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.
Almost a week had passed since then. Søren hadn’t touched him in all that time. 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 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 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—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 face. “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 on the way 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, which were 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. Søren was as intimate with the woods around the school as Kingsley was with his own cock. And if someone didn’t get intimate with his cock in the next few minutes, he would die from blood loss to his brain since it had all gone to his erection. He was about to tell Søren this 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 that 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 were 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?”
“I said I’m sorry...sir. I forgot myself. I took something that wasn’t mine to take and nearly lost it in the woods. I shouldn’t have done that. I don’t belong to me. I belong to you.”
Søren nodded his approval. “You’re forgiven,” he said. “Now get in.”
Kingsley dove into the pile of wool blankets and lay on his side in the fetal position. Søren stood over him, looking down at him. He didn’t seem the least bit cold. Of course he had on his winter boots, wool socks, thick black trousers, a shirt, a sweater, a heavy wool coat and a black and white scarf. But it was more than the clothes. The cold seemed incapable of touching Søren. Or it could touch him but it couldn’t harm him. Snow fell onto snow but the snow never complained of the cold. It was the cold.
“Warmer?” Søren asked after Kingsley had lain there a few minutes.
Kingsley nodded, still rolled onto his side with his knees to his chest.
“Lie on your back,” Søren said, removing his gloves.
Kingsley did as he was told and found that once he lay flat on the bedroll with the blankets over him, he was quite comfortable again. Almost warm. He could sleep out here all night naked under these blankets and he would be fine. Well, until he had to go out and take a piss. But until then, he would be fine.
Søren removed his coat and laid it atop the blanket pile. He took off no other clothing—much to Kingsley’s annoyance—but he did slide in under the blankets and on top of Kingsley, which was heaven. Face to face, eye to eye, hip to hip, Kingsley naked and Søren clothed. And Kingsley discovered something lovely then. He wasn’t just comfortable. He wasn’t just warm. He was hot.
“Better?” Søren asked.
“Much. Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome.” Søren kissed him on the lips, a cold hard kiss that left Kingsley sweating.
With Søren’s full weight on him, Kingsley struggled a little to breathe. Søren was even taller now than when Kingsley had first laid eyes on him in January. Taller, stronger, heavier...a boy no more, if Søren had ever been one. Kingsley wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t naive. He knew about those men who acquired boys his age, collected them, seduced them, and then discarded them when they grew into men and lost all their boyish beauty. Would Søren still want him when Kingsley was twenty, twenty-five, thirty, fifty? When Kingsley had crow’s feet and gray hair? Would anyone still want him then? Would he even live that long?
“Will you still love me when I’m fifty years old?” Kingsley asked Søren between kisses.
“No,” Søren said, pressing his cool lips to Kingsley’s neck.
“No?”
“I don’t even love you now,” Søren said. “Why would I love you in thirty-three years?”
“Ah, good point.” Kingsley smiled at the ceiling of the fishing shack. “Well...will you still want me when I’m fifty? Like this?” Kingsley asked, pushing his hips against Søren’s.
“You mean naked and pathetic and willing to do whatever I tell you to do?”
“Yes,” Kingsley said, pressing his erection up and against Søren once again.
“Time will tell,” Søren said. “Now hold still.”
“Hold still?”
Søren reached down and laid his hand flat onto the ice floor.
His bare hand.
The bare ice.
This wasn’t a good sign.
Søren’s eyes were locked onto Kingsley’s, who lay there trapped underneath Søren’s body.
“Søren?” Kingsley whispered.
“Yes?”
“Aren’t you going to hurt your hand like that?”
“You said I had ice in my veins,” Søren said. “Did you not?”
“I might have implied something like that.”
“Then the ice won’t hurt me, will it?” Søren asked, his hand still pressed flat and hard to the ice.
“I was only joking.”
“Were you?”
“I don’t really think you have ice in your veins.”
“No?”
“No, sir,” Kingsley said. “Only living beings have veins.”
“That was a joke, too, wasn’t it?” Søren asked.
