"Idle As A Painted Ship Upon A Painted Ocean", RPS, William Wordsworth/Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Title: Idle As A Painted Ship Upon A Painted Ocean
Fandom: Real Person Slash
Pairing: William Wordsworth/Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2610
Genre: Slash
Copyright: Title is from The Rime Of The Ancyent Marinere by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Summary: Samuel can never give his beginnings an end but he does fall for everyone he meets regardless.
Author’s Notes: I heart Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he’s so amusing with his laudanum addiction and random unfinished poetry. Written on my English residential to Wales earlier this week and also on the coach on the way home with people leaning over and going so you’re actually writing Wordsworth/Coleridge? occasionally. widowedanthem, you are now free to leave me comments going PRETENTION PRETENTION PRETENTION as much as you like (although, equally, don’t!).
Largely unresearched (the biography in the front of my copy of Lyrical Ballads doesn’t count, does it?) and of course it [probably] never happened.
1798
Sun-blinded, Samuel’s eyelids flicker.
Keeping them closed, he focuses on the flat heat of the sun and the way it complements the fresh coolness of the grass beneath his back. Here, alone - blissfully alone - where it is quiet and smooth and calm around him, he can begin to allow himself to imagine that one day he’ll touch greatness. He’ll finally understand exactly what these pieces of mystery and majesty mean.
A warm summer day, and he sprawls, bare, to feel the sun taste him and to taste it in return. The heat pressed down on his chests, thighs and arms, crawling over the tendons in his neck when he turns his head, is like another human being climbing over him.
But he cannot think like that any longer, and anyway the marriage was a mistake. A costly mistake whose consequences bite him even now, and Sara is not happy. Poetry, it turns out, does not last, and writing verse to woo another is a waste of precious words that could be put to far better use.
And Samuel attempts to remind himself that the Lyrical Ballads is not really his attempt at showing William exactly what he is worth. It is merely a book that they have both published - anonymously of course - to explore form and idealism. And that is all.
Though he knows himself too well, and he is young and although he is not quite beautiful he can have what he desires anyhow, and Samuel can never give his beginnings an end but he does fall for everyone he meets regardless. And it was hard when William was smiles and a glass too much of wine at dinner (“our imaginations complement each other” - their entwining of souls whispered in an amused tone of voice late into the night). Dorothy is sweetness personified, sharp as a pin and intriguing in her own wide-eyed way. Not as intriguing as her brother of course, but William is William and Samuel drives himself half-insane on dreams that taste like opium and Sara probably hates him more than she used to.
It’s sad about Kubla Khan and the end that won’t ever arrive. He sometimes wonders what he saw then and if it was better than this.
Against his eyelashes, the sun pushes harder. He’ll burn, Samuel remembers distractedly, skin cracked and reddened and peeled and Sara will hear about the grass stains from their poor maids. Glory of nature and who minds a few marks - but they are not as well off as they could be and silk shirts cannot be provided for by the open spaces he worships so much.
The arguments are getting louder. It feels a little like they have forgotten how to be happy.
His mouth, Dorothy laughs, is too wide, his eyes too fearsome, his black hair too wild and badly-cut. Sara thought it made him look exciting, a tragically long time ago. Now he pretends he doesn’t love the opium that comes from countries he’ll never go to, and cleaves to William, who has the courage of his convictions and two more years to his repertoire.
Ragged dark hair fallen against the grass, and he smiles with the lips that repel dear Dorothy so very much. Somewhere, birds share their morning news and his fingers press, soft, against the dirt. Compared with this much majesty and power, the human race looks a little like a bad joke told by a man rather the worse for liquor.
As someone who spends more time than is perhaps socially decent rather the worse for liquor, Samuel believes that he is in a position to know.
Though Sara scowls at him and won’t call him Sam any longer. His dreams of a perfect new world have become dust as all things must, and yet they clench their fingers into the misguided marriage vows nonetheless. Sheer determination and a refusal to admit their mutual failure.
Walk far enough and you can find places away from prying eyes, a space where society cannot touch and there’s distance enough from misplaced wives and sons who grow up trapped to a flawed regime and poets who say things that they do not really mean while drinking too much and laughing too hard. William says that he knew him at once; Samuel believes that their relationship happened too fast to be classed as mere accident. He likes to think that anyway, because if you push the thought enough it stings.
