CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, THE CABAL announced Professor Ilaria collapsed due to her arcane, baneful serpents, which were then permanently banned. She had been found unresponsive on the cabal premises and, by the strict protocols, the body was to be removed without exception.
The polemarch and, most importantly, the archon eponymous assumed it was the negligent fault of Séverine Ilaria for her own death.
Perhaps, then, if James had treaded carefully afterward, he would have lived a safe life.
“What were you going to tell me earlier?” Elliott asked James.
Above the camping grounds, the broad, open sky was radiant with billions of moon-washed stars.
The pair loved stargazing together in the forest since they were young.
For years, they had a summer tradition where they went into the Nixon Forest to stargaze the night before the snow fell.
That would be the very last time. Then, AEscwulf College was long behind them.
Next week was September seventh, their fresh start at Tiberian College.
That was what James told himself, convinced if he kept reiterating it to himself, it would be true. A fresh start for them.
Elliott passed him a thermos of beef bone broth.
“What?” James asked beside him, he ran his eyes over the Harvest Moon.
“You mentioned the theater department.” Elliott cleared the flecks of dirt from his long sleeved, buttoned denim shirt. He knotted the dark bandana around his neck. “That if I knew the truth about it I would never forgive you. What did you mean to tell me?”
James thought about it. “Nothing, never mind.”
Séverine Ilaria was gone. However, instead of a cyclopean weight lifted from his shoulders, he felt the gaze of a cellist behind them. Of course, the Nixon Forest was available to all students year round, with the exception of extreme weather conditions, it rarely closed.
Surreptitiously, however, the stage actors had gathered in a clandestine congregation a few tents over from their sleeping bags.
Actors that preferred the Amalfi coastlines of Italy and the pampering luxuries of the wineries of Toulouse, France were outside in the dried soil with them.
He’d never heard not even one of the lead actors ever mention the dense timber forestation of the Nixon Forest before.
They were a hundred meters behind them, traversing through the immense, vast elms and timber, the mountainous terrain of the camp grounds encumbered with stately trees and tiresome roots. The thick, sweaty summer air of the overheated woodlands flooded them with tiny flies.
If James believed in coincidences, he wouldn’t have been concerned.
“I can handle anything you need to tell me, James. I already promised to forgive you for anything.”
Everything was finally right again, and James couldn’t ruin it. Besides, there was a meteor shower aligned that night. He’d wanted to use the extraordinarily brilliant meteor storm to formally ask Elliott to be his boyfriend. He lit the end of his Marlboro cigarette.
He paused when he saw Lucy Swann enter through the wooded gates of the entrance. Lucy Swann wore a black Dolce and Gabbana evening dress in the mud of the forest despite the illogicality of it. Strapped across her back was a golden crossbow and arrow.
Last weekend, she increased Perseus’s life insurance, and the pay out was expected to be massive one day, James heard, considering that she now stood to inherit his part of the Swann fortune.
Should anything happen to him.
By the dyspathy in her glower towards him, she wasn’t amused that James decided to endanger her husband’s life the same week she decided to increase his life insurance. The insurance had been neatly done, convincingly a formality in their post-nuptial paperwork.
She was methodical. She understood the purpose of stealth in financial matters.
While Perseus had forgiven James for inducting him into yet another murder plot without permission, Lucy granted him far less clemency. He nearly interfered with her money.
She’d killed men for less.
Her pupils were the tone of cold ash. The same ash of the letter Callum left for Elliott to not leave for Montana, which James had burned with the edge of his lighter before they left.
James’s enemies were rising in number before his political career began.
However, he never perceived it as the omen it was for him.
He never intended to retreat when he could have.
He never intended to surrender to any of them.
James asked Elliott instead, with the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, “Where will Callum take you in the winter?”
“Callum?” Elliott repeated.
“When you were on top of me…” James reminded him under his breath. It might’ve been their fourth round or the fifth. “There was a passport I saw hidden behind your Jimi Hendrix poster. The cover of it had the Hán 韓 insignia, I imagine Callum gifted it to you.”
“Oh, I booked a flight to Mount Kilimanjaro with Callum, I’ve never been out of the country.
I bought the ticket myself, he just had an extra passport cover.
I really hate the thought of not seeing him for a while after we return, though.
” Elliott frowned, wincing at the bright, remarkable stars as though their luminescence in his eyes was the matter with him.
Why was his brain acting weird and confused at itself?
At times, Elliott turned over in bed to whisper a joke to Callum, and it was James asleep there instead.
His mind couldn’t keep it together. There were moments where he mentioned an inside joke with James, expecting him to laugh, then he remembered only he and Callum knew it instead.
Elliott had wanted to leave Connecticut since the winter, only he couldn’t stop thinking of Callum.
The way he laughed at Elliott’s jokes even when they didn’t make sense to him.