“A little joke.”
“You like to make jokes, don’t you?”
“Sometimes. I guess.” Kingsley wasn’t laughing or smiling anymore.
“I know a joke,” Søren said.
“You do?”
He nodded. “It goes like this—what did the French whore say when his cock was grabbed by an ice-cold hand?”
“I—”
The punchline to the joke was, of course, a pained animal howl. It was uncontrollable, erupting from deep inside Kingsley, and there was no stopping the scream on the way out.
“That’s right,” Søren rasped into Kingsley’s ear. “You know this joke.”
“Jesus fucking God Christ in heaven you evil son of a bitch…” He swore in English. He swore in French. He swore in what little Latin he’d learned.
“Funny joke, isn’t it?” Søren said.
“I hate you. I fucking hate you so much...” Kingsley’s eyes watered again. His stomach muscles had contracted from the cold so hard he almost ejaculated out of sheer shock to his anatomy.
“Tell me how much you hate me,” Søren said. “I like to hear it.”
Kingsley might have told him and told him in excruciating detail that involved not only his hatred for Søren, but also for Søren’s mother, his father, his grandparents, his cousins, his as-yet unborn progeny and even any pets he might have had in his life or would have someday.
But.
Søren’s hand heated up quickly against Kingsley’s hot flesh, and now it was an almost-warm hand that stroked his cock under the blankets. A warm hand and growing warmer by the moment. Søren massaged him with long strokes, hard strokes, sensual strokes that brought Kingsley to the very edge of orgasm so quickly he’d forgotten how much pain he’d been in only seconds earlier.
“I have to come,” Kingsley panted. The muscles in his thighs quivered with need and his back shook and his hips pulsed and pulsed against Søren’s hand, and Kingsley couldn’t have stopped if someone had held a gun to his head.
“You’re going to come,” Søren said, still stroking, stroking... “You’re going to come until you’re empty. I want you spent. I want you hollow. I want you to have nothing left inside you. No will to live. No will to die. No anger. No fight. No hope. No sorrow. Nothing. You’re going to come and come and come until you are a shell of yourself and then maybe, just maybe, I will be able to put up with your company the rest of the evening. I’m certainly not going to spend any time with you until you learn that you’re too old for temper tantrums. You understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Søren stroked him harder, faster, and that coil in Kingsley’s groin tightened, tightened like a clock that had been wound too much so that the spring was about to break. Oh, he was about to break. He rocked against Søren’s hand, pressing his head against Søren’s chest, watching the blankets shifting in the lantern light. Ah, it was bliss. It was heaven. It was ecstasy. His hips rose off the bedroll and he came with a pained whimper. Semen spurted out of him and onto his stomach in a hot wet rush.
“Good.” Søren punctuated that word with a kiss on Kingsley’s naked shoulder. Then he breathed onto the kiss and Søren’s breath was warm, shockingly warm, and Kingsley melted into the floor. It was a miracle the ice didn’t steam underneath him. “Now again.”
Søren ran his bare hand over the wetness on Kingsley’s stomach, then used it as lubricant when he started stroking Kingsley. Søren hadn’t been kidding. He really did mean to make Kingsley come again and again and again until he was empty. It hurt at first, being rubbed right after the first orgasm, but soon enough he was rock hard again, pulsing his hips into Søren’s hand, coming again with a shudder and a cry.
“One more, I think,” Søren said with a kiss to Kingsley’s forehead. “It usually takes three with you.”
“Three?”
“Three climaxes before you’re spent,” he said.
“Does it?” Kingsley asked.
“It does. I know your body better than you do,” Søren said.
“Because it belongs to you.”
“Exactly.” Søren smiled as he started massaging Kingsley’s cock again for the third time. At first Kingsley was certain it wasn’t going to happen. He was already spent. He’d come twice in under ten minutes. A third time so quickly? He was a young man, yes, but still mortal.
“I don’t think I can,” Kingsley said, wincing as Søren pulled gently on his wet cock.