Talk to me, Sara insists, and then won’t listen to him. He really is sorry.
Out here, he is more than himself and it’s a relief because Samuel is not entirely sure he likes being himself at this moment in time.
The shadow that falls over him makes him want to cry out in shock, but he reminds himself not to; no sense in frightening everything in the vicinity because he has not walked far enough to escape. Samuel can feel a thick, ugly blush creeping up from his collar bones; whilst in his heart he knows that coming here to get close to nature and appreciate it is for his art and peace of mind, the teachings pushed into his young head at school still make embarrassment paint his face and neck. Samuel blushes beautifully, if one can be induced.
The laughter, alive and wild, makes him slit his eyes open. Silhouetted too brilliantly and green-tinged after only the inside of his eyelids for so long, it takes a while for Samuel to focus on the sight. Until that point his vision is made up of smears of colour and bright and it’s almost beautiful in a disconcerting way.
William is too amused. The minute it becomes apparent that he is the one laughing, his rich Cumberland accent thickening the sound in a way that haunts Samuel beyond what is probably healthy, the flush deepens. Samuel scowls.
“You followed me?”
“I didn’t,” William assures him, face a mask of attempted innocence. He can feel what he wants to feel at any given moment; Samuel is less defined by choice.
He sucks his lower lip into his mouth, a nervous habit he developed as a boy. William stops laughing and a warm mouthful of words asks Samuel exactly what he thinks he’s trying to do. No longer ridicule; merely curiosity and an eagerness that Samuel feels cannot end well.
“It is a beautiful day,” he manages, “I wanted to become part of it.”
When William gets his amused expression back, Samuel closes his eyes again and turns his face back to the light. The rest of him remains naked and swathed in William’s tall, cool shadow, and he attempts to regain the melancholy peace he’d done so well in acquiring. But there’s rustling of clothes and the shadow keeps wavering and he imagines destruction instead.
The birds have quietened. Samuel is far from an idiot and he can read this for the ill-omen it must be. He bites the tip of his tongue and prays for Xanadu. But all that happens is that William’s shadow shifts and moves away, and then the other man exhales, long and slow. There’s the rustling sounds of material shifting, boots thudding against the grass. Samuel dares to turn his head and open his eyes and finds William smiling at him. His enthusiasm is rich and he’ll do anything you can suggest to him at least once. Samuel has a few suggestions of his own but lacks the courage and anyhow he has seen how friendships fall and crumble into simple halves from the slant of a wrong word.
Maybe this will become a poem:
And bare together on the grass we lay
Eyes shut closed against the bright summer’s day.
Yet another verse for Samuel never to finish, though William says he’ll forgive him for the stunted mess that The Three Graves became eventually. The Lyrical Ballads encompassed too many dreams and it was inevitable that some would wither.
William gives him the shadow of a wink, then turns his face towards the sun. Samuel closes bruised-feeling eyelids, attempting to recapture the feelings he felt so easily before. William changes things irrevocably and Samuel hates and loves him for it in equal measure.
He curls his fingers against the ground, dirt slides under his nails and he wonders if blades of grass scream, or if he’s just attributing tired human emotions to them. This was about him and the day and now it’s merely about the sound of William breathing and the burn against the line of his jaw and it’s all ruined.
“Why did you come here?” Samuel asks, careful to keep the bite of accusation behind in his mouth.
William doesn’t reply and when Samuel can no longer suppress the urge to turn and look, he finds his friend lost in thought, chin tilted towards the sun. He looks so peaceful lying there and quietly happy. Samuel wonders with a shred of ugly jealousy if perhaps his life would have been that easy if he had made William’s choices, and if he wouldn’t be left with an inadvisable wife and a son who scares him more than he ever wants to admit. Poor Sara; Samuel pities her almost more than he pities himself.
When Samuel sits up his skin feels warm and damaged and not entirely like it belongs to him. His unruly dark hair falls around his cheeks, locks obscuring his already blurred vision. The grass has left its mark; raised ridges to red and white press his skin into strange shapes and smudges of dirt further mar his appearance. Unarguably undignified, but he’s almost proud of it. In London there was no sky; just the hope of it beyond the chimneys.
