpretation for me.
The river Nile from space.
It feels criminal not to include the third panel
Sleepy innkeeper doodle based on liggy Taika