The Cross of Sins (6 page)

With a passion he hadn't felt in a long time, Marco scurried about his loft, pulling a large blank canvas clear from the clutter. He pushed a bland unfinished landscape off his easel, let it bang to the floor, and then spun the easel away from the window to face Luca.

He dragged the table across the room.

He took Luca by the shoulders. "What about the book?" Luca said.

"Do you trust me to tell you where it is?"

Luca nodded. Then, like a prop, like a possession, he let himself be guided into the arms of his ex-lover.

"I'll tell you soon," Marco whispered. "But first..."

The artist leaned Luca back against the table. "Put your weight here for me." He positioned one hand back; he pulled the other forward and laid it across his tight muscled stomach, tilted down. He spread the fingers just so, like arrows pointing down to his cock. Luca could feel himself harden at Marco's touch, at the tenderness with which he sculpted him into the composition he desired.

Luca almost felt as if he needed to apologize for the involuntary reaction. Marco spoke as though he could read his thoughts, "It's okay. I'm going to call this one, Eternal Muse. If I don't see you for another five years—if I'm unlucky enough to never see you again—this is exactly how I want to remember you. Zefferino was a muse, too, you know. His short black hair, his youthful body. He kept the fire burning in Videlle."

"Do I keep the fire burning in you?"

Marco touched his index finger to Luca's chin and guided his head up and to the left, just a little. Then, he placed a single gentle kiss on Luca's lips and said, "Sometimes the embers are hotter than the fire itself. Now don't move."

The artist stood back and looked. The sun shined from a skylight onto the back of Luca's shimmering brown hair, forming a glow behind his beautiful face and body. He looked angelic, Marco thought. He looked like a work of art, even before the paint had touched the canvas.

"Perfect," Marco smiled.

The light was gone, the painting sat propped upon the easel, its glistening thick brushstrokes drying in the lamplight of the loft. A complete work. A product of passion. The most perfect painting Marco had ever created.

"My Eternal Muse," Marco whispered again, although his lips had trouble forming the words as they pressed hard against Luca's, their tongues pushing into each others' mouths.

With his hands, his forearms, his chest splattered with reds, browns, yellows and blacks, Marco pushed Luca flat onto the table, accidentally kicking the empty bottle of vodka across the floor, which hit the leg of a chair and smashed. Neither of them cared.

The paint from Marco smeared across the mounds and valleys of Luca's hard young body. While the artist took Luca's jaw in one hand and his hard heavy cock in the other, Luca himself struggled to get the zip of Marco's pants down. When he did, Marco's penis pounced, pressing into Luca's balls with a hot hard hungry greeting.

Luca groaned. Marco responded by shoving his own thumb and index finger into the young man's mouth. Luca sucked on them ravenously. Marco pushed the bulbous head of his cock harder into Luca's balls, pushing against his sack, and for a second, Luca thought he was going to burst. This early in the piece he had no choice but to shove Marco off him. He pushed too hard. Marco slipped and rolled off the table, landing on the floor hard and laughing hysterically as he did.

Luca quickly leaned over the edge of the table and looked down, concerned. "Are you all right?"

Marco responded by grabbing the young man by the back of the head and pulling him down onto the floor as well.

Luca landed on top of Marco awkwardly, winding him, forcing more laughter out of him. "It's been a while," the artist managed eventually, gasping and wheezing and panting as the air returned to his lungs. He scrambled to his feet and clambered over to a set of drawers in the kitchen. From the last drawer, he pulled out a packet of condoms and a bottle of lube.

Luca watched from the floor, his large stiff penis getting even harder still at the sight of Marco tearing open the condom packet with his teeth and rolling the rubber onto his cock. Marco massaged it with his lubed fist, making sure the fit was comfortable, before returning to Luca on the floor.

Luca instinctively lay flat on his back while Marco took his ankles and raised his legs in the air. He let go with one hand, so he could guide his cock inside Luca's ass, and then smiled as the young Italian grinned, groaned, and slapped both palms flat against the floorboards, locking himself down and getting ready to take Marco in.

