Before the previous night, Philip would have spent the proceeding days cursing the entire procession to his friends, blasting the simpletons he was forced to commune with. Now he had the idea that he wouldn't - wouldn't mention it at all, in fact.
A certain amount of braggadocio insofar as conquests goes was encouraged, if not necessitated, but he felt as though the whole situation was rather a castle in air and he had absolutely no intention of spoiling it with attempts to tie it to anything so feeble as reality. He didn't want anyone to form false images of the footman - of Thomas - because he seemed to be rather intimate a thing, like a culmination of Philip's history in the guise of flesh and blood. He had the look of Oxford fairies, the voice of trade, the presence of a lord, and it was all too enrapturing.
At luncheon, Philip made a point of turning his mind's eye to Thomas instead of letting his gaze linger. In a self-conscious flight of fancy, he tried the crown of incubus upon the slick black hair, testing its weight against the previous coronet of saint. A thrill at the idea of having a demon so entirely his own sent shocks to his fingertips and a flush to his cheeks. He quickly drew himself away from that line and bathed himself in the ice of conversation.
On the brief journey to his residence, he began to lament the prescription of his days and heed of etiquette. In a kinder world, he'd snatch the footman from his employ and drown the both of them in the indolence of summer from within his flat. In the world as it was, he would keep up appearances and the hunt for a tolerable heiress, taking Thomas to bed whenever the man didn't work.
So he hoped.
Thomas had seemed somewhat put off at the start by that line of inquiry, but perhaps it was only down to the oddness of the request. Indeed, even to Philip it was odd. If he were looking for someone to accompany him to bed, it was never to his bed. Indeed, beds were typically superfluous. Yet the idea of Thomas in a club (or, god forbid, a toilet) was incongruous in a way devoid of charm. He didn't just want the idea of the man to be unsullied, he wanted the fact of him to belong to himself alone. He wanted the image he had conjured of Thomas to be brought to life as his personal Galatea, unsullied by the invariable corrosion of others.
He'd seen ideals corroded and an abortive attempt at an adult affair burst before his eyes, but that had been a situation entirely bred of a flight of what he now termed 'youthful folly' and what he still thought of as 'gross idiocy'.
Some years prior, he had hired the most jarringly beautiful man he'd ever seen as his valet, firing the retainer of his father apropos of nothing. Within a day he was reduced to wondering how the man managed to dress himself. Within the week his mother had swooped in from the country and relieved the valet of his position before Philip had woken up. She cut off his arguments with the simple: "Boys like that are how men like you go to prison."
That was the only thing she had, or would, ever say clearly on the subject, and it had shocked him into silence. He'd been so visibly startled by the entire situation that she hadn't even stayed to keep an eye on him, leaving after she'd hired him a new man. Her physical absence did nothing to detract from her heavy presence on his thoughts, however, and he barely looked at another man for months.
Since, hackles of self-preservation had been raised. He was no more likely to indite Uranism of itself than he had been, but he was also unwilling to fall martyr to it. That said, his inclinations towards avoiding such a fate were not to blind him to opportunities that presented themselves.
Thomas had presented himself as a dream, that was the thing. He'd been the only spot in the evening where the haze was cleared, as everyone else seemed to blend into one another by virtue of having confused having a title with having a personality. He certainly seemed to have a personality and also seemed to have thoughts wherein the fact of his beauty wasn't central, which bade well for his intelligence.
Philip contemplated the man's merits as he fiddled a pen between his fingers, staring at a piece of paper before him at his desk. He felt like a schoolboy trying to write a love poem. It hardly mattered what was said - he needn't (indeed, shouldn't) be romantical, yet the idea welled in him that if he were the sort for poetry his thoughts at the present were what would spur him to it.
He sat the pen down and wondered at the sense of attempting to carry this thing on to something beyond their enjoyably shared hour. He rose from the desk and paced about, straightening frames as he went as though he had an audience.
His friends spanned the spectrum of those who spent far too much time dockside and others who spent far too much time writing letters to "W.H.", yet he found himself stranded between the two. He liked fucking attractive men without ever learning their names, he was hardly likely to deny that, but he did want to find someone to love in the manner he had spent so much of his youth reading about. That lack of genuine love often left him under the impression that he had spent the majority of his life preparing for an examination which he still hadn't been given.
Though it hadn't come to fruition, he did feel the idea of Thomas provoking a desire to love. Instead of words, he had yet only pressed needful impressions upon Thomas's skin and the muse who sat at his desk with a cocked brow hadn't found herself even fully called upon as yet. The reticence that crept over him when he had tried to write was overwhelmed by Euterpe's hand slipping into his own like a glove, enacting a wicked play of touching the footman until he moaned like an exquisite instrument under Philip's fingers.
Having been shoved on a wave of desire back to his desk, he wrote several feverish pages, the sort of which he most certainly was not going to send to someone he didn't know. Still, with fantasies put to paper he felt a little clearer of mind. He folded that particular missive and put it into his pocket.
What he settled on was the barest of bones entreaties as to when Thomas had time off. Reading it back, he was embarrassed at having spent so much time fretting over the absolute simplest of requests. It mightn't be responded to, but that was a fairly unlikely prospect; the allure of having a duke was not one to be glossed over.
He sealed his entreaty in an envelope before he had the chance to read it again.
That aside, he meandered his way through his remaining correspondence, accepting invitations he'd rather decline and declining to comment upon situations he'd rather discuss. Most of them needn't go out until the following day, so they sat with their half-written responses atop them while he poked at his bookshelves.
All of his options seemed either banal or appropriate to the point of using it as a prop to a scene on the stage. He wondered at the prospect of lending Thomas something shocking, imbuing him with ideas to be enacted. At this, he wondered at the ideas which Thomas had enacted and lost his reason for standing, letting himself sink to the couch. He eyed his desk from where he sat and tried to forge an outline of his coming days, hoping that they would provide distraction enough that he wouldn't keep falling into the well of his latest fantasy.
He rarely found himself out of activities to spend (or, more honestly, waste) his time upon. He liked to imagine that he could, if he so desired, avoid them - indeed, he probably could but at too dear a cost to spend. What propelled him into the shoes of his father were his mother's hinted threats. She had no tangible hold over him, but she was fond of dropping into conversation, particularly any conversation which touched upon Philip's 'peculiarities', how much she did miss the Season and perhaps this would be her year to rejoin?
She was not fond of the city, preferring to spend her time dragging the visage of Miss Havisham into modernity by way of Crowborough, but he was under no illusion that she wouldn't stay in London to spite him. A dull party the length of an evening was infinitely preferable to a dull existence the length of a summer, wherein his mother could press any number "suitable" friends and would-be brides upon him, all uniquely remarkable for their comparability to paste.
He didn't know where she found these people and, frankly, counted it among his chiefest attributes that he had so far managed to avoid wherever it was that they congregated.
Though each invitation he was strong-armed into accepting did pose a risk.
Fortunately, as he was still parked upon the couch hoping the coming days wouldn't be the ones during which he stumbled upon this den of dullards, his man came in bearing a post-card. The front was a strange drawing of some fat little cherub with a devious look about him, the back was simply:
Anything(one?) interesting? Regale me. If not, come anyway.
So at least that was one evening pleasantly filled.