Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks
you to give an account of the hope that is in you.
—1 Peter, 3:15

Apologia

The words of our Lord, Jesus Christ, come over me as I sit with my peers in mass, and all I can think of is his face, and hisbody against mine. I still smell him beneath the odor of candles burning at the altar. I still catch a glimpse of him in the lowered eyes of the Virgin in her alcove. I still hear his breath echoing in my ears. The memory of it, still vivid in my mind, is the sweetest sound to me, rousing me like nothing in this chapel has the power to, and thus I blaspheme even in God's house.

But to me his breath was like the fragrance of apples, just as it was written in the Song of Songs, his mouth like the finest wine. "Then let the wine flow straight to my lover," he whispered over me as he held my face in his warm hands, picking up where I left off, "flowing over his lips and teeth." Then his mouth was against mine, breathing life into me, and I was drunk on him. I could never have enough.

My God, but I can't believe he's gone.

It has only been a couple days since they found his body floating in the bay. Mutilated and picked at by scavengers, they told me, but I never saw it. Even as the priest leads us in a prayer for his soul, even as his classmates bow their heads in an awkward, unconvincing solemnness they are not used to, I still expect at any moment to see him walk through the doors—to cross himself a few pews in front of mine and turn to me with a knowing smile before apologizing for being late.

I still expect to catch his voice among the other second-years even as we all say our lines as one.

"Lord, I am not worthy to receive You. Only say the word and I shall be healed."

The words drone under the chapel's tall ceiling, but to me, as they leave my throat, they are as hollow as the gaze of the wooden Christ who watches us from His crucifix, and I choke. The syllables stick, their meaning a thick mass in the back of my mouth I suddenly cannot dislodge. Why should I of all sinners expect to be received into His forgiveness? By my own hand, by my own body, I made sure it would never be mine to know again.

And the sacraments that follow, the resurrection that they promise, if I even believe in that anymore, should be forbidden to me forever. Though I might go through the motions and no man here would be the wiser, they would nevertheless grant me no absolution; and the Eucharist in my mouth, this mouth that eagerly drank of the sweetest abomination, over and over again, would only be desecrated.

How I got to this point, I wish to God I knew. A year ago I was focused on my master's thesis, brimming with hope for the position I'd been offered at Saint Michel, and hardly a concern in my mind about getting old or getting laid. I was a good Catholic. I thought that was all I needed. And now. . . .

The organ comes to life, the hymn strikes up around me, and students begin to rise and slowly file out of their pews. One by one I watch them step forward with bowed heads to receive the body of Christ, place it on their tongues, and make the sign of the cross. But no matter how closely I study each face, I don't see Izuru among them.

No, I don't know why I should. When I close my eyes I still can see the blood that streamed from his violated hands and bare feet, from where he had cut off his own fingers and toes, and from the gouges that crisscrossed that body I adored, the weeping scores of the burns which he had inflicted on his flesh, lovingly, and in my name. And I remember my horror that was so strong I could rouse myself to do nothing, even as he collapsed on top of me, and his body grew slowly colder and colder.

Why couldn't I do anything?

God, how many times I have asked myself that question in the last few days, and each time I can come up with no better answer than I could that morning, when I woke to find his body gone and myself with no memory as to when I had lost consciousness or what I had done.

But I do remember—how clearly I remember—the exact shape of his waist under my hands, hot with the pounding of his blood. I remember his words as he took me into his mouth, on some night before we could have imagined any of the horror of the last few days, as he sank to his knees and placed me on his tongue like a communion wafer, his hands hot on my skin and sweet as an answered prayer: "Love is as powerful as death. . . ."

At the time I thought he was just quoting scripture.

A chill comes over me suddenly, and, fearing I'll be ill, I excuse myself for the fresher air and solitude of the narthex. No one seems to notice at all. Except for one of the other professors' brief nods, their eyes are all on the altar, their thoughts focused on their own mortality and the absolution from it promised them in the body and blood of Christ—just like the angels surrounding the crucifix who can't be bothered to look at anything but His perfection.

Just like they light these votives and claim to pray for Izuru's salvation while they all turned a blind eye to what he and I were doing. It must have been so obvious. God, I thought it must have shown so plainly on my face, my guilt, my shame, my cheeks flushed from my sins committed with a teenage boy, my student, under Saint Michel's very roof. I thought for sure my colleagues must have seen it, if not the students whose trust I did not deserve to have. But the truth was, no one could be bothered to see.

No one except God—if he even exists—and did He do anything to stop it? Did He ever lift one omnipotent finger to save Izuru from himself?

To save him from me?

Would He have even cared, given what we did?

No sooner do the doors close behind me than my stomach seizes up, but to my surprise it's a sob that comes out. It tears through my gut, tears itself out of me. I put my hand to my mouth, bite my tongue, hoping the singing and the organ will drown it out, but the sheer pain of it. . . .

My God, he's really dead.

He's dead and I killed him.

