The Scent of Winter: A Novella Read online

  He knew that cross.

  He knew that chain.

  One dark night long, long ago, he’d torn it from the neck of the boy he’d loved more than life itself. And that hadn’t been a cliché that night. He’d loved that boy so much he would have traded his very life for one night with him. That night he nearly had.

  Kingsley wrapped his fist around the cross and the chain and pressed it to his heart. He knew where he was being taken. He knew because he’d flipped the card over to read the caption on the back. The forest seemed familiar because he’d been in one just like it before.

  “Get comfortable, Mr. Edge,” was all the driver said. “It’s going to be a long drive.”

  They merged onto I-95 going north.

  North to Maine.

  “Driver?” Kingsley said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “If they give you a ticket for speeding, I’ll pay it.”

  The driver glanced back at him in the review mirror and smiled. Message received. “Yes, sir,” he said, putting his foot on the gas.

  They drove in silence a few minutes and Kingsley was about to roll the partition up between them so he could make a phone call in privacy when the driver asked him a question.

  “So what’s in Maine anyway?”

  Kingsley could have said “My Christmas gift” if he wanted to be twee. He could have said “Visiting a friend” if he wanted to lie. He could have said “rough trade” if he wanted to be obnoxious—and accurate.

  But he would tell the truth, though it was a bittersweet truth. Then again, the true meaning of Christmas was bittersweet. A child born to save us? Yes, but also a child born to die.

  Kingsley answered the driver.

  “Unfinished business.”

  2

  Capture the King

  As soon as the car cleared the city, Kingsley took his phone from his coat pocket and called Juliette.

  “Bonjour, mon roi,” she said.

  “You’re in on this, aren’t you, you wicked girl?” He spoke in French to her so the driver wouldn’t understand their conversation if he felt like eavesdropping.

  “I had no part in the planning,” she said. “But I did give a certain tall blond someone my permission to have you...relocated.”

  “Relocated? I’ve been kidnapped.” Albeit very politely kidnapped. Someone had even left him a picnic basket full of fresh fruit, nuts, cheese, and white wine in the backseat.

  “You’re so happy you’re about to explode, aren’t you?” Juliette giggled like a school girl. “I can tell.”

  “I am very happy, yes.” Très heureux, oui.

  “You need this. You haven’t been yourself for too long. I know when it’s time for you to go away and be someone else for a few days. And it’s past time. You’ll come home in a much better mood,” she said, her voice still flush with barely suppressed laughter.

  “This isn’t good for my ego, you sitting there laughing at me while I’m being abducted. You could at least pretend you’ll miss me.”

  “You’ll only be gone three days and two nights. And we’ll be too busy to miss you. I’m taking Céleste to visit her grandmother for a few days—with your permission, of course. We’ll be home in time for réveillon.”

  “You’ll be safe?” he asked.

  “Nora is coming with us, if that makes you feel better.”

  “Much better,” he said. Nora could watch Céleste while Juliette tended to her mother. “Yes, you have my permission. Give la Maîtresse my thanks. She takes good care of both my children.”

  “In very different ways,” Juliette said.

  “Don’t remind me,” he said.

  “I love you, mon roi. And I will miss you. So will your daughter.”

  “Tell her I love her and give her a thousand kisses for me.”

  “Always.”

  “And a thousand and one kisses for her beautiful, naughty mother.”

  “Parfait,” Juliette said. “I’ll tell her and kiss her. But you tell your priest something for me.”

  “What is that?” Kingsley asked.

  “Tell him to send you back in one piece, s’il vous plait.”

  Kingsley laughed. “You know the priest. No promises.”

  “Two pieces then,” Juliette said. “One for him and one for me.”

  They said their goodbyes, and Kingsley hung up.

  He’d stayed up most of last night reading through the clubs’ account books. He should sleep if he could, as he had a long night ahead of him. The car was spacious and the interior comfortable, the temperature warm and the ride smooth. The driver rolled down the partition an inch.