“You can. I know you can. You can and you will. You don’t have a choice.”
“I don’t?” Kingsley wanted only to sleep now and sleep for ages in Søren’s arms. His eyelids were heavy and his body leaden. He was sweating hard from the exertion of two powerful orgasms.
“You don’t,” Søren said. “You’re going to come again because you have to. It’s what I want.”
“Why?” Kingsley asked. “Why do you want me to come? It’s me, not you. You don’t get any pleasure out of it. Do you?”
Søren lowered his head and put his lips to Kingsley’s ear. “I like the sound you make when you come.”
“You do?”
“More than music. Which is why you’ll make it for me again, won’t you?”
“Yes,” Kingsley said, nodding tiredly. “I will for you.”
“Right.” Søren’s hand slipped from Kingsley’s cock down to his testicles. He held them lightly and Kingsley shivered with pleasure.
“I don’t have any choice.”
“No, you don’t.” Søren stroked the tender skin behind Kingsley’s testicles. When Kingsley was about to beg for it, Søren pushed a single wet finger inside him. Kingsley quivered in Søren’s arms, in pleasure and in happiness.
“That’s good,” Kingsley said breathlessly. “I don’t want to have a choice. I just want to do what you tell me to do.”
“Obedience is its own reward, Kingsley.”
Kingsley thought coming so hard half his brain shot out of his cock was a damn good reward, too, but he didn’t say that out loud.
Søren pressed his fingertip into that place inside him that ached to be touched, and in that perfect way Søren knew how to touch him. Kingsley’s body went tight and taut again. His heels chaffed the blankets as Søren stroked him internally. He was so hot, so aroused, he almost wanted to kick the blankets off. But the one rational cell of his brain that was still functioning warned him he’d regret doing that very quickly. His every breath steamed. The tiny fishing hut felt like a sauna. His body was open and aching. Søren must have felt that openness because he pushed another wet finger into him. Kingsley gasped and moaned, twitching at the tender touches. God, why couldn’t he live like this all the time? Naked, a slave to Søren, a toy, a whore to be used at Søren’s will as Kingsley served at Søren’s pleasure.
Søren kneaded that aching organ inside him and Kingsley could do nothing but take it. He was lost, insane, writhing in need. He threw his leg over Søren’s without asking permission first. Søren didn’t object, merely kept pushing and pushing his fingers into that spot—gently but constantly, keeping the pressure firm and right and perfect.
“You’re going to come for me again, aren’t you?” Søren asked. “From this, you’ll come.”
Kingsley licked his dry lips. He couldn’t talk, only nod.
“Every drop, Kingsley,” Søren said. There was a hard edge to his voice. “Don’t hold back from me. I’ll know, and we’ll do this again with you naked on the bare ice.”
Kingsley believed the threat. He had no doubt in his mind Søren would make him come while naked on the ice floor if he disobeyed. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. He had no choice but to obey.
The orgasm built slowly and steadily. It was different, coming from the inside of his body than the outside. Deeper. Softer. But more powerful, too, in a way, since only Søren could make him come like this. He writhed so hard against the wool beneath him he could feel his skin abrading. The pain stoked the pleasure. He would come any moment.
“Even if...” Kingsley began. “Even if you don’t love me when I’m fifty, I’ll still love you.”
“Could you be more of a whore?” Søren asked. A rhetorical question, obviously, but Kingsley answered it anyway.
“Probably.”
“Prove it.”
Kingsley proved it. His back arched as a muscle spasm shot electric pleasure through every nerve in his body. He came with a cry that was more like a shout that went on and on as Søren fucked him—hard—with his fingers. He was impaled, split, and writhing. It wasn’t an orgasm so much as a full-body convulsion. The whole valley must have heard his cry of pleasure. He hoped it did. He hoped someone heard. He needed to be heard. Kingsley needed the world to know who he belonged to. If he couldn’t shout it from the rooftops, he’d shout it here.
It passed at last, and he lay utterly spent and empty and hollow on Søren’s arm, his lover’s bicep better than any pillow.
