Author: Tiffany Reisz

“Wesley…why didn’t you sleep with your girlfriend while you were with her?”

“I didn’t want to.”

“Bullshit.”

“What?”

Nora glared at him. “Bull…shit. You are a straight twenty-year-old guy. And I’m guessing this chick was a babe. Yes?”

Wesley paused before nodding. “She was—is—beautiful.”

Nora winced internally at the simple sincerity in his voice. Yes, she was a babe…wouldn’t have hurt. She was beautiful... That hurt.

“So why not?”

Wesley ran his hands over Track Beauty’s long neck. The mare turned her head and rested her nose against Wesley’s stomach.

“You really have to ask?”

“Guess so, since I’m asking.” Nora came around and stood next to Wesley. His body seemed taut with tension. The need to touch him nearly overwhelmed her, but she feared he’d pull away from her if she tried.

“Bridget was…” He paused and took a ragged breath. “She was something, Nora. Even you would have been all over this girl. Woman. Twenty-seven. Like old Hollywood beautiful. What are those skirts you wear to church sometimes? The tight ones that stop right about your knees?”

“Pencil skirts?”

“Yeah, those. She wore those all the time, with these classy shirts that made her look, I don’t know, kind of glamorous. She turned heads like crazy when we went out. I took her to a fundraiser…everybody there worth millions of dollars and Bridget makes maybe forty thousand a year. But no woman at that party got half the stares she did. I barely got to dance with her. She had guys falling all over her. She’s smart, too. Undergrad degree in equine studies, MBA from Harvard. She’ll be running a farm this big someday. Probably sooner than later. For a guy like me who’s going to inherit thousands of acres of horse farm? She was the perfect woman. Mom and Dad were already planning the wedding.”

Nora swallowed. Every single compliment that came out of his mouth about Bridget hit her harder than Søren with a cane in his hand.

“So what was the problem?” Nora tried to ask the question calmly, without emotion. But her voice was barely louder than a whisper.

“The problem is…” Wesley met Nora’s eyes for the first time that day “…she wasn’t you.”

For a moment Nora tried to come up with a clever response, something to make Wesley laugh, something to break the tension. But words failed her and she stayed silent.

“I couldn’t sleep with her,” Wesley continued, “because she wasn’t you. And I have to wonder if the reason you keep turning me down is because I’m not him.”

Finally, Nora understood. Completely understood. For once in her life she knew exactly what the man in front of her felt, what he needed, what he wanted. And for once in her life, she knew exactly how to give it to him.

“No. You aren’t Søren. If you were, yes, I would have had sex with you last night, like I’ve had sex with him a million times before. But you aren’t Søren, and I could get down on my knees and thank God for that right here and now but for the huge pile of horse shit that’s at my feet. One Søren is enough for this world.”

Now Wesley seemed incapable of speech. She decided to take advantage of the sudden silence.

“I sleep in your bed, Wesley.”

“What?”

“I sleep in your bed at my house in Connecticut. I haven’t slept in my own bed since the day…since the day I went back to Søren. I haven’t once slept in my bedroom. I sleep in your room when I’m at the house. I sleep in your room wearing the Kentucky T-shirt you left behind in the dirty laundry. I tried sleeping in my own bed and I just…I couldn’t sleep.”

“You were a twenty-year-old virgin, too. You said that was when you and Søren—”

“First of all, I was never a virgin. Having an intact hymen does not a virgin make. Go to a Muslim country. Those girls take it up the ass from their boyfriends so they can still have a hymen to break on their wedding nights. Hymen doesn’t equal virgin.”

“Fine. But still—”

“But nothing. And butt everything. Søren started to train me for him the day I turned eighteen. No. Stop. Scratch that. He started training me for him the day we met. He taught me to sit and stand, to perform, to obey, to serve him and his every want and need and desire. He could tell me to meet him at three o’clock outside his office with just a look in his eyes. And I’m not exaggerating, Wes. By the time we spent our first night together, I was ready for him, ready to be broken. And my God, he broke me. I was shattered and every single piece of me loved him for it. But we were together. He collared me. He owned me. I was his.”

“Nora, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that the last time I had sex with a virgin he ended up in four-point restraints and had candle-wax burns. I’m saying that I might break you, too, the way Søren broke me. But you might not love me for it the next morning. And if I shatter you, I don’t know how to put you back together.”

“Nora…you don’t get it, do you?” Wesley cupped her face and smiled at her.

“Get what?”

“That I know being with you is a big risk. And that you’re worth it.”

Nora’s hands clenched as tightly as her heart.

“I know how to tie knots that sailors who’ve spent half their lives at sea have never even heard of. I can pick locks that would stump half the cat burglars in New York. I can slice a Post-It note in half with the tip of a bullwhip. I can get any kinky man in the world to drop to his knees, kiss my feet and confess his darkest sins to me just for the pleasure of having me punish him for them. But, Wesley…I do not know who to be with somebody like you. A sweet, kind, vanilla virgin has me stumped. It’s been fifteen months since the last time we tried, and I still haven’t figured it out.”

Wesley exhaled so heavily his breath ruffled Track Beauty’s mane. The horse twitched her head in mild irritation.

