Chapter 13
I woke to pain radiating through my back from sleeping on concrete and the acrid smell of cheap weed.
Diego stood over us, exhaling smoke toward the ceiling. "Morning, sunshine. Or afternoon, technically." He nudged my leg with his boot.
Lorenzo was still asleep beside me, his breathing even.
I groaned and rolled away from him.
Diego took another drag. "Every cop in Rio is looking for you, by the way. Church mobilized Sacra Custodia units. You've got maybe forty-eight hours before they find this place. We have to go make arrangements to get out of here. That means you’re on duty making sure your boyfriend here doesn’t bleed out while we’re gone. ”
I frowned and sat up. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Uh-huh. Sure. Just try not to kill each other while we’re gone.”
The door closed behind him and Jasper with a hollow echo.
I turned and looked down at where Lorenzo was sleeping. It’d been a full day since he’d passed out in the shower. He’d come around a few times since then, mostly to eat, drink, or find his way to the toilet. But we hadn’t talked. I certainly hadn’t asked him why he’d said what he did.
Now we were alone.
Maybe I’d get lucky, and he’d stay asleep the entire time Jasper and Diego were gone.
As soon as the thought crossed my mind, Lorenzo stirred and groaned, one hand going to his bandaged side. His eyes opened and found mine immediately.
"You're still here," he said quietly.
"So are you."
He pushed himself up and limped toward the back of the warehouse, where the bathroom was. When he returned, it was with a bottle of cachaca and two glasses.
"Are you sure that’s wise?" I asked as he twisted the cap off. “You were barely conscious a few hours ago.”
He poured himself a glass, and then another. “All the more reason to get drunk. And I’m not drinking alone.” He slid the second one toward me.
"I don't want to—"
"I don't care what you want." He picked up the second glass and placed it in my hand. "Your father's dead. He was the closest thing to a father I had, and I killed him. We're both fucked. So we're going to sit here and get drunk."
I sighed and closed my fingers around the glass. "To being completely fucked," I said and drank.
The cachaca burned all the way down my throat. Lorenzo drank his in one go, then held out his glass for more. I hesitated, then poured him another.
By the fourth glass, the edges of everything had started to blur. I'd migrated to the floor at some point, back against the wall. Lorenzo sat across from me.
"What was your mother like?" he asked.
“Why the fuck do you care?” I spat before I could stop myself.
To my surprise, Lorenzo wasn’t hostile. He shrugged. “I barely remember mine.”
I winced and looked away, trying not to think about how similar he and I were.
"Kind," I said eventually. "Too kind for the life she married into.
After she was diagnosed with cancer, I prayed every day for God to save her.
I begged. Pleaded. But she died anyway. Then Gabriel drowned.
" I took another drink. "What kind of God lets a kind woman die, lets a child drown, and leaves a man like my father untouched? "
"Maybe He doesn't choose," Lorenzo said. "Your mother got cancer because cells mutate. Gabriel drowned because pools are dangerous. Not because God decided they deserved to die."
"So God just watches? Does nothing? What’s the point of prayer then?"
"Maybe we're supposed to make our own choices. Fight our own fights."
I sighed. “Saint Augustine said that prayer is an exercise in desire. In seminary, we’re taught that unanswered prayer isn’t evidence of divine silence. It’s a conversation. But it’s always felt one-sided to me.”
“Well, maybe this Saint Augustine guy didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”
I smirked at the thought of how some of my teachers might’ve responded to such blasphemy. "What about yours?" I asked. "Your mother."
"I don't remember much. I was maybe five when they took me." He drank. "But I remember her smell. Cheap perfume and cigarettes. The way she'd hum when she braided my hair. Then she owed a debt and couldn't pay. They killed her. Kept me in a cage. Made me fight for food."
My hands clenched around my glass.
"And then my father bought you," I said quietly.
"And I bit you." Lorenzo met my eyes. "You remember?"
"I do." My voice cracked. "I thought about you every day for twenty years."
Lorenzo went still. "Why?"
I considered the question. “Because you were different. Every other child my father brought for me to play with was…deferential.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Deferential?”
