A Winter Symphony: A Christmas Novella Read online

  “Sorry,” he said, sitting back in the chair. “Priests don’t work nine to five.”

  “It’s fine,” Kingsley said. “Really.” He turned and sat down on the window bench, though the glass was cold and there was nothing to see outside but the dark, icy branches of an elm tree. “Who is KJ?” Kingsley asked, nodding toward the sampler on the wall.

  “KJ? Oh, Katherine Jensen. She’s in the choir, does embroidery in her free time.”

  “Does she have a crush on you?”

  “She’s ninety-one. But yes, I think she does.”

  Kingsley smiled. “You put our trophy in here.”

  “I was hiding it in shame,” Søren said, feigning disgust. “I will never forgive First Presbyterian for beating us again. You know they cheated.”

  “How?”

  “By having better players on their team than we did.”

  Kingsley sipped his wine and set his glass down. “What’s in the box?”

  “Which box?”

  “The locked one. Under the trophy.”

  Søren glanced over his shoulder at the box, and his eyes were different when he looked back. “Just letters.”

  “In a lockbox.”

  “They’re from Elizabeth,” Søren said. “Old letters from when I was in school.”

  Elizabeth, Søren’s sister with whom he shared a troubled past. She’d been abused by their father as a little girl. When she was twelve and Søren eleven, she’d instigated an incestuous abusive relationship with him. Her own brother. Søren had said before how difficult it was to even be in the same room with her, that it brought back disturbing memories.

  “I shouldn’t have asked,” Kingsley said.

  “You can ask me anything,” Søren said gently, as if he were talking to a scared child about to make a difficult confession. “You know that, don’t you? If it’s something I can answer, I will.”

  “Really?” Kingsley shook his head. “Forgive me for being skeptical. I feel like you’ve been keeping yourself a secret from me for years.”

  “I know,” Søren said with a solemn nod. “I was. In my mind, I’d convinced myself I was protecting you. I think the truth is, I was protecting myself just as much, if not more. But I’m trying to be more honest with all of us. If you want to know something, ask it.”

  “You’ll regret saying that.”

  Søren grinned. “Try me.”

  Chapter Eight

  Try him? That blond monster was as arrogant as he was beautiful. Kingsley would show him.

  “All right. First question. Where did you get your pajamas? Is there a pajama catalog just for priests?”

  “You like them? Eleanor got them for me. And red ones covered in candy canes, too.”

  “They make those in your size?”

  Søren picked up his wine glass. “Apparently so.”

  “They’re very cute.”

  “Thank you. I always wanted to be cute.” He took a drink. “That’s your question?”

  “I have more.”

  Søren held out his hand, palm open. “Ask away.”

  “Why do you keep your sister’s letters?”

  Søren sat back again, exhaled hard. “The pajama question was much easier to answer. I’ve wanted to burn them many times. However, since Elizabeth writes about my father’s abuse in them, destroying them would feel like destroying evidence. Stuart Ballard—”

  “Who?”

  “The priest who’s my confessor—he suggested I put them in a locked box, throw away the key, and set them on a shelf where I might see them every day until I’m used to them, and they no longer hold any power over me. It’s called exposure therapy. Seems to have worked. Now they’re just letters in a box. They have some sentimental value, too, I suppose. Apart from the occasional threatening letter from my father, no one ever wrote to me at school. I felt completely abandoned there. Finally, after two years, Elizabeth somehow found out where I’d been sent, and she started writing to me in secret. The first letter I received from her was a godsend. I can’t tell you how crushing my loneliness was there.” He smiled. “Until a certain French whore and masochist came along and changed my life.”

  Happiness again, pure happiness, potent as cocaine, hit Kingsley’s brainstem and shot through his whole body.

  “Does Nora know that you have those letters?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s never asked. I’ve asked her not to ask. Shockingly, she’s obeyed.”

  “There’s a small horrible part of me that’s happy I know, and she doesn’t.”

  “I don’t think that’s particularly horrible, just understandable, considering. Any other questions?”

