Page 35 of His Elder

The warmth of my skin began to seep into his, a slow transfer of heat, of life. I felt the slight roughness of a callus on his knuckle—from holding a pencil, probably, from the art he did in secret. I could feel the faint, steady rhythm of his pulse beneath my palm, beating against my own. The entire world seemed to shrink to that single point of contact, a universe contained in the space between our two hands. The sounds of Barcelona outside the window—the traffic, the shouts, the distant music—faded to nothing. The oppressive weight of Kempton's visit dissolved like sugar in water. The clamour of my own guilt and fear, the endless internal argument, went blessedly, mercifully silent.

There was only this. His hand beneath mine. The warmth spreading between us.

Eli did not pull away. For a long, breathless moment, he simply stared at our joined hands, as if trying to decode a message written in a language he'd forgotten. Then, slowly—so slowly I could track every micro-movement—he turned his hand over, palm up, an offering, a question. His fingers, long and ink-stained, intertwined with mine, slotting into the spaces between my own as if they had been made to fit there. His grip was gentle, tentative, questioning.Is this okay? Is this allowed? Is this real?

I held on. I squeezed, just slightly, an answer in pressureand skin.Yes. Yes. Yes.A current of silent understanding passed between us, a conversation without words. We were holding hands. Two boys—two missionaries—holding hands at a kitchen table in Barcelona. It was the smallest rebellion. It was the most dangerous thing I had ever done.

He lifted his eyes from our joined hands and met my gaze, and I forgot how to breathe.

In his eyes, I saw no cynicism, no armour, no carefully constructed distance. Just a deep, profound exhaustion, the kind that comes from carrying a weight for too long without rest. And beneath it, a flicker of something else. Surprise, as if he hadn't expected this. Gratitude, as if I had given him something precious. And something more, something I didn't have a name for, something that made my chest ache with a sweet, terrible pressure.

He held my gaze for a long moment—three seconds, five, an eternity—and I watched the tension drain from his shoulders like water from a broken dam. He let out a slow, shuddering breath, the kind of breath a drowning man takes when he finally breaks the surface. The breath he seemed to have been holding all day, maybe longer. Maybe since the moment he stepped off the plane in Spain.

And then he moved.

He leaned forward, just slightly, closing the space between us, and rested his forehead against my shoulder.

The world stopped.

His hair was soft against my cheek, softer than I'd imagined, though I hadn't let myself imagine. I could smell the faint scent of soap—the cheap, institutional soap from our shower—and beneath it, something warmer, something essentiallyhim. The city air, ink, something faintly sweet I couldn't name. His weight was solid, real, warm and alive andhere. A surrender.A trust I had done nothing to earn but had somehow been given, freely, without condition.

I sat perfectly still, barely breathing, afraid that any movement would break the spell, would remind us where we were, who we were supposed to be. My hand still held his, our fingers interlaced on the table. His forehead pressed against the curve of my shoulder, his breath warm through the thin fabric of my shirt. I could feel the slight tremor running through him, the aftershocks of the day, of the week, of the entire mission. Or maybe it was me trembling. I couldn't tell anymore where I ended and he began.

Slowly, carefully, as if approaching a frightened animal, I lifted my free hand. My heart hammered against my ribs, so loud I was certain he could hear it. I hesitated, my hand hovering in the air between us, and then I let it settle, gently, on the back of his head. My fingers curled into his hair—soft, slightly too long for mission standards, the way it always was—and I cradled him there, against me, holding him the way I wished someone would hold me.

He let out another breath, and this one broke in the middle, a sound caught between a sigh and something more fragile. His hand tightened around mine, gripping harder, anchoring himself.

The room was quiet. The fluorescent light above us hummed. Outside, Barcelona continued, indifferent to the small, sacred thing happening in our tiny kitchen. The only sound was the beat of my own heart, hammering a new, terrifying, and hopeful rhythm against my ribs, and the soft, uneven sound of Eli's breathing.

This is forbidden,a voice whispered in the back of my mind, the voice of every lesson, every rule, every sermon.This is wrong. This is sin. This is how you fall.

But another voice, quieter, newer, but somehow stronger,whispered back:This is the first true thing you've done in your entire life.

I didn't know how long we sat there. Minutes, maybe. An hour. Time felt different, elastic, unimportant. I held him, and he let me, and for those few stolen moments, the world was not a minefield. It was just a kitchen in Barcelona, and two boys who were tired of being afraid.

10

ELIAS

He pulled away first.

It wasn't sudden. It was a slow, agonizing retreat over the next twelve hours. The warmth that had bloomed between us at the kitchen table, the fragile truce declared by our linked hands and his hands in my hair, froze and shattered. By morning, it was as if it never happened.

Samuel woke before the alarm, a ghost slipping out of his bed while the sky was still a bruised purple. I heard him in the bathroom, the frantic scrub of his toothbrush, the splash of cold water on his face, repeated over and over. When he emerged, his face was raw, his eyes shadowed. He refused to look at me.

Our companion study was a masterclass in penance. He didn’t just read the scriptures; he attacked them. His voice was sharp, clipped, each verse a nail he hammered into the coffin of the previous night’s softness. He spoke of accountability, of avoiding the very appearance of evil, of the narrowness of thepath. He spoke to the air in front of him, to the wall, to his God, but not to me. I was a leper in the room, the source of his contamination. The space between our chairs at the table felt a hundred kilometres wide.

The hurt was a cold stone in my gut. Part of me wanted to lash out, to grab him by his crisp white collar and shake him, to scream,What are you so afraid of?But watching him, I saw it wasn't about me. Not really.

I saw the rigid set of his shoulders, the way his jaw worked under his skin, the frantic, desperate energy thrumming just beneath his surface. He wasn’t punishing me. He was punishing himself. He scrubbed the kitchen counters until the cheap laminate gleamed under the fluorescent lights. He reorganized his section of the bookshelf, aligning the spines of his scripture commentaries with a ruler's precision. It was an act of frantic, desperate exorcism. He was trying to scour away the memory of our touch, to scrub his own skin clean of the comfort he had offered, even if just for a moment, and I had accepted.

He was terrified. Not of me, but of himself. Of the part of him that had reached for me, that had intertwined his fingers with mine, that had surrendered to his inner desires, even if just for a moment. He saw that part as a monstrous thing, a weakness, a sin to be starved and beaten back into submission. And watching him hate himself with such devout, programmed intensity made my own anger curdle into something else. Something fierce and protective.

Kempton and Dalton had done this. The Church had done this. They had handed him this doctrine of self-hatred, this poison, and told him it was medicine. They told him he was broken, and he believed them so completely, he was willing to tear himself apart to prove his faith.

I sat on the edge of my bed that night, listening to the citybreathe outside our window. I sketched in my notebook, not people this time, just jagged, angry lines, the charcoal smudging under my thumb. Across the small room, Samuel knelt by his bed. His shoulders shook with the force of his silent prayers. He prayed for so long his white shirt rumpled at the hips, his posture eventually slumping with exhaustion. I watched the rigid line of his back, the devotion, the misery.

And I decided.