“Cultured,” I supplied. “They treated me like Ambassador Oliviera’s son.
Always let me win every game, even when I played badly, always polite, never called me names.
Gave me everything I asked for. And the adults in my life treated me like I might break.
You were the first person since Gabriel who didn’t treat me like I was fragile. ”
“I bit you.”
I nodded. “You did. I still carry the scar.” I held up my forearm, pulling back the sleeve to show the faded scar. "Maybe it's stupid, but you woke me up that day. The pain let me cry. It let me hurt the way I needed to." My cheeks burned. "That's insane."
"No, it isn't," Lorenzo said quietly.
"Yes, it is!" I gestured animatedly until the alcohol sloshed over the side of my glass. "It's fucked up. I've been doing it all my life. Hurting myself, hurting others. I'm a priest, and I've been calling violence holy because some cardinals told me that was the path to healing."
"You're right," he said. "It is fucked up.
But you know what's more fucked up? That they took a kid drowning in grief and taught him that violence was healing.
That pain was holy. They took what you needed and twisted it into a weapon.
" His hands clenched. "That's not on you, Rafael. That's on them."
"I still chose it."
"Did you? Or did they give you a framework where the only acceptable way to process your grief was through their violence? Where saying no meant being cast out, losing your purpose, becoming nothing?" He met my eyes. "That's not choice. That's coercion dressed up in liturgy."
"What are we then?" I whispered. "If not the choices we make?"
"Survivors." He raised his glass. "You jumped through that window. You saved me in the shower. Those were your choices."
We drank. The silence that followed was softer than anything I'd known in years, comfortable in a way that made my throat ache because I'd spent so long thinking I didn't deserve comfort, that suffering was the only language I knew how to speak.
I slid down the wall until I was lying on the concrete.
Lorenzo stretched out next to me, close enough that our shoulders almost touched, and the warmth of another body next to mine was so foreign and so necessary that I couldn't remember why I'd spent twenty years denying myself this simple human thing.
His hand moved between us slowly. When his fingers found mine and our palms pressed together, the contact was warm and solid and more real than any prayer I'd ever spoken.
This is what grace is, I thought through the alcohol haze. Not suffering. Not violence dressed up as righteousness. Just this: another person's hand in the dark.
"I'm drunk," I whispered.
"Me too."
I pulled my hand back because I was terrified of what it meant to want this, to want him, and the loss of contact made something in my chest go hollow. "I need to sleep this off."
Lorenzo nodded and crawled to the cots, where he yanked down a blanket. He curled up on his side, back to me, and the space between us suddenly felt like miles instead of feet, like every wall I'd ever built around myself made solid and insurmountable.
I stared at his back and thought about how I'd spent my entire life alone by choice, by doctrine, by the conviction that isolation was holiness. But lying there on the cold concrete with my father's blood still under my fingernails, I couldn't remember why any of that had ever mattered.
I moved closer and put my arms around him, draping the blanket over us both, and when he didn't pull away, when he just settled back into my warmth like it was the most natural thing in the world, something tight and ancient in my chest finally loosened.
I woke hard and aching, my cock pressed against Lorenzo's ass. For a moment, I was disoriented by the unfamiliar weight of another body against mine, even if his steady breathing was comforting.
His body heat soaked through the thin fabric into my skin.
Nothing had been this real since my mother's arms, since Gabriel's small hand in mine.
God, when was the last time I'd touched another person like this?
Not violently, not accidentally, but with warmth, with want, with the desperate hunger of someone who'd been starving for human contact and hadn't even realized it until now?
Late evening light spilled through the warehouse windows and turned the dust motes into something almost holy.
My cock throbbed where it pressed against him, but I didn't move away.
My body had found something it needed and was refusing to let go.
Maybe for once in my miserable life I could just let myself have this without interrogating every reason why I shouldn't.
My hips rocked forward, and the friction made my breath catch.
It was wrong. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
Not when Lorenzo's warmth was chasing away the cold that had lived in my bones since I was eleven years old, since I'd knelt at my mother's grave and decided that feeling anything at all was a weakness I couldn't afford.