Henry couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed so hard. “It is the right of the people to abolish and institute new cheesemongers,” he managed to sputter out between guffaws, and he was about to go on when John set a finger across his lips.

“Mmm?”

John leaned in. He set the back of his other hand against Henry’s cheek. “Henry,” he said on a low murmur. “Henry.”

“I know. You don’t need to tell me. I’m being an idiot.”

The finger on his lips pushed in. “No,” John said. “You’re quick, and you’re funny, and you’re clever, and you don’t stop thinking about a thing just because it hurts your head. You are further from idiocy than anyone I’ve ever met. Never let anyone say that you’re stupid because you’re not in the usual way.”

“John,” Henry breathed.

“I can’t let you be this necessary,” John said. “We’ll be in Newport in three days.”

“John.”

John leaned in, so close that Henry could feel the warmth of his skin. “And yet I can’t stop needing you.”

“Then don’t,” Henry said. “Don’t stop.”

Their lips brushed. It wasn’t a kiss, any more than a touch of a hand was a caress. It was just the prelude to one—a meeting of lips so glancing that it was barely even an acquaintance. John pulled back.

Henry met John’s eyes, rich brown and perfect, for one swimmingly sensual moment. Then they leaned in again, and this—this was a kiss.

John’s arm wrapped around Henry as if he could keep the entire world at bay, as if he could protect him from the end of their journey.

Lips melded, then tongues, then mouths. Henry moved to straddle John, bodies pressing together.

John was kissing him, and it was magnificent.

Throughout his life, Henry had been kissed for too many reasons—because someone was angry, because they’d faced a battle and made it out the other end alive, because Henry was there and he was better than nobody.

He’d never been kissed by someone who thought him necessary. He’d always been the frivolous one. The flighty one. He’d always been That-Idiot-Henry, and never…this. Never someone to be cherished or valued or wanted.

John kissed him as if he were air itself, and oh, how Henry wanted. He wanted so much to be the man John was kissing. He wanted to stay on this road forever. He wanted to have no destination at all. He wanted this to be his life, dust and miles and jokes and a voyage with no end.

It could never happen. They’d run out of cheese. John had a family and so did Henry.

John pulled away first. “I spent all the war thinking of nothing but coming home.” He shut his eyes. “I’ve worried so about my sister. Now, now that homecoming is upon me…I don’t want this journey to end.”

It doesn’t have to, Henry didn’t say. But it did. It did have to.

“What am I going to do, John?” he asked instead.

“You’re going to go back,” John said soothingly, stroking his hair. “You’re going to tell lies about Yorktown, and you’ll be good at it. You’re going to claim you struck your head and have only now recovered your memories. Your wealthy family will welcome you with open arms.”

“Oh.” Henry shut his eyes. “You…know about that, then.”

“Mmm.”

“You’re not angry? I…did rather tell a pack of lies about them.”

“Yes,” John said in a low voice. “You did, but the lies were so obvious they don’t count, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart. It hurt, that endearment, coming now, only when everything must end.

“I have to go back,” Henry said.

“I know. You don’t belong here with me.”

“No,” Henry said. “This is awful. I inherited eighteen thousand pounds from my aunt, and if I’m dead, my father gets it all. He’s terrible, John. I cannot let him have it. But how do I go back?”

“Think of this as a dream,” John said. “One in which you’ve acted differently, but—”

Henry sat upright. “You think I’m asking how to stop committing felonies? No, no. You have it all wrong. That is not the question that consumes me. How do I keep committing treason? It’s easy when it’s just principles spouted on an open road. But when my mother cries, when my father shouts, when my brother calls on me and tells me that I need to think of his son’s reputation—how do I go on?”

“Ah.” John smiled sadly. “That, I can’t tell you. But every man’s brand of treachery is his own. You’ve found so much of yourself. You can find this, too.”

* * *

They ought to have fucked that night.

Henry knew that. But somehow the act itself seemed so final. Intercourse of any kind would inevitably mean goodbye instead of I love you. And Henry didn’t want to say goodbye until he had to. That night, they had made a single nest of blankets.

One kiss on the lips had turned into two. John’s hands had found Henry’s hips; their arms had wrapped around each other.

It had only been two kisses, but the second hadn’t ended. It had gone on, breath heating, until condensation gathered on the sheet of canvas they’d stretched between two trees to shield them from stray drops. The kiss had endured until water dripped onto their skin and evaporated in the heat of their want. The entire world disappeared into that kiss until there was nothing but lust and humidity. John’s muscled body hard on top of him, his mouth hot against his, the ground hard beneath his hips. That kiss went on and on, until it was no different than breathing, until weariness caught them both up and they fell asleep, curled in each other’s arms.

