“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.

But the trees offered little protection. As Kingsley raced down untrodden paths, the green-leafed branches whipped at him, stinging his skin, his face. But he couldn’t stop. Behind him he heard footsteps. Kingsley could only force his legs to carry on faster, despite the pain of the branches beating him, despite the fear that nearly felled him.