Chapter 5: The Vigil in the Dark
The rectory hallway that night was a throat of shadows. The polished oak glimmered faintly in the sliver of moonlight from a high window, the carved faces of the Stations seemingly averted in pious discomfort. Silence should have reigned, but the old building was never truly quiet. It sighed. It settled. It transmitted anguish through its bones.
In his spare room, Paul lay rigid as a shroud atop his thin blanket. The chill of the island night meant nothing to him; his own internal cold was deeper. But another warmth permeated the stone and plaster, seeping under his door like a taunt. It was a compound scent, uniquely Jud’s: the coppery sweetness of his blood—a vibrant, living aroma that made Paul’s gums ache and his stomach clench—and layered over it, that other, more maddening perfume. Pheromones. They weren’t a clinical concept to Paul’s preternatural senses; they were a weather system, a dense, curling fog of allure that spoke directly to a predatory biology he despised. It didn’t smell of lust, not merely. It smelled of vulnerability, of a soft, secret openness. It made Jud, to Paul’s starving senses, seem less like a temptation and more like a sacrament waiting to be consumed.
He squeezed his eyes shut. The image from the confessional wouldn't leave him: Jud’s stunned, tear-bright eyes, the vulnerable column of his throat as he swallowed. The knowledge of what was hidden——the gentle swell constrained by rough cloth, a secret softness Jud carried like a cross. Paul’s hands clenched into fists, nails digging crescents into his own palms. The pain was a pinprick, useless.
The wanting was a physical sickness. It coiled in his gut, a cold need for blood twisting around a hot, human need for skin, for warmth, for surrender. He saw it in a devastating, shameful montage: tearing the clumsy cassock away, the rasp of the binder tearing, finding that hidden softness with his mouth. His lips against a pounding jugular, the ecstasy of the drink merging with the ecstasy of possession. Of filling. Of creating. The vampire fantasy bled seamlessly into the mortal one—Jud, rounded with a child, his child, a impossible future where his curse became a kind of gestation.
A broken sound escaped him. His hand moved from his fist to his own body, touching himself with a fury that was also a plea. It was a violation of every vow, a mockery of his penance. He thought of Jud’s mouth, that unwieldy, beautiful smile. He imagined Jud above him, riding him, a look of shocked reverence on his face. The fantasy was so vivid, so tender and so carnal, that it vaporized the last of his control. He finished with a shuddering gasp, his release stark and shameful in his palm, a single hot tear tracking from the corner of his eye into his hairline.
“Jud,” he whispered to the oppressive dark. The name was both a prayer and the vilest curse he knew.
A few doors down, Jud had buried his face in his pillow to stifle the sounds. The ache was a full-body thrum, a resonant emptiness that was more than sexual. It felt like homesickness for a place he’d never been. The ghost of Paul’s unorthodox absolution in the confessional—the image of God in all its mysterious forms—echoed, but it was drowned out by the memory of Paul’s face afterward: pale, strained, beautiful.
He saw it when he closed his eyes. Paul, not in the pulpit, but in the dim confessional. Leaning forward. Their lips meeting through the lattice, then, impossibly, the flimsy wooden door giving way. A kiss that was soft, patient, a question. Jud’s own clumsy hands fumbling with Paul’s robes, his own self-consciousness melting under that steady gaze. He imagined straddling Paul’s lap, the slow, devastating glide of being filled, being seen, in every way. Paul’s hands, those elegant priest’s hands, guiding his hips, not with force, but with a certainty that felt like grace.
The fantasy spiraled, sweet and fatal. A small cottage, not a rectory. Waking up to that quiet voice. The scandal, the banishment—none of it mattered. A ring. A little girl with Paul’s dark, solemn eyes. A life built not on hiding, but on a love so vast it would have to be a kind of faith itself.
His body clenched, yearning for a completion that was physical and spiritual and utterly impossible. He came with a sob, the wetness spreading beneath him, a messy, human proof of his sin. He trembled, breath hitching. The aftershocks weren’t pleasure; they were a hollowing out. The want was so intense it made the room tilt, a dizzying vertigo of need. A raw, animal part of him screamed to get up, to walk those twenty feet down the hall, to bare his neck and his soul and let the consequences be damned.
He didn’t move.
They lay in their separate cells, two hearts hammering against the silence. The addiction was bilateral, a circuit of pure ache with no release. They tempered it with silence, with stillness, with the awful discipline of saints and martyrs. It was a hydraulic press on their chests. It hurt. It hurt more than any wound either of them had ever borne, because they were inflicting it upon themselves, and upon each other, with every breath they didn’t take towards the other’s door.