The Thief Of Peace Read online

  His new favourite place was the hunting lodge at Prato. It lay in the woods beyond the house, and there was no more hunting now that Teo was in charge. Instead they had turned it into a little studio, where Nicci could work unhindered, or not, as it turned out. Today Teo had come with him to pose for him, but seemed determined to be a poor model. He lay restive beneath a fur edged coverlet, his bare feet hanging off the edge of the divan. His feet were supposed to be posed in mid-air, a study for the feet of an angel, but he kept sighing and stretching and – worse – moving his toes.

  “You moved,” Nicci said.

  “I didn’t,” said Teo, a lie so shameless that Nicci had to laugh.

  “You’re a terrible model. All you have to do is lie there and keep your feet still, and you can’t even do that.”

  Teo yawned and twitched a toe. “I think you’re obsessed with feet.”

  “Of course I am. An artist can’t be too obsessed with hands and feet. Other than the face, they’re the most eloquent parts of the body.”

  Teo laughed. “All right, hands I can understand, but eloquent feet?”

  “Yes. Look at the feet of Michelangelo’s David. They’re rooted. Planted. The way you press your feet to earth when you’re scared to death but you have to stand fast. Then look at the feet of Botticelli’s Venus, the one where she lies with Mars. Her foot looks as though it has never touched the ground. She holds it as if she has no idea how to even walk on it, or even has any cause to, because she’s the goddess of love, after all. All of her best work is done lying down.” Nicci looked up, looked back at his drawing board and sighed. The angle of Teo’s foot was completely different. “Did you move again?”

  “No.”

  Nicci abandoned the drawing and went over to the divan. Teo was all playfulness, an inviting light in his eyes. He enjoyed being quietly infuriating. “I should have gone with Saint Sebastian,” said Nicci, his hands sliding up the back of Teo’s bare, upstretched leg. “At least that way I could have tied you to something.”

  “I had a dream about that, once. You had me tied to a tree.”

  “Really?” Nicci kissed the inside of Teo’s thigh, just above the knee. “I think I’m going to need to know a lot more about that. What happened?”

  “It was a bright, sunny day,” said Teo, his fingers in Nicci’s hair. Not tugging, not yet, although he did like to pull, sometimes to the point of pain. “And I was stark naked, tied to a tree, no way to hide the state I was in…”

  Nicci flicked back the coverlet. Teo was erect beneath it, his cock and balls rosy against the white of his inner thighs. The hair at the root was a darker brown than the hair on his head, but when the sun shone between his legs it sometimes glinted off little threads of copper. “Were you as hard as you are now?” Nicci asked, as he bent lower to breathe in the scent of him.

  “Harder.” Teo arched, rubbing himself against Nicci’s cheek.

  “Impossible.”

  Teo was thick with hot blood, the velvet skin warm against Nicci’s lips. He bucked as Nicci dragged his tongue up the length of him, tasting the bead of eager dew at the very tip.

  “What else?” Nicci said, as he kissed his way to navel and belly, peaked pink nipples. “What happened next?”

  “There was an arrow,” said Teo, his legs wrapping around Nicci. “Sticking out of me. It hurt, but then you told me it would hurt less if you pushed it in before pulling it out…” Nicci laughed. “I know, I know…and then you…oh…there…yes…then you pushed it in, and it didn’t hurt at all.” His fingers curled around Nicci, drawing them both together. He squeezed, his kiss already soft and slow and delirious. “Fuck me.”

  Nicci entered him with a slither of the oil he used to keep his brushes supple. Teo breathed faster and closed around him, taking him like a sacrament at first and then later – when his breath was even faster and his heels digging into Nicci’s flanks – wallowing in him like a drunk diving to the bottom of a bottle. The name of God slipped from his lips as he came, the clutch of his muscles a tight circle that wrung Nicci out in an instant, and he spilled into the unglimpsed mysteries of Teo’s inner flesh. Still hard, Nicci pushed once more and fancied that he could somehow dive even further into him, fucking deep enough to nudge against the underside of his perfect, fist-sized heart. When he slipped out Teo let out a low, dry-mouthed whine of loss, and Nicci laughed at how insatiable he had become.

  “Oh, you love me,” he whispered, and kissed the inside of Teo’s thigh. “So greedy for me.” He pushed Teo’s knees even wider and bent to kiss his wilting cock, his empty balls and – with his heartbeat still thrumming against the insides of his ears – the place where he had just pierced him. He tasted salt, oil and himself, and Teo murmured and bucked at this new indecency. When Nicci raised his head Teo’s eyes were wide with shock, but dark with satisfaction, and try as he might he never could quite disguise his delight when Nicci found a new way to debauch him. They lay wrapped in each other, hands moving lazily over warm skin, unable to stop touching even after love. Nicci could still feel the slight ridge of scar tissue on Teo’s back, the fading lines that made Nicci vow, whenever he saw them, to never lay hands on his beloved with anything other than perfect tenderness.

  The chapel bell rang in the distance. Teo stirred, yawned and snuggled back down, pulling the coverlet over them both.

  “Do you ever miss it?” Nicci asked.

  “Miss what?”

  “Jumping up to answer the sound of a bell.” Nicci pressed a kiss into the cropped curls, the tonsure all but grown out now. “Don’t you miss the certainty of it? Of knowing that you’re good, and that you’re doing the best for your immortal soul.”

  Teo said something in Latin, and once again Nicci only caught a handful of words. Man. House. Nothing.

  “I think you said that before. What does it mean?”

  Teo stifled another yawn. “‘If a man should give all the substance of his house for love, he shall despise it as nothing.’”

  “Is that from the Bible?”

  “The Song of Songs,” said Teo, rolling onto his side and propping himself up on one elbow. “The substance of my house was nothing, Nicci. At the heart of it my faith was nothing more than the fear that I’d escaped earthly consequences for killing Cesaro, and that I had to do something to mitigate the otherworldly ones. I was a child. Self-centred. Fear and self-interest are poor cornerstones for faith. The only true foundation of faith is love.” His eyes shone, his hand warm on Nicci’s cheek. “Once you told me you never wanted to be the thief who stole my peace from me…”

  “I remember. And you told me there was never any peace for me to steal.”

  “There wasn’t. You stole nothing from me, and gave me everything.” His kiss was soft, close-mouthed. “You gave me peace, the perfect stillness I feel in the darkest part of the night when I’m lying beside you, listening to you breathe. And that, my love, is everything.”

  The End

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