Starkly lit in brilliant sunlight, William seems almost outside humanity. His limbs glow from the light’s attention, and he looks healthy and ethereal, unlike Samuel, who will insist upon looking consumptive. He is tired and largely mistaken in most things, and made up almost entirely of unfinished poems and sour insecurities and laudanum in closed rooms and other people’s disappointment. Samuel always costs others their faith in him and the guilt and resentment is almost too strong to handle.
Sometimes, he finds himself wondering how much the I love you is just a clean-cut I wish I were you and in any case his words mean too little. Poetry is his reason for living, but somehow all his sincerity is drained into it leaving him with none for his own life.
Maybe he’s blaming the poetry to hide his emotional deficiencies because he wants until he has and then he loses all interest. Like a selfish child, but there was no space for selfishness in all that education and the smooth curve of William’s mouth is half an invitation that no one will word.
There are too many words that they keep silent between them - I hated The Rime of The Ancyent Marinere and when you laugh at me like that I need to kiss you and I think our collaboration may have been a mistake. It turns out that even when you find the missing half of your imagination in someone else’s skull candid conversation is simply too much to ask for.
Samuel has no chance of retaining his inner calm now. He doesn’t even try; and it’s against all his assertions and all that he believes to sit here and reflect on the tattered mess of his life but nonetheless he doesn’t know how to let it go. This is another of those situations that he should not have got himself into, like asking for Sara’s hand in marriage on a day when nothing more interesting seemed to be happening, or saying yes, we should collaborate when he should have pointed out that their poetry is too at odds and he’s too unreliable to be anyone’s partner. He sighs, and turns to pick up his shirt, splayed carelessly across the grass in a streak of white. Leave before he makes new regrets; it’s the only way.
William’s eyes open and there’s the question etched over the line of his sun-flushed face. He says nothing aloud, and the peaceful quiet isn’t so much sublime and awe-inspiring as awkward.
“Stay,” William murmurs, fingers closing around Samuel’s wrist, the tips rough and nails dark with spilt ink. And he should go but temptation was never his to resist and he allows himself to be pulled, back to the warm, sun-parched grasses. Sprawled on his side, his arm is trapped beneath him, but the more interesting part is that William has not yet let go of his wrist. The touch is too warm and too tight and Samuel decides that it isn’t fair.
But if William won’t allow him to escape the temptation of this no-longer-funny game then Samuel will plead insanity and is no longer responsible for his actions. Propping himself up on one elbow, he leans over William and tells himself he can end this any time he likes. William opens his eyes as Samuel’s shadow tumbles over his face and he still says nothing. Hair spread across the grass and Samuel can’t seem to stop himself leaning, so close that his hair slides down William’s cheek.
Tell me to stop, he thinks, because this cannot end happily or safely, and William soundlessly opens his sun-chapped lips. Maybe he’s pushing or perhaps Samuel is reading too much into the action because he is desperate for this to have meaning in the way that so much of his life no longer has. It has been so long since Sara could crack apart this kind of heated spark in his stomach. William’s mouth is still open and Samuel cannot prevent himself from almost toppling down that last inch of distance, finally, oh God, finally pushing their lips together in a slide of feeling that leaves him light-headed. Yet another mistake in a life awash with them but the heat of William’s bare skin this close is as elusively maddening as opium - he promised Sara he’d never touch it again but this an entirely new betrayal and probably worse - and he silently begs for a reaction from his stone-still friend.
When William’s hand moves to curl in the back of Samuel’s ragged dark hair he thinks he could fall apart from sheer sensation and his elbow gives, making him half-tumble down, shoulder thumping William’s chest and the angle is impossible and he will never, never be able to write poetry about this. William tilts his chin upwards and the sun shoves down on Samuel’s shoulders and he is too aware of his lines of exposed skin. No matter that William is every bit as passionate as Samuel always wanted him to be, because this is a decision that could break their lives.
Samuel pulls away and looks down at William, leant over him with his forearm above William’s head and still close enough for his dark curls to kiss William’s cheeks and jaw. The silence remains, a light breeze in the trees and somewhere a bird warbles like hope.
“Please,” Samuel whispers, voice hoarse and William’s mouth is altogether too red, “Say something.”
William is quiet for a worryingly long time and Samuel wonders if he will have to leave the Lake District in disgrace to play at marriage with his miserable wife and never to think of William without an awkward flush.
“You have grass in your hair,” William offers at last.