They should have fucked.

Instead, they’d awoken that morning and packed their things as if it were a day like any other day.

“Kingston?” the man at the well said at noon. “It’s twenty miles distant. Just beyond, you ought to be able to find transport across the Sound to Newport. You’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon with any luck.”

“Excellent news,” John said.

It was. Henry was not so selfish that he would count it as anything except the best news, the most perfect news. John had worried, and here they were. It was good. It was great.

It was tearing him apart.

On that last night, with Newport a three-mile walk and a boat ride away from the camp they set, they ran out of cheese.

Their eyes met over the fire as they divided the last slivers.

“It’s just as well,” Henry said. “It is objectively horrible cheese.” It was sublime when he put it in his mouth. “Stupid reality.”

“I know,” John said. “I’m thinking too much of reality now. Tomorrow I find out…” Henry could almost taste his fears in that pause, the way he looked over his shoulder. He could almost imagine unknown horrors in the way John swallowed and shook his head. “Worrying won’t change reality, either. Distract me, Henry.”

He said it the way he said the cheese was delicious, drawing out the syllables.

“I’m no use as a distraction.” Henry sighed. “When I think of what will happen after tomorrow, I come up blank, too.”

John just looked at him. “That’s as good a distraction as any. What will you do?”

“Back home…” Back home, Henry was thought a frivolous, flabby fellow. One who thought a ten-mile walk sounded like an impossibility. “Back home, comfort is its own seduction. I wouldn’t even have to try, and everything would work out for me. The footmen would bow to me. Men thrice my age will take my coat and consider me a jolly master for remembering their actual names and not just calling them all Jeeves.”

John’s fingers touched Henry’s lips, and Henry let his deepest fears come out.

“I’ve been pretending this whole journey. I’m a frivolous fellow. I’m afraid my ideals won’t hold up to reality. How can they? The advantages I have there are…” Henry was at a loss for words, and he was so rarely without them. “…A thing.” He had no better word for it. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t keep telling people, no, no, don’t be nice to me.”

“So don’t do that,” John said. “There must be a thousand ways to commit felonies. You’re not the sort who is meant to be rude. Don’t try to be any kind of felon but the one you are.”

“Mmm.” Henry let the conversation lapse—something he also rarely did. He only took it up again once they’d finished dinner, cleaned up, and retreated to their blankets.

“I don’t know who I am there,” he said. “I know who I am here, on this road, but there? Nobody there knows…”

Me, he almost said, but he had been so many people. A frivolous child. That unthinking idiot who had taken another man’s coat without knowing the man who gave it to him.

“Someone who knows the me I want to be,” he finally said. “The best me. The me I can be, the me I didn’t know even existed a few months ago.”

“Have someone in mind?” John’s thumb stroked Henry’s lips once more.

Henry couldn’t help himself any longer. He leaned forward and kissed John with all his pent-up desire, with every ounce of his being. He wanted, he wanted, to be the man who could kiss John. He wanted to be the man who thought nothing of a five-hundred-mile journey.

He wanted to be the man who, ten years from now, saw John in the morning and thought, here is someone I can trust with my life. Hell, he wanted to give his own life over to him.

John’s arm came around his shoulder, pulling him in. Their blankets rearranged, covering each other. Their bodies came together in the darkness, as the kiss went from lips to shoulders to hips, pressing firmly into one another. It was the best kiss. The loveliest kiss. It was hard and unforgiving like the road against their feet. It was warm and gentle, like winter sunshine in the morning melting the frost on dried grass.

John pulled off Henry’s undershirt—cold air touched his skin, and it pebbled—but he scarcely had a chance to shiver. The other man bent his head and touched his tongue to Henry’s nipple. It was joltingly, perfectly pleasurable—that little touch, his hands spreading across Henry’s chest.

Henry let out a little gasp, then a larger one. His hands spread across the other man’s chest. Down his ribs. John didn’t object when he pulled away long enough to get the man’s smallclothes off. He bent down and tasted John’s erection, licking, sucking, hollowing his mouth around the man’s penis.

“Oh God.” John’s hands slid through his hair. “You’re incredibly good at that.”

How many times had Henry thought of John at night? Of giving himself over to him?