Even if I didn't hand him the knife, he was my student and I didn't protect him, I didn't stop him. I didn't try hard enough to discourage our meetings, I was too weak, too taken in by his youth and his charm and, Christ, his touch and the smell of him, of his uniform, his sweat, lingering in my bed, on my clothes. I committed such sins, and because of them he's dead, and I'll never see him again.

All at once the truth of that grabs hold of me so hard and tight, sinks its teeth so deep into me, so completely it forces tears to my eyes and I have to struggle not to cry out. I can feel my theology dropping like so many flies around me as I fight to remain on my feet, I just miss him so goddamn much it feels as though the agony of it will kill me and I . . . for once I think I might actually welcome it, if it means an end to this shame and misery, because it's hard for me to believe any hell can be worse than this already is. He's the only thing that made this place bearable, and even though a part of me wonders if this is all some lesson, some cruel test of faith, if that's why I was brought here in the first place—if I can even believe God would do that, if I can even believe in Him anymore—if that's all this has been then I have failed so abysmally, for I yearn for him even now.

Is that what Izuru called love?

Because if it is, I don't know why anyone should desire such a wretched thing.

I lean my shoulder against the wall, trying in vain to steel my nerves so that maybe I can rejoin my class after the hymn is over, but I can't move again from that spot nor do I want to. Tears roll freely down my nose, dropping cold onto my tie and tickling my cheeks; but I let them, because not only would trying to stop them be useless, they are nothing compared to what I deserve for my treachery.

That's when a pair of hands take my shoulders and turn me—young, strong hands that won't let me protest; and for a moment I'm sure I'm dreaming, that he has returned from death, or else I have joined him in it, and once again I'm in his arms that will forgive me no matter what I do, even when I do not deserve any forgiveness, let alone his. After all the times I've polluted his body, only to denounce what we do in his ear as he comes, breathing my title. I can't mistake the coat-of-arms of Saint Michel that is embroidered on the breast of his jacket in the dark of the hallway before he presses himself against me, trapping me against the cold wall, and kisses my mouth.

For just a second, a niggling sense of panic that we might be caught enters my mind, but then it's gone again along with the rest of my reservations under his supple lips pressing hard against me, his warm breath teasing my own mouth open. The next moment he's inside me, and the salty taste of my own tears is on his tongue. He grips my lapels in both hands like he might grip the reigns of a horse, subtly guiding me, while his erection rubs against my leg through the crotch of his wool trousers, between the opening of his jacket, stirring up all those desires I was trying so hard to forget and all the shame that goes with them, and—God, but I can't help it, he's making me want to defile him all over again in that dark corner of the church, with the singing in the nave drowning out our gasps, drowning us in the depths of our depravity, of our sin. Damning us.

But now somehow that knowledge only justifies our act. And I, who have nothing left to lose now except my freedom and my job, kiss him back, starving once again for that pear in someone else's garden I cannot have except through robbery. That tastes all the sweeter for its illicit gain. I caress his thighs, sliding my hands up his trouser seam beneath his jacket to his narrow hips and waist. His youth is outlined in every curve, that transient moment that traps him between the softness of a boy and the jaggedness of a man, and I fear if I let go of him what tiny vestige that remains of my own youth will wither away with him.

He turns and pulls me with him until his back is against the wall, and that's when I finally notice his face.

"Fujisawa."

It's at once a question and an exclamation. I knew. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew he couldn't be Izuru. I knew he felt different and Izuru was dead, but I still had hope.

If Fujisawa can sense my confusion, my despair, he doesn't care. "Sensei," he murmurs back as though out of courtesy, and mashes his lips against mine again, rolls his hips into mine. And even knowing it was him all along comes as no real surprise to me. It doesn't dampen my arousal one bit. It doesn't make me any less eager to breathe him in, to run my hands up his sides. I caught him watching me during lecture even before that morning they found Izuru's body floating in the bay, and naive as I may have been then, I recognized the glint in his eyes, the not so subtle meaning in his sly smile. It frightened me once. I had caught just enough of the whispered rumors about him for that look to frighten me.

It frightens me now, but only because Izuru had often looked at me that same way, long before I ever knew what he meant by it. Long before I ever knew I would return the sentiment. No, if I'm surprised by anything, if I'm frightened by anything, it's that I was prepared to fall again so easily, so willingly.

Fujisawa turns this time to face the wall and leans back against me, catching my wrists in his hands and placing mine on his body. My hips thrust against his backside despite myself in a pathetic parody of what I suddenly want to do to him, and what he apparently wants from me. He mutters something I can't quite catch over the drone of the organ in the nave; but the sound of his voice, at the same time breathy from excitement and low and resonating in my chest where his shoulder blades rub against me, is enough to make me painfully hard for him. It's only when I discover that my hands have gone of their own will to the fly of his trousers that I remember where we are and reluctantly back away.

I cannot return to mass after that, even if to pray for Izuru's soul. The obliviousness on the downcast faces of Christ and the Virgin, uplit by flickering candles, and the priest's words of condemnation ricocheting like gunshot off the ceiling were hard enough to endure. Now there's no way my guilt will lead me back, only farther into this maze of depravity, and if that means I'm weak then, God help me, I am only as human as He made me. But it's not as though anyone will miss us.

