Chapter 7: Glitter and Goodbyes
The ferry’s engine shifted to a lower gear, a deep, groaning shudder that vibrated through the deck plates and up through the soles of their shoes. The mainland’s electric necklace of lights was a receding dream. Ahead, Crockett Island was a deeper darkness against the star-pricked sky, a solid mass of silence waiting to swallow them back into its rhythms of suspicion and memory.
Riley leaned his forearms on the cold railing, the salt wind peeling back his jacket. Glitter caught in the rough weave of his sweater sparkled in the boat’s running lights—tiny, stubborn constellations from the craft store disaster. He could feel the echo of Paul’s leg over his, the warm, solid weight of it in the dark of the movie theater. The film had been predictably, terribly bad. A cacophony of cheap jumpscares and idiotic dialogue. It had been perfect. For two hours, tucked away in the back row, they had been just two more bodies in the dark, anonymous and unjudged. The world had been told, firmly, to wait.
Paul stood beside him, not touching, but so close Riley could feel the unnatural absence of body heat and the slight, electric hum that seemed to live in the air around him. He was staring at the approaching island, his profile a pale cut-out against the night.
“I can hear Warren Snell arguing with his wife about their septic tank,” Paul said, his voice quiet, almost lost in the wind and engine noise. “Three blocks from the dock. And Beverly Keane just said her nightly prayer for my corrupted soul. She does it at 9:15, like clockwork.” He turned his head, a wry, pained smile on his lips. “The break is officially over.”
“Yeah, well, screw them,” Riley said, the words rough but gentle. He didn’t look away from the island. “That hour we wasted in the sex toy aisle was more holy than anything Keane has ever muttered.”
A soft laugh escaped Paul, a real one. “I hadn’t seen a ‘Marital Aid Marathon’ display since the Nixon administration. It was… educational.”
“You’re a terrible priest.”
“I’m not a priest at all. Not anymore.” Paul said it without bitterness, a simple, awful fact. “Just a man with very good hearing and a lot of glitter in his hair.”
Riley finally looked at him. The gold dust was threaded through Paul’s dark curls, catching the light like flecks of mica. It was on his collar, his cheeks. He looked touched by something celestial and cheap, an angel from a dime-store greeting card. Riley’s chest ached. “It suits you.”
The ferry docked with a metallic bang and a shout from the deckhand. The handful of other passengers disembarked quickly, heads down, hurrying to warm houses. Riley and Paul hung back, letting the distance grow. The pact was unspoken but solid: no swift return to the rectory’s skeletal loneliness.
They took the long way, boots scuffing on the packed dirt road that skirted the town. The only sounds were the distant crash of surf on the far shore and the rustle of dry grass in the fields. Their hands swung, and the back of Riley’s knuckles brushed against Paul’s. Once. Twice. On the third pass, Paul’s fingers slipped between his, cool and strong. They didn’t speak. They just held on, walking through the sleeping world, their linked hands a secret.
They ended up on the beach behind St. Patrick’s, the black water sighing up the sand. Riley sat, grunting as he hit the cold ground, and Paul folded himself down beside him with an unnatural, graceful ease. The sand held the day’s weak sun, a faint memory of warmth.
“See that?” Paul pointed to a cluster of stars just above the horizon. “Orion. The hunter. He looked the same over the desert, you know. When I was young. Real young. Before…” He let the sentence die. Before the angel. Before the blood. Before time stopped.
Riley listened, his head finding the hollow where Paul’s shoulder met his neck. He didn’t know the constellations. His world had been bars, blurred headlights, the defined geometry of a prison cell. This was better. Paul’s voice was a low, steady river in the dark, talking about Greek myths and Babylonian astronomers and the relentless, faithful march of the stars. It was a history lesson from a man who had lived more of it than any textbook.
The cold began to seep through Riley’s jeans, a deep, invasive chill. He shifted. “We should head back. You might not feel it, but I’m about to turn into a Popsicle.”
Paul didn’t move. The silence stretched, filled only by the sea. When he spoke, his voice was so small it was nearly swallowed whole. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
The words hung there, naked and trembling. This was the man who had faced down an angry town, who had contained a monstrous angel, who was older than Riley’s grandfather. And he was terrified of an empty room.
Riley stood. He brushed the sand from his jeans, a soft swish-swish in the quiet. Then he extended his hand, not as a question, but as an offering. A decision already made.
“You won’t be.”
The walk to the rectory was faster, purposeful. The half-finished building loomed, the single work lamp in the window like a watchful eye. Inside, the air was still and smelled of sawdust and mildew. Riley locked the door behind them. The click of the deadbolt was the loudest sound in the world.
Paul stood in the middle of the main room, suddenly awkward, a visitor in his own purgatory. He looked at the pile of lumber, the waiting tools, the laptop glowing on the floor—the scattered pieces of his endless atonement.
“I don’t…” he started, then stopped.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Riley said, shedding his jacket. He kept his movements easy, deliberate. He toed off his boots, lined them up by the door. “Just… be here.”
He crossed to the narrow, temporary cot he’d been using while working on the place. It was pushed against the least-damaged wall. He pulled back the rough wool blanket and sat on the edge, the frame creaking. He looked at Paul, his expression open, unguarded in the lamplight. An invitation.
Paul moved as if in a trance. He sat beside Riley, the cot groaning in protest. The space between them was an inch. A mile.
“It’s not…,” Paul whispered, staring at his own hands. “My body. It’s not what you’d expect. What I was. The angel, it didn’t just make me young. It… changed things. Rewrote things. A different kind of vessel.”
Riley reached over. He didn’t touch Paul’s body. He touched his hand, turning it over, tracing the cool, flawless skin of his palm. “I’m not expecting anything, Paul. I’m just here.”
The simplicity of it broke something. A dam of eighty years of solitude, of dogma, of monstrous certainty and more monstrous error. Paul turned his head, and his eyes were wells of pure, undiluted need. He brought Riley’s hand to his chest, pressing the palm flat against the crisp cotton of his shirt.
Beneath it, Riley felt the soft, gentle swell of a breast. He felt the pebbled hardness of a nipple against his palm. He didn’t jerk away. He let his breath out, slow and steady, and held Paul’s gaze. He saw no deception, no trick, only a profound and vulnerable truth. This was him. The beautiful, impossible, rearranged fact of him.
“Okay,” Riley breathed.
He leaned in, closing that final distance, and kissed him. It was not a kiss of fire, but of deep, settling peace. Paul made a sound against his mouth, a fractured thing that was part sob, part relief, and his hands came up to cradle Riley’s face, his touch desperate and reverent.
They sank back onto the thin mattress, a tangle of limbs and whispered assurances. Clothing was dealt with not with frenzy, but with a slow, almost ceremonial care. Each new inch of skin revealed was a revelation, a silent conversation. Riley mapped the truth of him with his hands, his lips: the soft curve of his waist, the elegant line of his hip, the shocking, perfect feminine heat between his legs. Paul trembled, not from cold, but from the sheer, terrifying force of being known.
“You’re beautiful,” Riley murmured into the hollow of his throat, the words a vow. “All of you. It’s all beautiful.”
Paul could only cling to him, his face buried in Riley’s shoulder, as a feeling he had no name for—clean, warm, and utterly human—swept through him, scouring out centuries of loneliness. Outside, the island slept, gossipy and grim. Outside, the stars spun their old, indifferent patterns.
But in the skeletal rectory, for the first time since the blood and the fire, two ruined men were whole. The world, for a little while longer, was still waiting.