  “Tell me something else she doesn’t know.” Kingsley grinned, feeling deliciously evil.

  “Something Eleanor doesn’t know? Let’s see... Well, this is hardly a deep, dark secret, but I didn’t tell her that I was recently offered a theology professorship at the Gregorian in Rome.”

  Kingsley’s eyes widened. “When was that?”

  “About a month ago. They wanted me to start next summer.”

  “Rome?”

  “Rome.”

  “And you told them no?” If Søren wouldn’t leave Sacred Heart for a cushy teaching position in Rome, he’d never… Kingsley pushed the rest of that thought aside.

  “After everything we’ve just been through, I could hardly ask Eleanor and you and Juliette to uproot yourselves and come with me, could I? And I wasn’t going to leave without you.”

  Kingsley ignored a pang of guilt. “Did you want to take the job?”

  “I miss teaching. Being the only priest at a parish this size is exhausting. In a perfect world, I’d be teaching, but we don’t live in a perfect world.”

  “If you weren’t planning on taking it, why keep it from Nora?”

  Søren met his eyes briefly, then looked away. “She’s fragile right now,” he said. “Doing better than most people would after what she went through, but she’s not quite there yet. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve called her over the years and said I needed her to come over and be with me. Never once has she called to say she needed me.”

  “And now?”

  “Three times in as many months. Which isn’t many on paper but it’s a lot for her. Most of the time, she swears she’s fine, and I believe her. But sometimes when she’s alone…sometimes she just can’t be alone.”

  “You like that, don’t you? That she needs you now.”

  “It’s gratifying, yes. I wish the cause were different, but since we’re being honest, it means...” He paused and smiled. “It means everything to me. Just mentioning to her the possibility I might go away—even if I’m not planning to, which I’m not—it would worry her. And worry is the last thing she needs, especially since she’s starting to get back to her old self.” He smiled. “Any other brutally personal questions?”

  “One million. Give or take.”

  “How about one more, and then we go to bed? Surely we could save the other 999,999 for tomorrow?”

  “What’s something you never told me? Something about us.”

  Søren raised his arms and clasped his hands behind his head, the picture of deep contemplation. Kingsley would have killed to be inside that blond head, seeing all those memories flashing across his mind’s eye like a montage from a black-and-white film.

  “I got you a Christmas present,” Søren said.

  “That’s not a secret. We get each other Christmas presents every year.”

  “Not this year. Back then.”

  “When we were in school?”

  Søren nodded. “By the time it finally arrived, you were already gone and not coming back.”

  Kingsley sat up straighter, looked at him. “What was it?”

  “You used to brag that you were scouted by Paris Saint-Germain FC.”

  “I had been, I swear.”

  “I believed you. That’s why I wrote Elizabeth and asked her to buy a PSG football shirt when she was in Paris for
Christmas that year and ship it to me. She did, but the post was slow, and it didn’t arrive until a week after you were gone. It sat wrapped in brown paper with twine—the only wrapping paper we had at school—until the end of the term. Sat on my dresser taunting me every day, reminding me you’d left and weren’t coming back. When I went to France to look for you after the term ended, I took it with me, but I never found you. When you join the Jesuits, you have to give up all your worldly possessions. That shirt was the very last thing I gave away. A homeless man was begging for change across the street from the building. He looked about your size.”

  Kingsley stared at Søren and didn’t speak at first. In the silence, a branch from the frozen elm tree outside scratched the frosted window. The wind blew softly, but he felt it creeping through the cracks in the old and drafty cottage. The moment was already becoming a memory, one of his most important, one that would keep him warm in any season, safe in any storm.

  There was nothing you could say to a confession like that, that the man you loved more than your own life had clung to a scrap of fabric for months and months and had only let go at the very last second, like a bride turning back one last time before walking down the aisle to make sure the man she truly loved wasn’t coming to claim her. Or like Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom before being turned into a pillar of salt.

