He entered a clearing. The sky above had turned red with the setting sun. Darkness was coming and he would be lost here in the woods. Alone…or worse. Not alone.

He jumped and spun around as the sound of a twig cracking alerted him to the presence of another. Kingsley didn’t hesitate. He took off again, racing deeper into the forest. The canopy of trees closed in on him. Dropping to his hands and knees, Kingsley crawled through a small opening, crying out when the thorns of a bush cut into his forehead. His vision turned red with blood. But he pushed on, pushed through, stood up and started running again. Or tried. But a hand came out of nowhere, grasped him by his shirt and pushed him into a tree. The bark bit into his back. In the shadows, Kingsley could barely see. He groped in the darkness, felt fabric under his hands and tore. His fingers touched something cool. He pulled and it came off in his hand. The grip on him loosened a moment, long enough for Kingsley to get his footing and flee again.

Sweat and blood poured down his face. Kingsley wiped at his eyes. As his vision cleared he discovered he held a small silver cross on a thin chain. Kingsley carried it high up the side of the mountain, the footsteps still following behind him.

In another clearing, he stopped and dropped to his knees. He could run no farther.

As he gasped for air, he heard the sound of shoes sliding over a blanket of leaves. Kingsley’s fingers tightened around the cross. No matter what happened to him, he wouldn’t let it go.

Neither of them spoke. Kingsley put up one last fight as Stearns stripped him naked and forced him onto his stomach. But he didn’t have the strength for anything but surrender. He groaned from the pain every small movement caused him. This wasn’t how he wanted it…not here on the forest floor, broken and bloodied and terrified. But he would take this pain, this humiliation. For the communion he’d prayed for, he would take it all.

Stearns caressed Kingsley from his neck to his hip. Yes, Kingsley decided, this was exactly how he wanted it.

One arm stretched out to the east. The other to the west. He kept his fingers clenched around the cross. When Stearns pushed inside him, Kingsley cried out. Stearns covered his mouth with his hand. Kingsley bit down and nodded, thankful for the fingers against his teeth.

The pain of the penetration was beyond anything he’d ever felt in his life. The knife wound to his chest had been nothing. Nothing had hurt like this, nothing outside or in, nothing in his body or soul.

In the midst of his agony he felt Stearns’s mouth on the back of his shoulder. Kingsley melted into the ground. Whether or not he survived tonight ceased to be a concern. The touch of Stearns’s lips on his skin was all he’d ever needed. Complete now, he could die happy, if that was his destiny.

Time passed, but Kingsley couldn’t count it. After a minute, an hour, the blood began to ease Stearns’s movements into him. The pain turned not to pleasure, but something more than pleasure. A kind of ecstasy that threatened to raze him, cut him down and leave nothing left of him. But it didn’t matter.

Stearns was inside him.

As the red evening turned into the black night, Kingsley rejoiced in this truth. He heard Stearns’s ragged breathing…or was it his own? He didn’t know, didn’t care. He inhaled deeply and smelled pine in the air. A beautiful scent. He inhaled again for another lungful.

On the merciless ground, Kingsley came with a shudder that racked his entire body.

Stearns was inside him.

His prayers had been answered. Perhaps. Or perhaps his prayers were being punished. Heaven and hell became meaningless words to Kingsley. Heaven was now, this moment underneath Stearns. Hell had been every moment before and would be every moment after.

Stearns was inside him.

He repeated those words in his mind until they became the only ones he knew in any language.

It ended, finally, after an hour perhaps. Maybe two. Or perhaps only minutes. He felt a weight lift off of him, felt his body empty.

Slowly, Kingsley pulled his arms to his sides and rolled onto his back. Above him the sky screamed with stars. Beneath him the fallen leaves stroked his skin like a blanket of living silk.

He heard the rustle of fabric, of clothing righting itself. But he would lie here under the heavens forever, naked and bleeding and unashamed. He’d died underneath Stearns. Died and been born again.

Something touched his face. A hand? No, a pair of perfect lips. The lips moved from his forehead to his cheek and settled onto his mouth. The kiss lasted an eternity and ended all too soon.

“My name is Søren.”

Kingsley nodded and prepared words of his own. “Je t’aime,” he replied in the language God spoke.

I love you.

NORTH

The Present

Nothing had changed. Kingsley couldn’t quite believe that after thirty years, absolutely nothing had changed. The road to Saint Ignatius still wound through the most desolate, dangerous countryside he’d ever encountered outside of Europe. The trees still swaddled the school like an evergreen blanket. And every last building looked like a church.

“How long has it been, mon ami?” Kingsley asked Søren as they exited the back of the car Kingsley had hired to drive them to their alma mater.

“Five years, perhaps.” Søren stood in the middle of the quad and looked around. “I came when they buried Father Henry.”

“In his garden?”

Søren smiled. “Where else?”

“Five years…a long time.”

Nodding, Søren slowly turned around and gazed up into the forest that surrounded them. “I try not to come too often. It’s…uncomfortable to be here now, considering.”