  “Would you like me to put on some Christmas music, Mr. Edge?”

  “If you like,” Kingsley said. “But nothing modern. If I hear even one bar of ‘Wonderful Christmastime,’ I’ll be forced to violently commandeer the vehicle.”

  “Christmas classics it is, Mr. Edge.”

  He rolled the partition up, and Kingsley leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.

  The quiet strains of violins and cellos filtered through the speakers.

  In the bleak midwinter...

  It sounded like a recording from the Vienna Boys’ Choir.

  It sounded like a memory.

  St. Ignatius.

  It must have been a Saturday or a Sunday, as he didn’t recall having classes that day. What he remembered was the loneliness. The worst kind of loneliness. The loneliness of being in love with someone he couldn’t have.

  Kingsley had been so happy to see his sister Marie-Laure when she’d come to the school for a surprise visit. Oh, and how happy had all the other boys been at the sight of her French beauty. But his pleasure in her presence faded shortly after her arrival. She’d quickly become as obsessed with Søren as he was, and Kingsley’s only comfort was that although Søren had treated her with unfailing politeness, it was clear he did so only for Kingsley’s sake, not hers. Yet she monopolized their time and it became nearly impossible to be alone with him. He and Søren had snuck off campus the week before together in a Rolls Royce and spent the best afternoon of his life in the back of it.

  But that was the last time Søren had touched him. Almost a week had passed. He would have gone a week without eating before he’d willingly go a week without Søren. When Kingsley saw Søren and Marie-Laure sitting alone at a table in the dining room, he turned his back on them and walked to his dorm room where he put on his coat, his winter boots and scarf, and set out to walk into the snowy woods in the hopes of letting the bitter cold soothe his burning blood.

  The only thing even remotely like submitting to Søren was a walk in a snow-filled freezing dark wood. There was the cold of his heart, the terror of the darkness, the exertion of trudging in a foot of snow, and the beauty like no other. If he could not have Søren, this was the next best thing.

  As he walked, he thought angry terrible things. Marie-Laure didn’t even like Søren. She was playing a game with him. She wanted to win his heart like she’d won every other boy’s heart in the school. Søren was aloof, showed no sexual interest in her. That’s why she was so obsessed with him. And how dare she not love him like he deserved to be loved? She only wanted to conquer and discard him. He almost told Søren to confess to her that he was madly in love with her. Knowing her, she’d pat his cheek and tell him how flattered she was, but she simply didn’t feel the same.

  As Kingsley trudged deeper into the forest, he realized he had no idea where he was. Above him the tree cover was so thick he could barely see the moon. He tried to orient himself, to find his footprints in the snow in the dark. Six years from that night he’d be alone in the Carpathian Mountains with a sniper rifle strapped to his back, stalking through a forest ten times as thick and dark and dangerous, hunting down a rogue KGB agent. But that night he was still a boy and the boy was lost and scared in the cold dark woods.

  And it had started to snow again.

  “Merde,” he breathed as the snow filled up his footprints. Shit. He hadn’t told anyone he was going for a walk. No one would notice he was missing until lights out. And even then, the boys in his dorm room were used to him sneaking out after dark because of his “insomnia.”

  Kingsley’s pretend insomnia might get him killed tonight. His coat was warm, but not warm enough to keep him alive all night if the temperature dropped a few more degrees. Though they were likely all hibernating, Kingsley knew there were bears in the woods. And sometimes criminals would use this forest to cross into Canada. His mind was running away from him with fear. Hypothermia. Criminals. Bears.

  Then he heard a twig crack.

  He spun around, his heart taking off in his chest like a spooked bird.

  “You could have told me this was your plan,” Søren said, stepping into the clearing.

  Even if he hadn’t spoken, Kingsley would have known it was him at first glance. Despite the darkness, what little moonlight filtered through the trees reflected off Søren’s blond hair giving him the illusion of a halo.

