Author: Tiffany Reisz

By the last week of July, Kingsley had nearly gone mad with longing for Søren, but he knew of no way to hasten the days or contact Søren. He feared sending him a letter. The priests sorted the mail and delivered it. Kingsley had refused to explain his injuries. No one ever spoke to Søren unless necessary. That Kingsley would be the lone student to send him a letter over the summer…no, too great a risk.

He couldn’t call, couldn’t write…so he waited and he prayed. And the days passed and the nights passed and his body healed completely. So completely that he finally felt comfortable taking all his clothes off again. In late July he and Jackie, the quarterback’s bookish but beautiful redheaded sister, holed up in her bedroom one Wednesday night when her parents were out celebrating their anniversary. That night had been unremarkable, really. Unremarkable but for one thing, one act that had come as an answer to his unspoken prayers.

Jackie kissed her way from his hip to his neck.

“Can we do something different?” she’d whispered as she nibbled on his earlobe.

“Anything, ma chérie. Anything you desire…” He exaggerated his French accent with his American girls. Most boys he knew plied their girlfriends with beer to get them to open their shapely thighs. Kingsley needed only a few words of French.

“I want to do something you’ve never done with anyone else.”

Kingsley smiled at the ceiling.

Rolling over, he pinned Jackie onto her back and pressed her legs open with his knees. He let the tip of his erection lightly caress her swollen clitoris. She gasped and laughed in the back of her throat.

Reaching out her hand, she pointed down to the floor. Kingsley raised his eyebrow in a question.

“Under the bed,” she said.

He ducked his head and raised the bedskirt. From beneath her bed he pulled out a plastic tube of some kind of fluid.

“C’est quoi?”

“My father’s a gynecologist. It’s called K-Y. I heard him telling Mom what some people do with it.”

“You know I go to a Catholic school now.” Kingsley raised his eyebrow again. “Sodomy is frowned upon.”

“So…?” Jackie waited.

Without another word Kingsley flipped the girl onto her stomach, pulled her to her knees, doused her with the cool liquid and pushed inside her. He groaned deeply, loudly, from the pressure around him, the tightness. Jackie squirmed underneath him and grasped his hand.

“You’ve done this before…” Kingsley said, noting how readily she took him inside her.

Jackie giggled. “Well…never with anyone else.”

Kingsley bit the back of her shoulder to stifle a laugh. Jackie wanted to be a librarian. Of course, a librarian. It was always the quiet ones...

After they finished, Kingsley asked to keep the lubricant as a souvenir. She promised him a dozen tubes of the stuff if he would come over that weekend and do it again. The promise was readily made and easily kept.

So everything had fallen into place. He’d burned for Søren with a fire no girl or woman had ever inspired in him. And Søren had taken him on the forest floor. It would happen again. It had to happen again. Kingsley would die if it didn’t happen again.

But would it happen again? Two months passed and, with his wounds completely healed, Kingsley began to fear he’d imagined everything. It had happened, he reminded himself often. Of course it had. What else would explain his grandparents’ wary looks, their whispers when he entered the room?

He had one final proof that lingered even after all the bruises had faded. The cross…the small silver cross he’d ripped from Søren’s neck and had clung to, had carried, during the entire night. Never did he part from the cross. He kept it always in his pocket like a talisman, like a burden, like an icon.

Two weeks before school started again, Kingsley sat on the back deck of his grandparents’ house, communing with the stars. They comforted him, the stars did. These stars had been the only witnesses to that night. Did they remember it as well as he did? He started to ask them what they’d seen when he heard voices in the kitchen.

“I don’t care what he says, he’s not fine. He is definitely not fine.” His grandmother spoke the words, and in her voice Kingsley heard the echo of his late mother. How he missed Maman. Kingsley knew his grandmother blamed his late father for the death of her daughter. She’d gone to school in Paris and fallen in love with a dashing older Frenchman. The bastard had the audacity to love her back and even marry eighteen-year-old Karen Smith and make her Madam Boissonneault. Even the two children they’d raised hadn’t convinced her parents that Kingsley’s father was anything more than a seducer of young girls. Like father, like son, Kingsley knew his grandparents thought. If only they knew that while he seduced girls, it was to another young man that his heart belonged.

“What do you want me to do?” his grandfather asked, his voice laced with frustration. Kingsley surmised tonight wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation.

“Father Henry called today to talk about it. He’s thinking Kingsley shouldn’t come back. They’re worried about him, about whatever happened that he won’t talk about.”

Not come back? Kingsley’s communion with the stars shattered at the very thought. Why would he not go back? Father Henry hadn’t said anything about him not returning. Where had that idea come from?

Søren…could it have been Søren’s idea? Did he regret that night? Had Søren told Father Henry he knew something about that night?

Panic consumed Kingsley. What if this was Søren’s doing? Even the priests deferred to Søren.

For days after Kingsley walked through the hours in a haze of self-doubt. He couldn’t go back if Søren didn’t want him there. But he had to see him again. He had to go back.

A week before the school year was to start, he sat at the kitchen table with his grandparents, not eating and not speaking.

“You got a letter today.” His grandmother handed him a white envelope. Kingsley didn’t glance at it. Another letter from Marie-Laure, surely. He’d read it later.

“School starts soon.” His grandfather looked at him over the top of his reading glasses. “Your grandmother and I have decided to leave it up to you. Saint Ignatius or Portland High?”