More than the miles they’d traveled together. Every time they moved, the blankets shifted. Cold air hit them in short blasts, but Henry’s body was a furnace of need now.

“I want you,” he said. “I want you inside me. Do you—do we—”

He never got to finish his question. He never needed to.

John turned over, fumbling in his pack. Henry knew what he was looking for. Oil, its uses all too familiar… There. He turned back, sitting on his haunches, and hauled Henry to straddle him.

John’s mouth was hot on his throat. Henry leaned down and inhaled the man’s scent, wrapped his arms around the man’s shoulders. Their naked hips pressed together.

“God, I want you,” John said and tipped his head up.

They kissed again. It was dizzying, scarcely being able to see the man. Feeling the heat of his fingers running down Henry’s back. His head bowed against Henry’s chest.

John’s fingers followed Henry’s spine, down, down. They paused. Henry could hear the clink of the glass stopper, then the cool oil, slick against John’s fingers, pressing against him, opening him up. His cock twitched against the other man’s abdomen.

“You like that.”

“God. I do.”

“Let’s try a little more, then.”

John’s hands steadied him. Guided him onto the head of his cock. Henry exhaled, sinking down. Down. Feeling his body open up so intimately… Feeling that pressure, so right, so perfect…

“God.” He caught John’s face in his hands. “You’re perfect, John. You’re so utterly perfect.”

They kissed again. They didn’t stop kissing.

John’s hands came to Henry’s hips. They moved, awkwardly at first, learning each other, learning the rhythm of each other’s thrusts. Then less awkwardly—John wrapping one arm around Henry’s waist, his other hand finding Henry’s aching cock. His fingers felt like encouragement, and Henry gave himself over to the feel of them. Their shoulders grew hot, then slick with sweat. Every thrust was a perfect pleasure, stoking fires that could never be banked.

Had he thought the air cold? It was hot and humid, scented with their mixing musk, the silence broken by John’s gasps of pleasure.

Henry was doing this to him. Squeezing him. Riding him. He could feel the other man’s muscles tense. Feel John’s arm squeeze him. He felt a spurt of heat, heard John let out a groan of surprise, then thrust hard, hard inside him.

He rode out the other man’s pleasure, the groans, until John was a gasping, wrung-out mess.

“Henry.”

“Yes?” He could not hide his own delighted pleasure.

“How close are you?”

“Very close. I should say—”

John cut him off with a kiss. He hadn’t yet withdrawn from his body. His hand closed around Henry’s cock with an almost possessive groan. He pumped once, twice, his kiss hard and demanding. Henry thought of the feel of John inside him, thrusting, groaning, being laid bare…

Very close. He was very close. He was—oh God. He spilled over the edge, his wet semen painting them both. For a second, his mind could not function. There was nothing but that achingly perfect pleasure. The absolute joy of touching someone he knew so well. Someone who trusted him. Who believed in him. Someone who thought that he could be so much. It couldn’t be better.

Then John kissed him. “Let me find a cloth.”

It was better. There was a little water still in the canteen, and even though it was half-freezing, having someone take care of him with such tenderness, being able to return the favor… It undid Henry. More even than the sex.

They curled up in the blankets afterward. Their arms, curled around one another, spoke all the words they had not yet said.

It hadn’t been goodbye. It had been everything Henry wanted—desire, affection, a promise of what they could have.

It had been a promise of an illusion, like saying the cheese was delicious. No matter how their bodies had lied, the truth was simple. Henry looked into John’s eyes afterward, trying to find the right words to say.

John found them first. “You’re going back.”

“I’m going back.” Henry shut his eyes. “You’re necessary, John. I need to know that I’m necessary, too. That I can be…” He trailed off.

He didn’t have to finish the sentence.

John trailed his fingers along his shoulder. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he whispered, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of…”

John trailed off, shutting his eyes. For one heart-stopping moment, Henry wanted to be the thing John was pursuing. He wanted to be on that list of vital necessities. He wanted to dream that he could be so important.

“Home,” John said instead. “The pursuit of home.”

It wasn’t home in the Declaration, but happiness. Happiness was here. It was evident in the flutter of John’s fingers down his arm, the way their bodies fit together. Happiness was laughing with a man who let their conversation ebb and flow and never called him an idiot for the rapidly turning tide of his thoughts.

Happiness was this journey, and it was coming to an end.

Henry shut his eyes and tried to imagine going back to England. Back to his family. Nothing, still.

“Go,” John whispered, brushing his hair back. “Pursue.”