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.