Speak Its Name: A Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

every day between the time they’d sat down to coffee, cakes and guilty kisses, and the end of the Easter term. Sometimes they walked, or sat together in hall—it was just friendship on the surface, but all the time the undercurrent of attraction wouldn’t go away.
    On the last but one day of term, Edward stood in Hugo’s rooms, watching the man pack, desperately keeping his hands pinned behind his back so he couldn’t reach out and touch him. “I suppose you’ll be having a big family gathering to welcome you home?”
    “I guess so.” Hugo didn’t look up from his packing. Edward wondered why the man looked so uncomfortable; he hoped it was at the thought of their being apart for weeks on end. “I dare say all the family will turn up in Hampshire at some point, they usually do, although it won’t be as mad as when I was a boy. Not so many Lamonts now—what the war didn’t take, the flu did, but Mama will make sure we keep up the traditional family festivities.”
    Edward always felt jealous of Hugo’s family—not just because they had first claim on him. “I don’t suppose we’ll be particularly festive, we’ve never been great ones for partying.” He swallowed hard. “I’m dreading going home, really.”
    Hugo put down a book he was putting in the box and looked straight at his friend for the first time that morning. “I’m sorry, truly. If I could do anything...” He tailed off. There was no point in even beginning the conversation. “You’ll write?”
    “I will.” Edward felt the tears welling, turned on his heels and returned to his own rooms, where he started drafting what would be the first letter.
    ~
    It arrived in Hampshire only a couple of days into the break, a very stiff and proper letter full of formality, but awash, to Hugo’s eyes, with a million hidden meanings. He pored over it time and again, wondering whether last term was a very interesting and instructive one referred simply to the chemistry lectures Edward had sat through or if I look forward very much to my return to Cranmer meant that he was as desperate as Hugo was for them to meet again.
    Hugo wished he’d had the nerve to ask Edward to come and visit, but he didn’t have the moral courage for it yet. His mother would have been delighted that one of his friends was paying them a call as her son rarely invited any of his acquaintances home. But it wasn’t any inconvenience to his parents which was the important issue; it was the temptation that his hands and lips would be feeling that was crucial. Having Edward Easterby half way across the college, sleeping in his little bed, breathing softly into the night, was a clear and present danger. Having the same man three doors away, down a carpeted and quiet corridor, in a large and warm guest bed, would have been the height of peril.
    His letter of reply was slightly less cautious, although still within the strictest bounds of decency, and the to and froing of letters continued to the brink of their return to college and the chance of saying aloud what they’d only been able to write for the previous month. By the time the last letter appeared at Edward’s breakfast table, Hugo’s style of writing had become like his conversation that day by the river—light and full of laughter, warm and generous, speaking of a love that was burgeoning without ever using the word itself. Whatever Hugo had said over coffee and cakes, the day he had both awakened Edward’s soul and almost broken his heart, the words he used on paper told a very different tale. Perhaps their separation was making the man’s heart grow fonder, as the old saying had it.
    ~
    “Mr. Easterby. Mr. Easterby, sir!” Edward turned around, half expecting to see Marsh again, only to see Hugo, who was grinning to himself at his impersonation of the porter’s fierce voice.
    “Hugo! Did you have a good Easter?” Edward resisted the temptation to embrace his friend, settling for a handshake.
    “We did