Page 13 of Illuminated

I reached for the flashlight and also turned around and pulled my camera bag toward me. If he was really going to show me something abandoned, I might just as well use the opportunity and capture it.

Auris opened the car door for me. We walked into the nighttime forest. Auris walked ahead of me, but he quickly faded into the darkness as if he were a part of it. If I hadn’t kept my flashlight on him, I might have thought he wasn’t real, just something I had imagined. But whenever the light touched him, he remained a solid presence.

Chapter Three

In the wild, in the darkness, time lost much of its meaning. Through breaks in the canopy, I could see stars, littering the night sky like bright grains of sand, much brighter than the city let them shine.

The forest seemed unremarkable in my flashlight, but my flashlight could only show me so much. The thick growth of trees and bushes was filled with strange noises and stranger shapes, and the ground was softer than I expected, littered with branches that tried to catch my feet and make me fall.

If Auris hadn’t been holding my hand, I wouldn’t have known he was there, because I was too busy with my footing to keep my flashlight trained on him. He made no sound at all, didn’t make an attempt at conversation. Every now and then when he brushed against the brightness cast by my flashlight, I caught him looking at me.

At some point, we slowed, stopped, and I spotted something that, for once, wasn’t a tree up ahead.

“Here,” Auris said. He moved to stand behind me, and guided my hand that held the light.

In the slice of light, I saw something that was not grown from the earth, but built from stone and mortar. The building was smaller than the church had been. The stones were covered in thick moss, which made them look like soft cushions.

Ivy had reached its many green fingers up windowpanes and around the balustrade that surrounded the front porch. The window glass was just reflective enough that it looked like buried treasure when I ran my light over it. Shadows spilled out from cracks in the mortar and lapped at the edges of lintels and eaves. It was beautiful.

I exchanged the flashlight for my camera just as I had back at the church. I walked around the structure slowly in the darkness between the flashlight’s strobing brightness. I lost all sense of where Auris was. I thought he might have left me and snapped a picture of the wall leading all the way up to a chimney.

Maybe I will wake up in these woods tomorrow and remember nothing, I thought, and photographed a corner of the building with its low eaves bending beneath the burden of time.Or he’s leaving me here, so he knows where to find me, I thought, and in my camera flash, I caught him standing on the moss-covered front porch, a dark, magnificent appearance that seemed not out of place here at all.

“I can show you around inside,” he said. “Come.”

I pulled out my flashlight again, made my way up the front steps. They were slippery with moss, and I took care not to fall and break my lens.

Once I was at the door, Auris put his arm at the small of my back. He pushed the rotten front door out of the way and led me inside. “There is a root cellar as well,” he said. “I did come back here over the years, sometimes to hide, sometimes to see how the place was doing.”

“How it was doing?” I looked up at him while my flashlight washed over rotten furniture, paintings faded to dark shades on the walls, and curtains that were but tendril thin tatters. “This is yours?”

“Yes. I was early coming here. Across the Atlantic, I mean. I built this house, though before it, I built a shelter. I’ve restored and abandoned it twice now.”

“Oh, that is…” I’m not sure any language had a word for what this was. Incomprehensible was one option. This person had been the one to build this and also the one to allow nature to retake what he had built. It made the time he had spent living very real and tangible. And as far as my project went, it was as if he -- at least for this place -- was what was missing in all the other abandoned places. A tether to keep the house from just floating away on the relentlessly moving river of time.

With a jolt, I realized that this place was not really abandoned at all, not like the church had been, for instance.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing. Just… It’s complicated. I was thinking about the photography.”

“Hmm. The artist’s mind works in mysterious ways.”

I snorted. “Vampire humor again?”

“Well, without a bit of gallows humor, Ethan, I would never have managed the first five hundred years. Those were the Middle Ages, after all. Be thankful you were born when you were born.”

I took his word for it, or rather, was distracted by taking in what my flashlight showed me. A vase, abandoned on a small table, but somehow still reflecting the light, at least to some degree. I pulled my camera out, took a picture, another, then captured the remains of the curtains.

I lowered the camera, the flashlight dangling from my wrist, and just stared at what I could see of the house in the low light.

Auris pulled me from my reverie with his lips on mine. His arms came around me, holding, exploring. I opened my lips to let his tongue taste me. His kiss was surprisingly tender at first, his hands barely ghosting over me without really pulling me in. A small sound spilled out of me, a moan in response to him, to his closeness, his gentleness.

My cock filled, and my spine tingled, and I sighed, desperate for more. That sound broke his slow pace and shifted it to more urgent exploration. His mouth latched onto mine harder, taking my lips with one part need, two parts desire, and his hands pulled me to him until I could feel his strong body against mine. Before I could think about it, I rocked my hips, making sure he could feel my erection.

He took the flashlight from my hand and placed it on a cabinet behind me. I placed my camera back in its bag, which he took off my shoulder and put next to the light. As if that interruption had riled him, his arms wrapped around me to close the small distance that had briefly existed between us. His mouth took mine all over again, and he placed a hand at the back of my neck so that he could bruise my lips to his heart’s content.

Meanwhile, I’d stumbled a half step back, and my lower back was against the cabinet, my arms around his shoulders, brushing that long, luscious hair. I could feel myself surrender in his embrace. In that moment, I wanted him badly, this person I didn’t really know. It was as if I was drawn to him, as if an invisible pull like a magnet’s strength was reeling me in, and I did not resist.

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