The way he read Mandarin-translated literature and Cantonese-translated ancient poems beside him in the afternoons with complete concentration.
The way he practiced the drums with him before bed every night.
Even when Callum read comic books beside Elliott, it was with his full attention. His brows wrinkled.
James didn’t care for foreign literature. He didn’t have time for comic books anymore.
He liked to watch Elliott drum with the set in his room, but that was the extent of his interest. On the first Sunday of the month, Elliott made a point to be early to chapel, but Callum didn’t attend anymore.
Elliott grimaced from the noise of dozens of chatter–crushed potato chip bags, crackles of the outdoor campfire, the sound of seniors that drank beer and belched as they crunched the cans.
Elliott missed him and he hadn’t even left yet.
Every time Elliott thought he could leave without Callum, he was messed up inside about it.
James reminded him, “We’ll leave Connecticut behind, it’s what we’ve wanted.”
“Yeah.” Elliott grumbled underneath the sound of James’s political aide friends that set up camp as they muttered about the cellular connection. They’d flown in, intensely curious about James.
Elliott already missed Kitty so profoundly, so afflictively, it was killing him inside. He’d spoken to her five times that afternoon alone, and three more times in the twilit air, pressed against the telephone cords wrapped around his taut fist. He wanted her to be with them.
He couldn’t even work up the courage to write to Callum farewell.
Callum helped him after the letters from Professor Ilaria ceased as though she’d lost interest in him completely.
Callum promised to write him every night before bed, and Elliott hadn’t responded to the last letter.
His heart seized in his chest. Compose yourself, Elliott.
“Do you need help writing him farewell?” James teased, he tried to resist the smile on his face.
Elliott shook his head. “We’ll see each other when the term ends for the fall. It’s only for a few months that we’ll be apart.”
“Of course, you will see him then.” James kept his voice rational.
Even though he felt irrationally possessive.
Part of Elliott falls in love with anyone who saves his life.
It’s in his nature to love as he’s loved.
He smoothed his hard leather vest, his long-sleeved flannel shirt buttoned underneath, as he spoke with a smoky breath.
“It might be beneficial to learn to leave the past behind, however.”
James was nothing, if not relentlessly hypocritical. As all politicians were.
“He’s not the past, he’s my friend.” Elliott raised his voice over the noise. “I’m only a plane ride from him, he knows that.”
James behaved nonplussed, his hands in his pockets, smoke curling around his smirk. “Naturally, he’s not the past. If he’s a friend of yours, then he’s a friend of mine.”
Elliott smiled at him. “That really means a lot. I think you two would really like each other.”
He tousled the underclassmen’s hair. “Confessedly, I love that you’ve made a new friend of your own.” James smiled back at him. “I am proud as hell of you, Elliott. Really, I am.”
Elliott settled himself onto his back. He winced up at the magnificent lunar atmosphere. “I haven’t been to the west of the United States before. It sounds charming and rugged.”
Elliott beamed up at him. His idyllic, handsome features were dreamy and James nearly kissed him then.
However, James remembered where they were. Congressman Pittman’s aides were intent on exploring where James was from. They perceived him as more of a high-end model than a future senator. Which James resented. He planned to prove his political acuity in the election season.
For now, he was with the love of his life.
Earlier, James had kissed the tip of Elliott’s ear before they entered the camp grounds, thinking they would be widely alone as usual. He nearly asked Elliott then to be the love of his life then. His fox sparrow. Is twenty hundred kisses such a trouble?
Elliott had grinned back. Pay them at they leisure, one by one.
However, they were surrounded now. That had been the last time they could exchange those words in public. In the end, James hadn’t even shown him the tattoo he’d gotten inked on his ribcage beneath his heart that read in little, enamored letters. FOX SPARROW.
Politics was an extremely masculine, patriarchal institution.
As a public figure, the staffers believed James couldn’t be seen fraternizing in a way that seemed subversive.
The state of Montana held conservative values.
Traditionalist beliefs. Rural principles.
Therefore, if he wanted to succeed in his youth, he needed to assimilate to his acquaintances in the political sphere and cull the rest of his former companions that weren’t the archetype of the national identity.
Elliott knew he didn’t fit in well with that vision. Wounded.
He worried about it from time to time if he would be abandoned. Forgotten.
Elliott couldn’t bear being left behind again. He already had trouble making new friends and the new friend he made he struggled with leaving him.
There was hurt on Elliott’s face, but he hid it, tinkering with his Walkman instead. Elliott tugged at his bandana around his neck as though it suffocated him. He kept his head down.
Against his will, and against his better judgment, James reached to brush his thumb against Elliott’s thumb.
He locked their thumbs together for only a moment.
Even if he risked danger in that millisecond, for Elliott, it was worth it.
Elliott was worth the risk that his infatuation would only end in heartbreak.
He was worth the pain of the past winter.
James would endure it all over again for him.
THE END.