TWENTY-NINE
Bastien
“How many times do I have to apologize for landing on your doorstep crying?” She breathed a giggle that touched me in places it shouldn’t have.
Hearing her lips wrap around a full sentence was like hearing an angel at the end of a long, dark night. One gloriously full sentence out of her gloriously beautiful mouth was enough to set my heart at ease for another lifetime.
“God, I missed you,” I said again, caging her in my arms and thinking I might possibly refuse to ever let go. Keeping her hostage here would be a crime, but I was pretty confident I could get away with it for at least a little while before the authorities showed up. And still, it’d be worth every minute with her.
“I heard your Mass.” She pushed me away, inches separating us now. “Heard all of it.” She shook her head, eyes welling up again. “I’ve agonized for so long about whether it was a good idea for me to come here. At one point on the flight from Miami, I told myself this was the worst decision I’d ever made in my life. Then I reached the cathedral I thought you might be at, only to be told I’d need to head deeper into the mountains.” A frown danced across her features. “And then I heard that Mass, and I was sure I’d done the wrong thing.” She swiped at more tears, this time a little more angrily. “I almost turned and left again. I thought you’d moved on, would resent me for even showing my face here, but I couldn’t come this far without…” Her gaze clung heavily and weighted to mine. “…without hearing your voice one last time.”
I crossed the inches, hands clasped at her elbows to hold her to me. “I’ve tried to move on. I can’t tell you how I’ve tried. But I could never resent seeing you.”
“Then why this, Bastien?” She was slipping around me, fingertips trailing over the raised muscles of my bicep, over my shoulder blades, finally landing at the fresh welt on my back.
I winced when she touched the tender, broken skin.
“How could you do this to yourself?” Her words cracked, tears lacing every syllable.
I didn’t think I could handle her pain on top of it all.
Hell, if only I’d known she would be back, I’d never have taken leather to my skin at all. I’d have endured, biding my time, waiting until now.
“I’ve allowed carnal lusts to corrupt my faith. I need absolution.” I breathed, intent on the truth, no matter how much it hurt.
“How can I fight your God when he is not mine? Filled with more vengeance than redemption, more retribution than forgiveness? You know what I think? I think to love is to die a little. To not love is to exist a lifetime in purgatory.”
She regarded me shrewdly, logic written on every feature. She was a contradiction, faithfully detached, committed and still free. She gave love freely but to no one at all. Gentle and tough and passionate and refreshingly predictable in her unpredictability, just being near her light brightened mine.
Left to generate my own light, my world had gone dark.
“Bastien,” she finally uttered. “You’ve been torturing yourself.”
Her eyes cast across the room, the chrome of my belt buckle glinting from under the bed. “I heard the first strike.”
I closed my eyes abruptly, thinking of the sickening sound leather made when it met flesh.
A sound I’d never forget, and now, because of me, neither would she.
“No.”
Her palms were holding my face, lifting my gaze to meet hers.
Every ravaged day spent apart was etched on our pupils.
“You don’t know what I’ve done,” I finally murmured.
“I don’t have to to know corporal punishment isn’t an appropriate form of penance.”
“It’s not like that. The Jesuits have a practice—”
“I don’t care about thegoddamn Jesuits. If you only saw yourself through my eyes, if you loved yourself as much asIlove you.” Her eyes broke with emotion. “Then you wouldneverraze your own flesh.”
And that was all it took.
With those few words, she pieced a broken man back together. Stitched my heart whole, assembled my soul to a capacity fuller than it’d been before. Like a sorceress, she used her magic to expose all the unseen parts of me. The parts I’d been hiding from myself.
“You are a good man, Bastien Castaneda. No number of lashings could make you any better in my eyes. Tell me, how much good can you bring to the world if you’re ravaged and beaten and bloody on this bed?” Her gaze was accusatory now, reason rearing its ugly head. “Don’t you think all the beautiful gifts you’ve brought to this world far overshadow the few moments of unbridled passion you’ve allowed yourself?”
“That’s not what the Church would say—”
“Fuck the Church, Bastien!” She pressed closer to me, up on her tiptoes, our noses hovering just out of reach, her lips right there. “You contaminate and condemn the most beautiful and complex love of my life, and you think I want to know what God would say? I want to know whatyouwould say.”
My mind warred, good and evil, pleasure and pain, sin and sacrifice, all battled fiercely before she did the one thing she could do to calm the chaos.
She kissed me.
