“What are you sorry for?” Monty asks.
I was sorry that my great plan hadn’t worked out. Sorry I was here relying on my brother’s Christian charity—what little he had to spare—because my plan for my future had lost its footing at every mile marker. Because I was born a girl but too stubborn to accept the lot that came with my sex.
“Felicity.” Monty sits up and leans forward with his arms around his knees, looking very intently at me. “Apologize for nothing. It has been made clear in many a letter you are always welcome with us. I was anticipating if you ever took us up on that offer, there would be some notice, so you’ll have to put up with our current states of invalidity and concern for said invalidity. But had you written, I swear to God our answer would have been ‘board the first coach south.’”
Thank God—something I can be indignant about. It’s far more comfortable than sentimentality. “Many a letter? Really?” When Monty gives me a quizzical look, I fill in, “You have not once written to me.”
“I write!”
“No, Percy writes me long lovely letters in his very legible penmanship and then you scrawl something offensive at the bottom about Scottish men and their kilts.” Monty grins, unsurprisingly, but Percy snorts as well. When I glare at him, he pulls the quilt up over his nose. “Don’t encourage him.”
Monty leans over and gives a gentle nip at Percy’s jaw, then presses a kiss to the same spot. “Oh, he loves it when I’m filthy.”
I look away, right at a pair of trousers tellingly discarded upon the floor, and resign myself to the fact that their affection is unavoidable. Particularly if I’m to be staying with them. “Are you two still nauseatingly obsessed with each other? I thought by now you’d have mellowed.”
“We remain completely unbearable. Come here, my most dearest darling love of loves.” Monty pulls Percy’s face toward him and kisses him on the mouth this time, sloppy and showy, and somehow he manages to look at me the whole time as if to convey just how smug he is about making me uncomfortable. That initial fondness I felt toward him has already begun to rot like an overripe melon.
I can resist the eye roll no longer, though I fear for my vision as soon as I look to the ceiling—it seems to be peeling off in chalky lumps. If there is a piece of this flat that isn’t playing skip rope with the line between habitable and condemned, I have yet to see it. “I will leave.”
When they pull apart, Percy at least has the good sense to look sheepish about the show. Monty just looks obnoxiously pleased with himself. Somehow his dimples are even jauntier than I remember them.
“He’s showing off,” Percy assures me. “We never touch each other.”
“Well, please don’t start for my benefit,” I reply.
“Come here, darling, and we’ll give you a cuddle as well.” Monty pats the bed between them. “A proper Monty-Percy sandwich.”
I give him a sweet smile in return. “Oh, darling, I’d rather set myself on fire.”
It has taken me, admittedly, a time to reconcile the idea that Percy and Monty seem to have found honest affection for each other in what I was taught was the sin of all sins. Perhaps the distance helped, or at least gave me space to ponder it and make my peace with it and move from cringing tolerance to something nearer to understanding that their love is probably truer than most of the pairings I saw growing up. Anyone who put up with my brother certainly would not be doing it unless they really, sincerely loved him. And Percy’s the sort of decent lad who actually might. When stripped of the illegalities and the Biblical condemnation, their attraction is no stranger to me than anyone’s attraction to anyone.
Percy nudges the side of Monty’s head with his nose. “You should get to work.”
“Must I?” he replies. “Felicity just arrived.”
I perk up in a way that I’m certain makes me look more squirrel-like than is flattering, but I can’t resist a taunt. It’s owed him after that clogged drain of a kiss. “I’m sorry, Percy, I’m not sure I heard right, because it sounded as though you said work, which would imply that my brother has tricked someone into employing him.”
“Thank you, I have been consistently employed since we arrived in London,” Monty says. Percy coughs, and he adds, “Somewhat consistently.”
I follow Monty around the partition, perching myself at its edge so I can keep them both in my conversation as Monty starts pawing his way through the trunks. “May I guess what sort of employment you’re rushing off to? You’re a horse jockey. No, wait—a nightclub performer. A bare-knuckled boxer. A brothel bully.”
From the bed, Percy laughs. “He’d be smaller than most of the tarts.”
“Ha, ha, ha. I won’t have you two ganging up upon me while you’re here.” Monty surfaces from a trunk with a jumper that looks like it was vomited up by an aging housecat and wrestles it over his head. “I’ll have you know,” he says as he fights to get his hands through the sleeves, “that I have a respectable position in Covent Garden.”
“Respectable?” I cross my arms. “That sounds fake.”
“It’s not! It’s very respectable, isn’t it, Percy?” he calls, but Percy has suddenly become occupied with a thread coming undone from the quilt.
“So tell me what it is you’re doing respectably in Covent Garden,” I say with an eyebrow arched over the neighborhood.
As a newly monogamous man, he pretends to not understand my emphasis on the notorious cruising grounds he once frequented. “I play cards for a casino.”
“You play for the casino?”
“I stay sober but pretend to be drunk to play against the men who actually are tipsy and win their money and give it to the house. They pay me a portion.”
I let out a bark of laughter before I can stop myself. “Yes. Respectable is the first word that comes to my mind when I hear that.”
“Better than making plum cakes with your little plum cake,” he returns with a sly grin.
And suddenly none of it is fun or funny any longer—it’s the savage sniping of our youth, both of us jabbing gently until someone presses a little too hard and it draws blood. Monty might not sense the change in the weather, but Percy does, for he says sternly to Monty, “Be nice. She’s only been here twenty minutes.”
“Has it only been twenty minutes?” I mumble, and Percy swats his hand at me.
“You have to be nice too. That road runs both ways.”
“Yes, mother,” I say, and Monty laughs, this time less at me than with me, and we trade a look that is, shall we say, not hostile. Which is good enough.
It takes Monty an excessively long time to dress. There’s the jumper, mostly obscured by a jacket and an overly large coat, then heavy boots and fraying gloves, all topped by an adorably misshapen cap that I like to imagine Percy knit for him. It also takes him half a dozen false starts before he actually manages to reach the street—first he has to come back for his scarf, then to change into thicker socks, but most times the thing he comes back for is one more kiss with Percy.
When Monty finally leaves in earnest—the whole building seems to tip a bit more westward when the door slams behind him—Percy smiles at me and pats the spot on the bed beside him. “You can sit down, if you like. I promise I won’t try to cuddle you.”