  Since there was nothing to say, Kingsley said nothing. He went over to Søren, sitting in his office chair, and he went down onto his knees on the rug in front of him and rested his head in Søren’s lap.

  Søren put his hand in Kingsley’s hair and just held his head against his thigh. Kingsley inhaled deeply and smelled the scent of winter, the scent of trees encased in ice, but earthy and bursting with life within.

  “I have a problem,” Kingsley said. “I’ve gotten used to it.”

  Søren laughed softly. “It shouldn’t be a problem. I told you, it’s not going away.”

  No, maybe not, Kingsley thought. Maybe Søren’s love wasn’t going away.

  But Kingsley was.

  Chapter Nine

  “Come to bed,” Søren said, and Kingsley obeyed.

  Kingsley went first, and Søren walked behind him. Once inside the bedroom, Søren shut the door. Kingsley heard the click of the door latch, his new favorite sound.

  Talking was over. All the secrets that would be told that night had been told. As soon as the door shut and the world was outside it, Søren took Kingsley’s face in his hands, possessively, forced his head back, and kissed him like he owned him. He did own him, had every right to him.

  Quickly, roughly, Kingsley’s clothes were stripped from his body. Buttons unbuttoned. Shirt tossed aside. He was hard already from the kiss, but his penis stiffened even more when Søren pushed him onto his back on the bed and crawled on top of him.

  Even six months pregnant, Juliette was light as a feather compared to the sheer breathtaking mass of the six-foot-four man on top of him. Was there anything like being kissed while fighting for air that made one feel more used? More owned?

  The quilt was soft against Kingsley’s skin and cradled his body as he sank into the bed.

  White hand-made quilt, antique bed, light from an old brass lamp. It was like making love in another time, another world, a world so removed from the real one that Kingsley was able to forget that their nights like this were numbered.

  Søren rose up on his knees, straddling Kingsley’s waist. “Do you want to leave marks on the bed?” he asked.

  Kingsley answered, “I would carve my name across your headboard if you let me. I’d leave teeth marks in your footboard. I’d let you bleed me into the mattress so deep the stain would never come out. I’d…”

  Kingsley paused as Søren’s eyebrow reached his hairline.

  “So that’s a yes,” Søren said.

  Søren left the bed to go to his steamer trunk, his box of tricks. While he was gone, Kingsley moved fully onto the bed, lying in the middle, head on a pillow. Søren returned with two sets of steel handcuffs. Two? Søren straddled him again, putting one set on each wrist. The snapping of the lock into place and the cool touch of the metal on his already tender wrists made Kingsley desperately hard. His cock throbbed, wanting to be touched. Once the cuffs were on, Søren turned him onto his stomach. Kingsley lay there, prone and defenseless as Søren cuffed each wrist to a bedpost, his arms locked in a wide V.

  Kingsley relaxed at once, surrendering himself entirely to the grip of the cuffs. He closed his eyes and rested his face against the quilt, soft from a thousand washings and smelling clean as a spring dawn.

  His back was covered in bruises from the earlier beating, and even the slightest touch hurt. So that was all Søren administered at first, light touches on his tender back. His large and heavy hand stroked the wounds, lighting them up like signal fires with every touch.

  “It wouldn’t be right,” Søren said, his tone quiet and gentle, “to put bruises on top of your bruises. It wouldn’t be right at all, really. But it will be very, very enjoyable.”

  Not would be. Will be.

  Kingsley registered the switch in verb tense at the exact moment Søren brought the short crop down onto his back. Not only onto his back, but directly onto a fresh bruise. Kingsley buried his face into the quilt to muffle his cries. The pain was staggering. Tears filled his eyes, and he pulled hard enough on the cuffs that bound him that he could feel the metal digging into the wood.

  Then it was over, and Kingsley panted against the pillow, his back as hot and throbbing as his cock. Cool air soothed his raw skin, but the respite was brief. Something touched his bruises again, and Kingsley cried out softly. He felt it again and knew what it was this time. Not a hand. Not the crop. Søren was kissing his back, kissing his bruises. Kissing them softly, but even Søren’s softest kisses caused him pain. Those were his favorite kisses, the ones that hurt.

