pride in what he said. “You put me to shame and rightly so. So why do you come back?”
“My lord, can we go to hell for a few embraces? Is this the will of God?” Tonio asked.
“You’re the devil with the face of an angel,” the Cardinal said, recoiling slightly, but even now Tonio could hear his breath grow heavy and uneven, and he could see that an inner struggle had commenced.
“My lord, is that really so?” Tonio went down slowly on one knee so that he was looking the Cardinal in the eye. What an amazing texture was this face, a man’s face, the lines of age confined to such definite places, yet so deeply etched, the roughness of the pointed chin. There was a softness about the eyes, yet nothing alleviated the clarity of that gaze. “My lord,” Tonio whispered, “since they cut so much away from me, I have often thought the flesh was the mother of all.”
A defenseless confusion came over the Cardinal, and Tonio fell silent, astonished to hear such a confession from his own lips. What was it about this man that he should say such things to him?
But the Cardinal’s eyes were fixed on him as if he must understand. And how wrongly Tonio had assessed this. The man was innocent, truly innocent, and he wanted desperately to be led.
“I’ve sinned enough for both of us,” said the Cardinal, but it was without conviction. “Now you must go and let me win my battle for God and with myself.”
“But will you be the loser for that, my lord?”
“Ah, no,” the Cardinal pleaded, but at the same time, he drew Tonio closer to himself, holding him firmly in his arm.
“My lord,” Tonio pressed, “may God forgive me if I’m wrong, but is it not true that this sin has already been committed? That in our passion for each other, we are already damned? You have not sent for your confessor, and I have none, and if we should die at this moment, we would burn as surely as if we had already committed the act? Well, then, if this is so, my lord, let me give you the little bit of heaven we can yet have.”
He brought his lips to the Cardinal’s face. He felt the inevitable shock of new flesh. A body he did not know was turning to him, opening its arms to him, and as the Cardinal rose and they stood together and Tonio embraced him, he felt against him the hardness of a body he had never known.
His hunger was weakening him. He would have begged for it suddenly had there been the need.
And this man’s fire caught hold of him.
It seemed he led the Cardinal to the bed. He brought the candles there and set them down, extinguishing all but one, and looking dreamily at its little flame as his shadow leapt up and over the wall, he felt the Cardinal’s fingers loosening his clothes.
He was slow about things. He did not help. He was looking into the core of what he wanted, feeling his own waning shock. From a great distance he saw his garments tumbling to the floor, and he felt the Cardinal’s eyes passing over him. He heard him speaking in a barely audible confession: “It is enough.”
“My lord,” Tonio said, laying a hand on this firmness, this solidity, “I burn. Let me give you pleasure, or I will go mad.”
He sucked at the Cardinal’s mouth, astonished at its malleable innocence, and then, further astonished, he gave himself over to the powerful clumsiness of the Cardinal’s hands. The Cardinal lapped at the nipples of his chest, he plunged into the dark hair between his legs, pressing his open palm right against Tonio’s scars, and feeling them, convulsed with passion, unable to be quiet. He moaned as Tonio moaned, those dead seams of flesh suddenly alive with a jarring vibration, and Tonio, arching his back, felt the Cardinal’s mouth on his rigid sex.
“No, my lord, I beg you….” Tonio, his eyes half mast, his lips quivering as if he were in deep pain, drew back ever so gently and, sliding down to his knees at the side of the bed, whispered, “My lord, let me see it. Let me see it, please.”
The Cardinal stroked Tonio’s head uncertainly. He appeared dazed and mindless, and then he opened his hands almost in an attitude of discovery as Tonio removed his red robe.