“Now will you behave?” Søren asked him, easing his fingers out of Kingsley’s body.
“Define ‘behave.’ ”
Søren only sighed. He tossed the blankets off them and stood up. Kingsley took the opportunity to dress as quickly as he could. He knew he only had a minute or two before he’d start to feel the cold again.
“I’ll behave, I promise,” Kingsley said. “I want to please you. Always. In every way.”
“Don’t wander off again and get lost in the woods, and I’ll be a very happy man.”
Kingsley grinned. “If that’s all it takes to make you happy, then you should be a lot happier than you are, mon ami.”
“I am happy,” Søren said.
“You are?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Kingsley was happy. He’d just been tortured into orgasming three times. Happy might have been an understatement. They were alone together. The night was so clear and beautiful it could have been a picture off the front of a Christmas card. And they’d just shared a brutal, intimate hour together.
“You like me, don’t you?” Kingsley asked.
Søren rolled his eyes. “Come along, Whore. Back to school with you before you wander off again and end up in Canada.”
“I might like Canada,” Kingsley said.
Søren zipped Kingsley’s coat up for him and wrapped his scarf tight around his neck. “Canada might not like you,” Søren said. “The people there tend to be decent and polite.”
“So nothing like you then,” Kingsley said, loosening his scarf so he could breathe. “Too bad. I guess I’ll just stay here.”
Søren grabbed Kingsley by the back of the hair and set him walking across the ice to the woods.
They walked in silence. It made Kingsley nervous. He’d rather talk, but Søren wouldn’t let him. In the silence, he had only his thoughts for company…and they were not good thoughts. If Søren hadn’t found him, he might have died out here in the woods tonight. A humbling possibility. And all because he’d let his jealousy get the best of him. It had been juvenile. It had been a temper tantrum. He should be ashamed of himself. And he was.
“Thank you,” Kingsley said when they reached the border of the school’s property. Søren had darkened the lantern so no one would spot them in the woods. Kingsley felt like a ghost standing there, like everyone was real and corporeal and alive but him and Søren. If only that were true.
“You’re welcome,” Søren said. He started to step out of the woods and onto the cobblestone path that led back to the dorms when Kingsley reached out and grabbed him by the hand.
“What?” Søren asked.
“I don’t want to go back yet. Stay with me. Please?”
Søren looked at him through narrowed eyes. Then he stepped back into the darkness of the forest, taking Kingsley with him. They made a circuit of the school until they stood in the dense thicket of cedars that backed up to the chapel. Kingsley heard music...singing...
“Choir practice,” Søren said.
The school’s choir was small—only ten boys—but they were well-trained and had won competitions for their angelic singing. They were singing an old song—“In the Bleak Midwinter.” Standing there with his hand in Søren’s hand listening to the choir, Kingsley heard the lyrics in a way he never had before. Mary in the stable with the newborn Christ...
Angels and archangels may have gathered there
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air
But his mother only in her maiden bliss
Worshiped the beloved with a kiss
Kingsley wished there were angels here to worship Søren. He deserved it, all of it, the seraphim and the archangels and all the heavenly host. But Kingsley couldn’t give that to him. So he kissed him instead.
And lo, a Christmas miracle occurred, and the only miracle Kingsley wished for.
Søren returned the kiss.
The kiss was as heated as the night was cold. It was tender as the night was bitter. It was light as the night was dark. It ended only when the song did—and if Kingsley remembered correctly, the choir had sung it twice.
Søren stepped away from him at last. He turned his back to Kingsley, and started to walk to the school once more. Then he stopped and turned back around.
“I swear on all that is holy, if you ever get lost again...” Søren said, and shook his head.
“You’ll kill me?” Kingsley asked.
Søren smiled. “Probably.”
“Mr. Edge?”
Kingsley blinked himself awake.
The driver was looking at him through the rolled down partition.
“Yes?” Kingsley said, sitting up again. He’d fallen asleep on the long drive.
The driver pointed out the window.
“We’re here.”