The choice lay before him. Both options seemed untenable. He couldn’t go back to Portland. Søren wouldn’t be there. He couldn’t go back to Saint Ignatius, not if Søren didn’t want him there.

Kingsley shook his head, crossed his arms and laid his head on the table. His stomach hurt. His head ached. He needed something, anything, a sign.

The letter lay in his lap and he saw the handwriting on it didn’t belong to Marie-Laure or any other woman. A man’s handwriting, strong and vital.

Slowly and with trembling fingers, Kingsley opened the letter and read the only word written on the ivory sheet of paper.

Reviens.

Come back.

The letter had been signed with only a strong swirling S with a diagonal slash through it.

Kingsley looked up at his grandparents.

“I’m going back to Saint Ignatius.”

NORTH

The Present

Kingsley stared at Søren only a moment before shaking his head in the profoundest disgust and walking off deeper into the forest. He heard the footsteps behind him and didn’t turn back. Today Kingsley didn’t run, but he didn’t particularly want to get caught, either.

Thirty years had passed since he’d traversed this dangerous terrain with its closely packed trees that gave way to sudden cliffs. Even after so much time, his legs retained the memory of so many walks down this path. In half an hour he came to a ridge overlooking a steep canyon.

“Mon Dieu…” he breathed. After all this time…surely not. But there it was.

“It’s still in use.” Søren came to stand beside him. “They renovated it. It’s quite nice inside.”

“Our hermitage?” The old love welled in Kingsley’s heart, and he forgave Søren just enough to laugh.

“Our hermitage. It was never actually ours, you know. We only claimed it for ourselves.”

At the bottom of the canyon stood a tiny shack made of stone. A hundred years ago the first Jesuits who’d come to rural Maine had built a chapel first, then their living quarters, and finally a hermitage for Father Charles, who’d taken a vow of silence.

“Quite nice…” Kingsley repeated. “Of course they would wait until after we were done with it to remodel. Always the way. My God, what a hellhole it was.”

Søren laughed softly. “Indeed. But perfect for our purposes.”

“Oui,” Kingsley agreed. “Parfait.”

The hermitage had been their hideout when Kingsley returned to school, when he and Søren had taken up where they’d left off.

Kingsley pulled his eyes away from the small house where he’d given up his body to Søren in a thousand ways so many years ago. A hundred yards or more from the hermitage, a huge moss-covered rock loomed large. For a full minute Kingsley stared at it. Only when he felt a hand on the back of his neck—a gentle hand, a gentle touch, entirely kind and without ulterior motive—did he blink and look away.

“It was there?” Søren dropped his hand. Kingsley missed it the second it was gone.

“Oui. Right there. She landed so hard...” He stopped and swallowed. He had to blink again to wash the image of his sister’s body from his eyes. “Her face…”

“Je sais,” Søren whispered. I know.

Of course he knew. Marie-Laure had been Kingsley’s sister…but when she died, she’d been Søren’s wife.

Marie-Laure…only twenty…a ballerina in Paris.

“We killed her, mon père.”

“I’ve absolved you of any guilt long ago, Kingsley. You must learn to absolve yourself.”

“Her face was gone when they found her.” He turned to Søren. “The world imagines I am handsome, you are handsome, your Eleanor is beautiful…but we are nothing compared to what Marie-Laure was. I, her brother, couldn’t keep my eyes off her at times. All paled next to that face of hers. And when she died, when we killed her…”

She had no face. None. The impact of her fall had crushed her skull and sheered her face off. She’d been identified by her wedding band alone.

“She ran. She fell. You did not push her. Neither did I.” Søren spoke the words in a low voice as he moved closer. How Kingsley wanted to step back and press himself into Søren. Once when they were teenagers, standing in the forest staring at the night sky, Søren had wrapped an arm around Kingsley’s chest. The gesture had been simple, mindless, hardly even affectionate, only possessive. And it had saved Kingsley’s soul. To feel that again with Søren…Kingsley would treble his fortune and give every last penny away.

“She loved you,” Kingsley said. “And she trusted me.”

And she saw them.

Together.

“Come,” Søren said. “We should go back.”

“You go.” Kingsley smiled at him. “I want to stay a moment.”

Søren raised his hand and lightly gripped Kingsley’s long hair before releasing it and walking away.

“Of course.”

Alone now at the top of the hill, Kingsley’s eyes roamed from the rock where his sister had died, back to the hermitage. They should have been inside there, he and Søren. If they’d been in the hermitage, she would never have seen them. All Kingsley ever wanted was for Søren to want him as badly as he had that night in the forest. Søren never lost control like that again with him. Oh, Søren had hurt him, brutalized him, broken him. But he’d kept calm, controlled…he’d tamed his hunger, channeled it, restrained it. Kingsley longed for the fear he’d felt that first night. So he’d goaded Søren, challenged his authority. Finally, Søren had succumbed and dragged Kingsley into the woods. Jealously had brought about Kingsley’s temper tantrum. Søren had married his sister and Marie-Laure suddenly seemed to love him more than her own brother. And as a married man, Søren slept in Marie-Laure’s bed, while Kingsley once more slept alone. He had to have reassurance that Søren still desired him more than anyone. And he’d gotten it once more. Only this time the stars had not been the only witnesses.