Page 24 of Lake of Sin

“How,” I whispered, “do you intend to deal with me?”

He said nothing. Fear had made him suddenly small. Oliviero squeezed his hands together, pressed his lips into a thinline, and regarded me with unbridled terror—and something else. Something more.

I moved behind him. He let me approach, stiffened only slightly when I wrapped my arms around his torso. I could only feel him slightly beneath the layers of the cassock. For a moment, I just held him.

I had loved Oliviero, hadn’t I?

I held him for so long that I barely registered my own tears streaming down onto his neck.

“Alessandro?”

“I—missed you,” I whispered.

He spun around, tearing out of my grasp and clutching my face. He made me look at him and crashed our foreheads together.

“Do not cry. Whatever you say—I remember you. I remember who you were. And to me, even if my youth frustrated you or my innocence irked you, you looked upon me with a kindness.”

“I looked upon you with a lust,” I said. “I’m sorry, and yet, I am not sorry. You are beautiful. You are still so beautiful. I’ve always wanted. . .”

He pulled me close into an embrace and shushed me. His body shook. He smelled of life and incense. I breathed in the scent caught in the divot of his neck. My hands roamed over the thick robe, ghosting over his groin, where I felt only the faintest outline of a bulge, my fingertips trailing over his upper thigh.

Now, it was my breath warming his skin, the only exposed patch of it rising above the white collar of his priestly cassock, and I felt alive again.

Perhaps I hadn’t realised until that moment how badly I had wanted this. I had given in to some of my nature and not all of it: I wanted to take, I wanted to be used. I wanted affection. I wanted to meet another man in the same field of cautious yet overpowering attraction. Oliviero’s breaths came in hot and fast.

“I cannot—” he murmured. “I serve God.”

“God serves only Himself,” I said. “You are my own age, now. I know that you feel it. The disappointment. The dying hope of being His chosen. You are becoming jaded, Oliviero—youknowas well as I did that you have spent your life in service to an institution that does not value you, worshipping a God who either does not care that you exist or is so wholly cruel with his creations that He does not deserve our praise.”

“Bl—blasphemy. . .”

“Oh, yes.” I licked his ear, sucking on his lobe, dragging my tongue down his neck. “As blasphemous as one can get.”

I pulled away from him to see his face, which was as red as the blood of Christ. I reached out, and he took my hand cautiously, letting me guide him up towards the altar.

We stared at it for a while. He turned to me, eyes wide.

“Why have you come?”

I took my time to answer. “I thought I had come to be rid of my shame,” I began. I reached out for his hand. He squeezed it. I thought of Paul in that town, and Romans 10. Of brethren loving each other in a different way to how I loved men. I made sure to meet his eyes when I told Oliviero the truth.

“I have lusted for you since you arrived at the abbey. I fantasised about you often. Perhaps more than that. Perhaps I. . .I believe I began to care for you. I wanted to corrupt you, and I wanted to love you the way men love women. That is my sin. That is what I gave up God for: Love of men.”

Is it such a great sin?I wanted to ask him, but I fought the urge to scrounge around for his approval. Then I cupped his face and gently brought our lips together.

He gasped, breath-stopping as our lips touched. His eyes stayed open, staring into my very soul. He pulled away first, saying, “Like Judas.”

And maybe it was like Judas; a kiss to betray the Lord God.

9

So I kissed him again, drawing his body close against mine. I pressed my tongue against his lips and felt a thrill when he let out the faintest of moans.

“I am ashamed,” he admitted when I pulled away. “That dream haunted me. I thought of it again and again; went to confession for it again and again.”

“You looked so beautiful like that,” I told him, and his eyes went wide with the understanding that I had been there. That perhaps it hadn’t been a dream at all.

“I still believe in God,” he told me.

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