  “Plan?” Kingsley asked.

  “I assumed you came out here so I would have to come and find you and bring you back? An excuse to be alone together?”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” Kingsley said, trying not to betray his relief in his face. “You didn’t need me to tell you the plan.”

  “I suppose not.” Søren gazed up at the sky through the trees. A light dusting of snow fell gently onto his hair and his face. “I assume this was planned, wasn’t it? Not even you are foolish enough to walk off into the woods at night without marking a trail back to the school?”

  “I marked a trail,” Kingsley said. “It’s...over there.”

  “Over where?” Søren asked, his tone mocking, dismissive.

  “Over...you know, the same trail you marked.”

  “You’ll have to show me where you marked the trail on our way back, as I didn’t notice any markings at all other than your footprints when I came out here. They’re gone, by the way. Your footprints. You’ll be lucky to find mine.”

  “I’m going back. Stay out here all night if you want.” Kingsley brushed past him. “See if I care.”

  He made it two steps before he felt a hand viciously hard on the back of his neck.

  “Not that way.”

  “That’s where you came from,” Kingsley said, meeting Søren’s steel eyes, a perfect complement to his iron grip on Kingsley’s neck.

  “No. I came from there.” Søren nodded to a space between two other trees. “If you’d gone that way for ten more steps in the dark, you would have fallen to your death off the cliff.”

  “Maybe I want to fall to my death.”

  “You’re not allowed.”

  “I’m not allowed?”

  “No,” Søren said. “You are not allowed. You are not allowed to get lost unless I want to lose you. You aren’t allowed to be found, unless it’s me doing the finding. And the only way you’re allowed to die is if I choose to kill you with my own hands. Your life doesn’t belong to you anymore, and if I have to murder you tonight and paint the snow with your blood to make you understand that, I will. You are mine, Kingsley. End of discussion.”

  At the time, Kingsley was certain he would never understand how words as cruel as those, how vicious and possessive and cold, could warm him like a bonfire and heal his wounds like a magic elixir from a fairy tale. It made no sense, but it was true nonetheless. Kingsley nearly collapsed on his knees into the snow right then from the sheer force of his love and his lust and his adoration of this bitterly cold boy with the snow in his veins.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Probably,” Søren said.

  Probably?

  Kingsley looked at him. “Do other lovers say the sort of things you say to me?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” Søren asked.

  “Fear of being sent to prison?”

  Søren stared at him.

  “Just thinking out loud,” Kingsley said. “Sir.”

  “Come on,” Søren said, dragging him by the hair to the path.

  They walked in silence and Kingsley could have sworn he’d never seen this part of the woods before.

  “This isn’t the way back to the school, is it?” Kingsley asked.

  “We’re making a detour,” Søren said.

  “Where?”

  Søren didn’t answer. Kingsley had no choice but to follow him. While Kingsley had attended St. Ignatius for only two semesters, Søren had lived here full-time since he was twelve years old. Søren was as intimate with the woods around the school as Kingsley was with his own cock. And he would like someone to get intimate with his cock in the next few minutes before he died from the blood loss from his brain into his erection. He almost started to tell Søren that when they stepped from the edge of the woods and onto a sheet of glass.

  “Jesus,” Kingsley said, nearly slipping and falling.

  “Steady,” Søren said. “We’re on ice.”

  “Thin ice?”

  “In Maine in December? It’s a foot thick already.”

  Kingsley had known there was a small pond two miles from the school, but he’d never walked in the direction it was supposed to be. It was on someone’s private land anyway, someone who’d warned the school to keep the boys away from it lest they be shot on sight as trespassers.

  “We could be shot, you know,” Kingsley said as Søren led him toward something across the pond that Kingsley couldn’t quite make out yet.

  “They only tell us we’ll be shot on sight to keep us from breaking into their fishing shack.”

  “Then what are we doing here?” Kingsley asked.