Relief and frustration and blissful confusion rise in Samuel and before he knows it he’s laughing with his cheek pressed to William’s sun-soft shoulder.
Fandom: Real Person Slash
Pairing: William Wordsworth/Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2610
Genre: Slash
Copyright: Title is from The Rime Of The Ancyent Marinere by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Summary: Samuel can never give his beginnings an end but he does fall for everyone he meets regardless.
Author’s Notes: I heart Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he’s so amusing with his laudanum addiction and random unfinished poetry. Written on my English residential to Wales earlier this week and also on the coach on the way home with people leaning over and going so you’re actually writing Wordsworth/Coleridge? occasionally. widowedanthem, you are now free to leave me comments going PRETENTION PRETENTION PRETENTION as much as you like (although, equally, don’t!).
Largely unresearched (the biography in the front of my copy of Lyrical Ballads doesn’t count, does it?) and of course it [probably] never happened.
1798
Sun-blinded, Samuel’s eyelids flicker.
Keeping them closed, he focuses on the flat heat of the sun and the way it complements the fresh coolness of the grass beneath his back. Here, alone - blissfully alone - where it is quiet and smooth and calm around him, he can begin to allow himself to imagine that one day he’ll touch greatness. He’ll finally understand exactly what these pieces of mystery and majesty mean.
A warm summer day, and he sprawls, bare, to feel the sun taste him and to taste it in return. The heat pressed down on his chests, thighs and arms, crawling over the tendons in his neck when he turns his head, is like another human being climbing over him.
But he cannot think like that any longer, and anyway the marriage was a mistake. A costly mistake whose consequences bite him even now, and Sara is not happy. Poetry, it turns out, does not last, and writing verse to woo another is a waste of precious words that could be put to far better use.
And Samuel attempts to remind himself that the Lyrical Ballads is not really his attempt at showing William exactly what he is worth. It is merely a book that they have both published - anonymously of course - to explore form and idealism. And that is all.
Though he knows himself too well, and he is young and although he is not quite beautiful he can have what he desires anyhow, and Samuel can never give his beginnings an end but he does fall for everyone he meets regardless. And it was hard when William was smiles and a glass too much of wine at dinner (“our imaginations complement each other” - their entwining of souls whispered in an amused tone of voice late into the night). Dorothy is sweetness personified, sharp as a pin and intriguing in her own wide-eyed way. Not as intriguing as her brother of course, but William is William and Samuel drives himself half-insane on dreams that taste like opium and Sara probably hates him more than she used to.
It’s sad about Kubla Khan and the end that won’t ever arrive. He sometimes wonders what he saw then and if it was better than this.
Against his eyelashes, the sun pushes harder. He’ll burn, Samuel remembers distractedly, skin cracked and reddened and peeled and Sara will hear about the grass stains from their poor maids. Glory of nature and who minds a few marks - but they are not as well off as they could be and silk shirts cannot be provided for by the open spaces he worships so much.
The arguments are getting louder. It feels a little like they have forgotten how to be happy.
His mouth, Dorothy laughs, is too wide, his eyes too fearsome, his black hair too wild and badly-cut. Sara thought it made him look exciting, a tragically long time ago. Now he pretends he doesn’t love the opium that comes from countries he’ll never go to, and cleaves to William, who has the courage of his convictions and two more years to his repertoire.
Ragged dark hair fallen against the grass, and he smiles with the lips that repel dear Dorothy so very much. Somewhere, birds share their morning news and his fingers press, soft, against the dirt. Compared with this much majesty and power, the human race looks a little like a bad joke told by a man rather the worse for liquor.
As someone who spends more time than is perhaps socially decent rather the worse for liquor, Samuel believes that he is in a position to know.
Though Sara scowls at him and won’t call him Sam any longer. His dreams of a perfect new world have become dust as all things must, and yet they clench their fingers into the misguided marriage vows nonetheless. Sheer determination and a refusal to admit their mutual failure.
Walk far enough and you can find places away from prying eyes, a space where society cannot touch and there’s distance enough from misplaced wives and sons who grow up trapped to a flawed regime and poets who say things that they do not really mean while drinking too much and laughing too hard. William says that he knew him at once; Samuel believes that their relationship happened too fast to be classed as mere accident. He likes to think that anyway, because if you push the thought enough it stings.
Talk to me, Sara insists, and then won’t listen to him. He really is sorry.
