“It was very still when I got back to the stables. That lull between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, before things began again. The horses did not stir, I was one of them really, the animals knew my smell. I led the Arabian out. I got on him and was going toward the forest, to ride off, to take him as ours because he was ours. My father always said that when you care for something, when you lift it up and make it fine, it is yours. And he had won the poker game. The horse was due him. I rode into the high snow. And then we came upon Max, who was passed out on a hill, nearly frozen. How easily it would have been to leave him to die, or better, to tromp on his skull, to let the horse do the work. This fancy man who treated us worse than he treated his animals, who demanded we care for his house, his land, his horses with such delicacy. Who called my father a dirty gypsy. But I got off and shook him. His weight and the heavy fur he wore had saved him. I got him up and he stumbled around cursing. Then he pulled out a pistol and screamed at me to take the horse back to the stable.”
Colm could see it all, the iced landscape, his irate grandfather Max wrapped in the fur of some outlandish beast. Sebastian’s hands were gone now. He had left, stepped away, and also left off the story. Colm realized he had dropped his glass and as he sat up with effort, he saw it lying helplessly at his feet, a tiny current of port rivering under his chair.
Sebastian stood at the fire, his hands on the mantle, his back arched and head lowered, that mass of hair falling forward.
“You want to see what he did to me?” he said. “You’ve wanted to see all along.”
He turned swiftly to face Colm and yanked his shirt up and over his head. He cast it aside, revealing his powerful, cruel body with a loud grunt, then pushed off his pants and stood naked. Stepping closer to Colm’s chair, he ran his hand over his chest, down to the wound at his belly, then without pausing pushed a finger into the wound’s hole, deeply. He moaned, then turned around again to face the fire, stretching his arms out wide, his back a canvas, the lash marks widening and moving as he thrust his shoulder blades back and forward, a riding rhythm.
He stood there just like that, in the hard, bright fire light, massive and statuesque, tightening his balled fists as his voice began again, louder with a growling depth to match the howling wind outside.
“Max took the horse, but first he got at me. He made me strip and kneel and he used his hunting knife that he used on game to gouge me in a few spots so I couldn’t fight, then he took up the whip and he yelled as he struck me. But that was when my father came and it all ended. It all stopped.”
The picture before Colm was moving too fast, and he had the sensation he was staring at a watercolor changing form, staring too long so it was blurring and becoming something else, and he felt he might be sick, and he tried to stand up and yell but as he did, he fell onto the floor. He was looking up at Sebastian now, who seemed to be floating high above, engulfed in the fire’s flame. A sight both horrifying and beautiful.
“He shot my father in the head, then he shot me in the belly and the bullet went straight through me. He buried us that night in the cellar, my father and I shoved in one unholy grave, down there in the cellar, into the guts of this house. Making it ours, every stone and beam part of us, the soul of this house running through our blood. That was his fatal mistake. To lay us here to rest. Because that made it ours. This house is ours. It will always be ours. And anyone who tries to take it from us will perish.”
As Sebastian finished he came closer, his brilliant sacred beautiful face lit from within, while the rest of him, all his broad edges, the very outline of his being, wavered and fluttered. He was all looseness except for that hot white face and those fiercesome teeth and wide, sensuous mouth pressing forward fast, onto him, burning Colm’s trembling lips, rolling past onto his tongue like a thick and pungent smoke rushing faster choking him, as this specter overcame him.
And Colm did not resist. He opened himself to a brutal and fast awakening, taking in the powerful and unbearable loneliness of Sebastian, this man’s loss and rage. Looking into those black eyes he saw his own loss and he felt that first kiss, that last kiss, the warmth of lying side by side all those years taken away, his one lover sunk into the earth. He felt Stan’s mouth on his and he shook with a spasm of utter grief, all that he’d had and loved, now gone. He let his buried grief and pain erupt as Sebastian moved deeper into him, filled him, and for the briefest moment, they shared their torture, that brotherhood of loneliness.
Colm shuddered over and over as Sebastian pressed away and Colm’s lips finally warmed now, wet now, moving into syllables of understanding. And finally, release.
“I will never sell this house.”
THE END
ABOUT SCOTT ALEXANDER HESS
An award-winning writer, Scott Alexander Hess has written fiction which has appeared in the Thema Literary Journal and Omnia Revitas Review. Diary of a Sex Addict is his second novel; his first, Bergdorf Boys, was serialized in Ganymede Journal and will soon be released by JMS Books LLC. He is working on another novel set in rural Arkansas and New York City circa 1918. His screenplay, Tom in America, is being produced by Queens Pictures in 2012.
Scott has contributed to various national magazines, including Genre, OutTraveler, and Instinct. Scott is a MFA graduate of The New School. For more information, please visit scottalexanderhess.com.
ABOUT JMS BOOKS LLC
JMS Books LLC is a small queer press with competitive royalty rates publishing LGBT romance, erotic romance, and young adult fiction. Visit jms-books.com for our latest releases and submission guidelines!
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