From past experience, Marco knew—and always loved—that once he was inside Luca, the young man was capable of coming without so much as touching himself.

Marco began to slide in and out of Luca's warm ass, slowly at first, but Luca prompted him to push harder. Faster.

Luca felt his stomach muscles contract as Marco crunched him up into a tight ball. He felt the pressure, the pleasure, of the intruding cock. His body sent signals of pain to his brain, telling him of the danger that there was something foreign inside him; his brain sent a signal back to his body, telling it that danger is ecstasy.

Luca felt Marco's balls rocking against his ass.

He felt the head of Marco's cock inside him, bulging. Getting ready to explode.

He saw the look on Marco's face. His eyes squeezed shut. His jaw dropped open. And then, as a rush of air escaped him, Luca felt the shaft of Marco's cock swell against the rim of his ass and felt the hot rush of come fill the tip of the condom inside him.

At that moment, Luca clamped his eyes shut and felt his own balls erupt, forcing a flood up the vein of his shaft, a flood that erupted from his cock and spattered all the way up his body, covering his stomach and chest in cloudy pearls and vines.

Luca rocked and groaned as a delayed second spurt burst forth, shooting and dripping more come onto his belly.

When he eventually opened his eyes, wide and glazed, he saw Marco's smiling, panting face looking down at him. "My God, I do love you. Even though I know you're going to walk out that door. I'll always love you."

Luca leaned up and kissed him. "I'll always love you, too. And yes, you're right; I am going to walk out that door. But not before you tell me—"

"I know, I know," Marco said. "The book."

The convent of Santa Maria del Mare was a tiny whitewashed mud brick building overlooking the Mediterranean, half an hour's travel from the village of Vita Sola.

In 1919—the year after the Great War ended, when the convent was built—thirty-two young girls, widowed wives and village virgins became the brides of Christ and joined the convent in its honest and innocent mission to salvage peace and faith—through the word of God—in a world that had lost its way.

But as time moved on, fewer and fewer women joined the convent. Heaven claimed more brides than even God could provide. Now there were merely four inhabitants of the convent Santa Maria del Mare: Sister Francesca, a sixty-two-year-old nun, who had come from a long line of olive growers, whose family had taught her the goodness of God and the toils of the soil; Sister Eva, a seventy-one-year-old nun, who devoted the majority of her time in the chapel, praying constantly for the lost and displaced souls of the world, for those tormented by war or ravaged by famine or taken into God's kingdom by the tragedy around them; Sister Margarita, a spritely forty-nine-year-old nun, whose sheer love of life meant that she sometimes had more energy and enthusiasm for sunshine and sport than she did for her prayers; and last but not least, a troublesome, free-spirited orphan who, twenty-six years ago, had been left in a basket on the convent's doorstep. There was a note pinned to the baby boy's blanket explaining that he had no name and was a bastard child, born in the ghettoes of Rome. Around his neck was a small crucifix on a silver chain. No markings. No engraving. No clue as to who this child could be.

When Sister Eva discovered him on the doorstep, the morning sun was shining on his face. So she took him in, and the three nuns named him Luca da Roma—a Light of Rome.

Luca was a good boy and a good student. He grew up helping Sister Francesca in the fields and the vegetable patch, praying solemnly with Sister Eva in the chapel, and playing soccer with Sister Margarita on the cliff top overlooking the sea—they had lost more than one soccer ball to God's great ocean over the years. As Luca grew older, he became interested in history and art, until the day finally came when Sister Francesca, Sister Eva and Sister Margarita drove seventeen-year-old Luca to the nearest train station—twenty-three miles away, bouncing along in a 1962 Fiat that had been left to the convent in the will of deceased local villager—where Luca bought a ticket to Rome to discover the world beyond the convent.

Before he boarded his train, it was Sister Eva, the eldest of the three, who had taken his hands in hers and said, "Remember one thing. Be courageous always. Courage brings fortitude. Fortitude brings character. Character will make you the man you will become. And that man, above all else, must believe in who he is. That is the greatest lesson I can ever teach you. Everything you do, do it always for courage."