“You know, if you want to know how to be with me…maybe you could just ask me?”

Nora opened her mouth, paused and closed it again. “That honestly never occurred to me.”

Wesley laughed and Nora laughed. And she almost cried from the sheer relief of hearing them both laugh.

“Okay, vanilla.” Nora laid her hand on top of Wesley’s. Track Beauty’s coat bristled underneath their twined fingers. “So tell me how to be with you.”

“Not that hard to explain. You know how we were together back at your house? How we hung out and watched movies and talked and ate dinner together and all that?”

“I remember. I remember it like yesterday.” Her hand slipped from his wrist to his face.

“I need it just like that, except…”

“Except?”

“Except instead of us going to separate bedrooms, we go to bed together. Can you do that?”

Nora ran a hand through his long hair. “I can try.”

Wesley started to lean forward, started to kiss her, before the sound of fingers snapping loudly echoed through the stall and startled them apart.

“Come on, John Wesley. We’re gonna be late.”

Nora saw Wesley’s father glaring at her through the stall door. He gave Wesley a dark look before walking away. “Now, J.W.,” he called out.

“You can come with me,” Wesley said.

“Where are we going?”

“Gotta go see a man about a horse.”

Nora paused on her way out of the stall. “Please tell me you mean that literally.”

NORTH

The Past

Kingsley walked in the garden outside the chapel. Rose bushes alight with red blossoms surrounded him as he wandered the cobblestone path among the flowers. The garden was Father Henry’s pride. To keep flowers alive in such an inhospitable clime took constant work and tending. Every free moment he had, Father Henry could be found in the garden.

“My garden is my Gethsemane,” Father Henry joked, and Kingsley would always smile. He never understood the joke if it was, in fact, one.

Kingsley had come here to get away from the boys in his dorm room. The coming of summer heralded the end of the school year. The boisterousness had been too much even for Kingsley. The other students couldn’t wait until their parents would collect them from exile and return them to the world of girls and movies and sleeping as late as they wanted. All these things would be Kingsley’s as well in two days, when his grandparents came for him. But unlike the other boys at the school, he couldn’t rejoice in this.

Stearns had ruined him. Ruined everything. A summer back in civilization held no appeal. Three months he’d be without Stearns, without even a glimpse of him. Kingsley already anticipated the agony of that time apart. Every ray of yellow sunlight would remind him of Stearns’s hair. Every solid gray evening sky would call to mind Stearns’s eyes. Every time Kingsley touched himself, he would imagine Stearns’s hands on his body instead of his own. Not that Stearns had ever touched him like that, only in Kingsley’s dreams. But since that day in the dorm when Stearns had held him down, things had been different between them.

They’d stopped speaking as much. But for some reason, Kingsley felt even closer to him. Whenever he found

Stearns sitting alone reading or writing, he would take his own homework and sit on the floor next to Stearns’s chair. Why the floor and not the sofa, the table, another chair, Kingsley didn’t know. But whenever he thought of the pad of Stearns’s thumb caressing the pulse point on his wrist, Kingsley wanted to sink to his knees, sit at Stearns’s feet and stay there forever.

His anguish at the prospect of so much time apart from Stearns had sent Kingsley into Father Henry’s garden. He wanted to try something he’d never tried before. Perhaps it was Stearns’s influence... Kingsley has seen him in the chapel just yesterday, rosary beads in hand, as he prayed in silence for a solid hour. Kingsley knew it had been a full hour, for he’d sat three pews behind him and watched him the entire time. At one hour exactly, Stearns had risen from his seat and turned around.

“What are you praying for, mon ami?” Kingsley had asked.

“What I’ve been praying for every day since I met you,” Stearns said, twisting the beads around his hand.

“And what is that?”

Stearns opened his hand to display the rosary beads he’d weaved between his fingers like a spiderweb.

“Strength.”

He closed his hand again and rested it against his chest, over his heart. Stearns had left the chapel, but Kingsley had remained.

Strength. That one word had told Kingsley everything. He needed no other hints, no other words. He knew the truth now. But instead of setting him free, the truth pulled Kingsley even deeper into the enigma that was Stearns.

Strength.

It meant one thing and one thing only.

Stearns wanted him.

Kingsley’s fingers balled up into a fist. Stearns had prayed for strength. So should he.

Plucking the largest, most pristine of the red roses from a bush, Kingsley held it in his hand and stared into the blossom’s core.

“Assistez-moi.” Help me, Kingsley prayed, falling into French. He couldn’t imagine God speaking any language other than his native tongue. “Assistez-moi, s’il vous plaît, mon Dieu.”

Kingsley opened his eyes. Standing at the edge of the garden, in the shade of a tree, was Stearns, watching him pray.

In his nervousness, the rose fell from his hand.

Stearns took a step forward.

Kingsley took a step back.

Stearns stopped.

Kingsley ran.

The school sat as an oasis in a desert of trees. Nothing but dense forest surrounded the place—forest, hills, cliffs, valleys. Kingsley usually saw it as something fearsome, threatening, a labyrinth. Now he fled into it for safety.