  Søren kissed a wandering path up Kingsley’s body from the small of his back to his sides, his ribs, between his shoulders, and then his neck. Søren was naked. Kingsley felt Søren’s cock pushing against the back of his thigh. A dizzying sensation, to be desired by this man.

  He felt Søren’s hands slide up his arms. Then the handcuffs were off and tossed onto the floor with a metallic clatter. Kingsley’s body was loose and listless after the rush of pain. He let Søren turn him onto his back. He returned to full awareness at the moment when Søren laid down a black towel onto the bed, then picked up a small scalpel off the bedside table. No words were spoken, but Kingsley’s heart pounded loud enough he could hear it beating in his ears.

  “Hold very still,” Søren said, his voice tender and soothing. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Søren was going to cut him with a scalpel, but he didn’t want to hurt him. Only to a sadist and the masochist who loved him did such a breach of logic make any sense. He meant that he didn’t want to hurt Kingsley unintentionally. He did, of course, want to hurt him—entirely on purpose and in exactly the manner he desired. That was Søren.

  Kingsley, as ordered, did not move.

  The chosen spot was on Kingsley’s hip, in that hollow of sensitive skin near the bone.

  “You left your marks,” Søren said, head down and leaning over Kingsley’s hip. “Now I’ll leave mine.”

  Kingsley watched Søren with hooded eyes, devouring the sight of his lover’s tender concentration. The beauty of a sadist at work. The intensity in his steel-colored eyes. The steadiness of his hand. A lock of silver-blond hair falling over his forehead. The lips parting in pleasure as the skin slit under the sharpest edge of the knife…

  A small cut, but precise and in the shape of an S. Blood welled to the surface. Søren’s pupils dilated and took over his eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Søren asked.

  “I have never been better.”

  Truly, only Søren could wield kisses like a knife and a knife like a kiss.

  Everything happened fast after that. Søren moved Kingsley onto his side, opened him
with wet fingers slick with lubricant. And then he was inside him, moving deep with long strokes. Side by side, Søren’s chest to Kingsley’s back and his hand clutching the bleeding hip, four legs entwined, breaths ragged and rushed.

  Slow thrusts. Deep thrusts. Kingsley felt them all the way into the aching core of him. Søren’s hand on Kingsley’s cock. A wet hand wrapped around a thick cock. Stroking in time with the thrusts so that Kingsley felt overwhelmed by pleasure, pleasure in and pleasure out. He wanted to come more than he wanted to breathe, but even more he wanted to hold back and come with Søren.

  He shut his eyes tight and breathed shallow breaths, even as his climax built. With his own hand on himself, he could have held back easier, controlled his arousal. But with Søren’s hand, so firm and grasping, it took herculean effort to hold back. The muscles of his stomach tightened painfully even as his hips worked into the hand that held him, and the cock inside him speared him completely.

  “Come,” Søren ordered into his ear, and Kingsley couldn’t disobey. His back bowed and he let go, coming in spurts onto the white sheets even as Søren pounded into him with rough thrusts Kingsley barely registered through the wild haze of orgasm. As soon as he was empty, he was filled again. Søren came inside him as Kingsley lay limp and spent on the bed.

  Then it was over, and they lay together, breathing together, bound together.

  Søren slowly held out his hand and showed it to Kingsley. He saw the blood from the cut on his hip, staining the fingers and palm.

  “It looks like my blood is your blood,” Kingsley said.

  And Søren replied, “Your blood is my blood.”

  Kingsley closed his eyes and asked himself how he could possibly leave this behind.

  He didn’t know how, only that he would.

  Chapter Ten

  Slowly they disentangled from each other. Søren pulled on his black flannel pajama pants and left Kingsley naked and spent on the bed. Shortly, Søren returned, his hands freshly washed—no more blood—carrying a first-aid kit.