In the years that followed, Luca questioned his sexuality as many times as he questioned his faith. He was a handsome boy and made enough money to live, modeling for the struggling artists of Rome. There were times he did more than model and made more money. And there were times he doubted the presence of the Lord in his life.

But he never doubted the place the Sisters held in his heart.

As often as possible, he would return to that tiny convent on the cliff tops.

And the Sisters would always greet him with open arms. They kept his room tidy, they dusted the surface of his drawers and they washed the dusty sheets clean if and when they knew he was coming to visit, so that every time he walked through the doors of the convent and into that tiny bedroom, he knew everything would be as he had left it. He knew that this was his home. These women were his mothers. And he was the son that they had given up for God.

Today, Luca was returning home.

Even if it was only to pack a bag and take off again, the Sisters didn't mind. They loved his visits, no matter how fleeting or far between.

Luca had called ahead to say he would be there by two in the afternoon and wouldn't be leaving for his connecting flight to Vienna until seven the following morning. Sister Francesca had pulled her finest tomatoes, potatoes and pumpkins from her garden and was busy cooking up Luca's favorite soup. Once the broth was simmering, she pounded flour and water into a thick dough, which she baked into a luscious loaf, sprinkled on top with sprigs of rosemary. Sister Margarita had spent the time cleaning Luca's room, throwing the windows wide open to let the bright day flood inside. Meanwhile, Sister Eva had spent the morning on her knees in the chapel, praying for Luca's safe arrival.

It was Sister Margarita who first spotted the dust trail from the taxi as it made its way along the long deserted road leading to the convent. She called the others, and by the time Sister Francesca had untied her apron and Sister Eva had pulled herself up from her old aching knees, the taxi was pulling up in front of the convent.

Luca stepped out of the backseat, lugging a tattered old shoulder bag behind him and grinning at the sight of his beloved family.

Before he could even close the car door, Sisters Francesca and Margarita rushed toward him and wrapped their arms around him.

"It's so good to see you again."

"We've missed you so."

Luca kissed them both, first on one cheek and then the other. "I've missed you all, too."

Slowly, with sore and steady steps, Sister Eva moved forward. She took Luca's face in both hands and smiled at him. "God Himself only knows where you've been. God Himself only knows where you go. But welcome home," she said in a quiet, loving voice. "Even if it is just for one night."

Before the sun went down on that day, Luca dug the root of a dead fig tree out of the garden for Sister Francesca. He challenged Sister Margarita to a one-on-one game of soccer in the open field between the convent and the cliff top, dribbling the flat old soccer ball without once kicking it over the edge. And last, but by no means least, he spent twilight with Sister Eva in the chapel. As she bowed her head in prayer, he knelt beside her, watching the stained-glass colors of the windows deepen with the setting of the sun.

That night, Luca nursed his over-full belly in his old bedroom on the second floor of the convent. He stood at the wide open window and looked out at the canvas of stars, gleaming like a million lazy candles in the sky. He took in a deep breath, enjoying the scent of the ocean breeze drifting in through the window and listening to the distant sound of waves crashing against the rocks at the foot of the cliffs. He felt so warm and safe here, everything in its place, everything where it had always been—the bed; the dresser; the wooden crucifix on the wall above his bed; the painting of Saint George slaying the dragon on the wall opposite, a classic hero for whom Luca had held a childhood crush for as long as he could remember.

Luca clutched his own small silver crucifix now sitting next to his heart. The silver was warm, soaking up the temperature of his body.

Sometimes he wondered if he would ever return here for good. Would he ever give up the adventure and surrender the fight? Deep down, he knew the answer, but it was nice to return—even if only once in a while, for only a short time—to take in a little peace.

Luca turned off the small lamplight on the old dresser, peeled the sheets off the bed, and then pulled off his clothes and lowered himself down into the tiny bunk.

He lay on his back, naked, enjoying the whisper of the breeze on his bare body. He thought about his journey tomorrow to Vienna. By tomorrow night he would be at the Professor's chalet—his other home. Eden, Will and Shane would be there, too, as well as another. That's what the Professor had told him on the phone.

Luca thought about the stone tablet, broken in two.