Out here, he is more than himself and it’s a relief because Samuel is not entirely sure he likes being himself at this moment in time.
The shadow that falls over him makes him want to cry out in shock, but he reminds himself not to; no sense in frightening everything in the vicinity because he has not walked far enough to escape. Samuel can feel a thick, ugly blush creeping up from his collar bones; whilst in his heart he knows that coming here to get close to nature and appreciate it is for his art and peace of mind, the teachings pushed into his young head at school still make embarrassment paint his face and neck. Samuel blushes beautifully, if one can be induced.
The laughter, alive and wild, makes him slit his eyes open. Silhouetted too brilliantly and green-tinged after only the inside of his eyelids for so long, it takes a while for Samuel to focus on the sight. Until that point his vision is made up of smears of colour and bright and it’s almost beautiful in a disconcerting way.
William is too amused. The minute it becomes apparent that he is the one laughing, his rich Cumberland accent thickening the sound in a way that haunts Samuel beyond what is probably healthy, the flush deepens. Samuel scowls.
“You followed me?”
“I didn’t,” William assures him, face a mask of attempted innocence. He can feel what he wants to feel at any given moment; Samuel is less defined by choice.
He sucks his lower lip into his mouth, a nervous habit he developed as a boy. William stops laughing and a warm mouthful of words asks Samuel exactly what he thinks he’s trying to do. No longer ridicule; merely curiosity and an eagerness that Samuel feels cannot end well.
“It is a beautiful day,” he manages, “I wanted to become part of it.”
When William gets his amused expression back, Samuel closes his eyes again and turns his face back to the light. The rest of him remains naked and swathed in William’s tall, cool shadow, and he attempts to regain the melancholy peace he’d done so well in acquiring. But there’s rustling of clothes and the shadow keeps wavering and he imagines destruction instead.
The birds have quietened. Samuel is far from an idiot and he can read this for the ill-omen it must be. He bites the tip of his tongue and prays for Xanadu. But all that happens is that William’s shadow shifts and moves away, and then the other man exhales, long and slow. There’s the rustling sounds of material shifting, boots thudding against the grass. Samuel dares to turn his head and open his eyes and finds William smiling at him. His enthusiasm is rich and he’ll do anything you can suggest to him at least once. Samuel has a few suggestions of his own but lacks the courage and anyhow he has seen how friendships fall and crumble into simple halves from the slant of a wrong word.
Maybe this will become a poem:
And bare together on the grass we lay
Eyes shut closed against the bright summer’s day.
Yet another verse for Samuel never to finish, though William says he’ll forgive him for the stunted mess that The Three Graves became eventually. The Lyrical Ballads encompassed too many dreams and it was inevitable that some would wither.
William gives him the shadow of a wink, then turns his face towards the sun. Samuel closes bruised-feeling eyelids, attempting to recapture the feelings he felt so easily before. William changes things irrevocably and Samuel hates and loves him for it in equal measure.
He curls his fingers against the ground, dirt slides under his nails and he wonders if blades of grass scream, or if he’s just attributing tired human emotions to them. This was about him and the day and now it’s merely about the sound of William breathing and the burn against the line of his jaw and it’s all ruined.
“Why did you come here?” Samuel asks, careful to keep the bite of accusation behind in his mouth.
William doesn’t reply and when Samuel can no longer suppress the urge to turn and look, he finds his friend lost in thought, chin tilted towards the sun. He looks so peaceful lying there and quietly happy. Samuel wonders with a shred of ugly jealousy if perhaps his life would have been that easy if he had made William’s choices, and if he wouldn’t be left with an inadvisable wife and a son who scares him more than he ever wants to admit. Poor Sara; Samuel pities her almost more than he pities himself.
When Samuel sits up his skin feels warm and damaged and not entirely like it belongs to him. His unruly dark hair falls around his cheeks, locks obscuring his already blurred vision. The grass has left its mark; raised ridges to red and white press his skin into strange shapes and smudges of dirt further mar his appearance. Unarguably undignified, but he’s almost proud of it. In London there was no sky; just the hope of it beyond the chimneys.
Starkly lit in brilliant sunlight, William seems almost outside humanity. His limbs glow from the light’s attention, and he looks healthy and ethereal, unlike Samuel, who will insist upon looking consumptive. He is tired and largely mistaken in most things, and made up almost entirely of unfinished poems and sour insecurities and laudanum in closed rooms and other people’s disappointment. Samuel always costs others their faith in him and the guilt and resentment is almost too strong to handle.