  “Breaking into their fishing shack.”

  “You really are going to kill me tonight, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not ruling anything out.”

  Kingsley needed to learn to not ask so many questions.

  It was easy to break into the ice-fishing hut. All they had to do was open the door. Very few people locked their doors in rural Maine. Certainly not when the nearest town was an hour’s drive away and their closest neighbors Jesuit priests and their students.

  Inside the shack, Søren set the lantern on the ice beneath their feet. Under the golden circle, shadows wiggled and danced. Fish.

  “Take off your clothes,” Søren said as soon as Kingsley had the door shut and latched behind him.

  “What?” Kingsley demanded.

  “You heard me.”

  “It’s thirty degrees in here.” There was almost nothing in the fishing shack but two chairs, a pile of plaid wool blankets, and a half-drunk bottle of Kentucky bourbon. There was certainly no electricity, no space heater, no fireplace. Only bare wood walls and a floor of ice.

  Søren remained silent. He was waiting. Kingsley could spend the next half hour coming up with excuses, begging, pleading, and Søren would simply wait and wait until Kingsley did what he was ordered to do. He might as well skip the middle step and get right to the obedience.

  “I have never hated anyone like I hate you,” Kingsley said, dropping his coat.

  “I could have left you to die in the woods tonight.”

  “I wish you had.”

  “You’re so hard I can see it through your trousers,” Søren said.

  “That’s a gun, not my cock. And it’s going to be very happy to see you.”

  “I like the lies you tell yourself to keep from admitting how much you want this.”

  “It’s not a lie. I don’t want this. I want you. There’s a difference. Big difference. Une grande différence. Vive la différence.”

  “Are you finished?” Søren asked. He tapped his foot on the ice, impatient. “I can wait out any temper tantrum you throw.”

  “Temper tantrum,” Kingsley muttered, pulling his heavy wool sweater off and the t-shirt under it. “I don’t want fucking hypothermia, and he calls it a temper tantrum. If he shot me in the leg and I screamed, he’d tell me to stop pouting. If he cut my head off and I bled on him, he’d punish me for making a mess.”

  “I can hear everything you’re saying,” Søren said.

  “Good. That was the point of me saying it.”

  Kingsley kicked his shoes off and stood on the back of his coat as he removed his socks. He wasn’t cold. He was freezing. His teeth chattered and his body shook. Meanwhile Søren—at the most infuriatingly leisurely pace—kicked a bedroll open on the ice and dropped half a dozen of the blankets onto it. When Kingsley was completely naked, he stood with his bare toes scrunched up in the folds of his coat, desperate for any warmth, any at all. From the air, from the blankets, from the heart of the young man staring at him. But none seemed forthcoming.

  “It really is quite impressive,” Søren said, nodding.

  “What is?” Kingsley said through his chattering teeth.

  “That you can maintain an erection in any weather or atmospheric conditions.”

  “I’m not turned on. It’s frozen solid.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “Cold as the ice in your veins, you bastard.”

  “Do you want to get under the blankets?”

  “Yes.”

  “You may. As soon as you apologize.”

  “Apologize? For what?” Kingsley demanded.

  “Did you or did you not go walking in the woods without telling anyone where you were going or marking any sort of trail to find your way back?”

  “Well...maybe.” Kingsley blinked tears from his eyes. He wasn’t sad, nor remorseful. He was simply so cold that his eyes were watering uncontrollably. At least the tears were hot.

  “If someone were to take something of mine, something valuable, carry it off while I’m at dinner, and lose it in the woods so that I had no hope of ever finding it again, would I not have every right on Earth to be angry with that person?”

  Kingsley felt that strange warmth again, that warmth that came all over him when Søren said something or did something to show that he truly thought of Kingsley as his own private and personal possession.

  “I’m sorry,” Kingsley whispered.

  Søren put a hand behind his ear, cocked his head to the side. “What was that?”

  -->