Sometimes, he finds himself wondering how much the I love you is just a clean-cut I wish I were you and in any case his words mean too little. Poetry is his reason for living, but somehow all his sincerity is drained into it leaving him with none for his own life.
Maybe he’s blaming the poetry to hide his emotional deficiencies because he wants until he has and then he loses all interest. Like a selfish child, but there was no space for selfishness in all that education and the smooth curve of William’s mouth is half an invitation that no one will word.
There are too many words that they keep silent between them - I hated The Rime of The Ancyent Marinere and when you laugh at me like that I need to kiss you and I think our collaboration may have been a mistake. It turns out that even when you find the missing half of your imagination in someone else’s skull candid conversation is simply too much to ask for.
Samuel has no chance of retaining his inner calm now. He doesn’t even try; and it’s against all his assertions and all that he believes to sit here and reflect on the tattered mess of his life but nonetheless he doesn’t know how to let it go. This is another of those situations that he should not have got himself into, like asking for Sara’s hand in marriage on a day when nothing more interesting seemed to be happening, or saying yes, we should collaborate when he should have pointed out that their poetry is too at odds and he’s too unreliable to be anyone’s partner. He sighs, and turns to pick up his shirt, splayed carelessly across the grass in a streak of white. Leave before he makes new regrets; it’s the only way.
William’s eyes open and there’s the question etched over the line of his sun-flushed face. He says nothing aloud, and the peaceful quiet isn’t so much sublime and awe-inspiring as awkward.
“Stay,” William murmurs, fingers closing around Samuel’s wrist, the tips rough and nails dark with spilt ink. And he should go but temptation was never his to resist and he allows himself to be pulled, back to the warm, sun-parched grasses. Sprawled on his side, his arm is trapped beneath him, but the more interesting part is that William has not yet let go of his wrist. The touch is too warm and too tight and Samuel decides that it isn’t fair.
But if William won’t allow him to escape the temptation of this no-longer-funny game then Samuel will plead insanity and is no longer responsible for his actions. Propping himself up on one elbow, he leans over William and tells himself he can end this any time he likes. William opens his eyes as Samuel’s shadow tumbles over his face and he still says nothing. Hair spread across the grass and Samuel can’t seem to stop himself leaning, so close that his hair slides down William’s cheek.
Tell me to stop, he thinks, because this cannot end happily or safely, and William soundlessly opens his sun-chapped lips. Maybe he’s pushing or perhaps Samuel is reading too much into the action because he is desperate for this to have meaning in the way that so much of his life no longer has. It has been so long since Sara could crack apart this kind of heated spark in his stomach. William’s mouth is still open and Samuel cannot prevent himself from almost toppling down that last inch of distance, finally, oh God, finally pushing their lips together in a slide of feeling that leaves him light-headed. Yet another mistake in a life awash with them but the heat of William’s bare skin this close is as elusively maddening as opium - he promised Sara he’d never touch it again but this an entirely new betrayal and probably worse - and he silently begs for a reaction from his stone-still friend.
When William’s hand moves to curl in the back of Samuel’s ragged dark hair he thinks he could fall apart from sheer sensation and his elbow gives, making him half-tumble down, shoulder thumping William’s chest and the angle is impossible and he will never, never be able to write poetry about this. William tilts his chin upwards and the sun shoves down on Samuel’s shoulders and he is too aware of his lines of exposed skin. No matter that William is every bit as passionate as Samuel always wanted him to be, because this is a decision that could break their lives.
Samuel pulls away and looks down at William, leant over him with his forearm above William’s head and still close enough for his dark curls to kiss William’s cheeks and jaw. The silence remains, a light breeze in the trees and somewhere a bird warbles like hope.
“Please,” Samuel whispers, voice hoarse and William’s mouth is altogether too red, “Say something.”
William is quiet for a worryingly long time and Samuel wonders if he will have to leave the Lake District in disgrace to play at marriage with his miserable wife and never to think of William without an awkward flush.
“You have grass in your hair,” William offers at last.
Relief and frustration and blissful confusion rise in Samuel and before he knows it he’s laughing with his cheek pressed to William’s sun-soft shoulder.