I grab Fujisawa's arm and pull him hastily out of the chapel. He doesn't protest, just lets out a sharp gasp at my roughness, but his eyes are bright and his flushed lips smiling and breathless in the fading afternoon light outside, as we hasten past cold, Gothic lecture halls to my apartment. We can hardly refrain from touching one another along the way.

It was the same with Izuru not so long ago, when just taking this path, just knowing what awaited us at the end of it, was enough to make our heartbeats quicken, our breath come in little sighs, and the most grievous temptation was being left last in an empty classroom, hurried footsteps pounding down the hall just outside and I was so achingly aware of every desk, every mote of dust, every button in his uniform jacket that separated us. I was his teacher, and he was my student. But no matter how many times I reminded myself of that, it only made me want him all the more—just like it does now, with Fujisawa shivering outside my door, all but champing at the bit.

But Izuru must have known this would happen. What was he thinking? Couldn't he see that taking his own life would prove nothing? If he loved me half as much as he claimed, he wouldn't have done this to me. He wouldn't have hurt me like this, damaged me and left me like this, left me alone to fend for myself like some sad, wounded lamb in this wilderness of youth. He wouldn't have left me prey for this wolf, with long hazel eyes dark and full of lust, soft lips stained vermilion from the force of our kissing, parting in anticipation. Izuru must have known this boy who hated him so much so openly would eat me up in his absence, and that I would not have the force of will to stop myself from being consumed, but would welcome it eagerly.

Fearful, hating myself all the while, but nevertheless eager.

With each passing moment, each article of clothing stripped away and left across the floor of my apartment, I succumb to his passion with more and more conviction, until I find myself believing this act of ours only serves Izuru right. It was he who set the wheels in motion and woke this devil in me, nurtured it with his caresses and his greedy kisses, and his magnificent thighs that stroked my waist so softly, so perfectly. . . . If he could see us now, if he were looking out from whatever cold, dark place he's in right now he would have no one to blame but himself; and holding that sense of self-righteousness inside me like something precious I push Fujisawa down onto my mattress half-naked and crush his lips under mine.

He moans and lifts his hips as I work his unbuttoned trousers and his underwear down over them, spreading my palm flat against the soft skin that flutters with each gasping breath he takes and moving down, down, until the tops of his thighs are free and I can feel half-formed goosebumps on them. My fingers wrap around his cock, and he arches his back and breaks our kiss to look down at that point of intimate contact, watching my thumb absently tease the head and swearing softly. Perhaps he didn't think his meek Christian history professor had this in him, as if he were the only one with these appetites. I lower my mouth to where I can feel his pulse beating in his throat, just beneath his jaw, and the split ends of his dyed brown hair that stubbornly clings to the side of his neck tickle my cheek. His Adam's apple bobs under my chin when he swallows. We never bothered to turn on the light, but in the fading daylight his skin looks as pale as the wisteria of his namesake. Only instead of that heady scent that somehow always manages to elude my memory, the slight acridity of his sweat somehow evokes that same adolescent purity that I had longed to possess in Izuru, mingling with the freshness of detergent from his shirt that lingers on his naked skin.

That mixture sends my mind swimming. I long to be buried deep inside him; he tells me without any prompting that he wants the same thing. He leaps up and hurries to remove his trousers properly, then guides me onto my back and crawls between my legs.

The way he brushes his lips against the underside of my cock runs a shiver up my spine, and his breath is like a flame over my skin. I hardly have a moment to blink before his mouth surrounds me with its heat, his moan I can feel vibrating through every inch of me. He snakes an arm under my thigh, his fingertips kneading my hip as his lips knead my sex. His tongue coils around my flesh. His intensity makes me start, deep in my gut, when he turns those bright eyes up to me, to catch my reaction as he releases me, as he strokes me with his fingers, pulling my foreskin up over the glans and down again. The corners of his lips turn up in a cruel smile when his actions draw a pathetic sound of need from me. He knows, I can see it in those eyes, that smile, the satisfaction written in it, that he owns me with his touch. He's still watching me as he leans down one more time to press a wet kiss to the base of my cock.

Just as I think I won't be able to take anything more, his lips leave me and he crawls up to straddle my hips. I can feel my cock, hard and wet with his saliva, stroking the hot bow of his inner thigh. He smiles down at me with that cold, lopsided smile like Donatello's David, the feather in Goliath's cap tickling his anus, before he kisses me again, deep and open-mouthed. I can taste myself on him, my flesh on his tongue. I should be disgusted, but the knowledge of it only makes the muscles of my stomach leap as pleasure coils deep in my nerves. I'm shaking with my desire for him and I can't help it, but amazingly my hands don't have the same problem. By rote my fingers find his opening. His breath catches in his throat as they press into him, perhaps not as slowly as he'd like but so much slower than every nerve, every pounding heartbeat is dying to go.

I push in as far as I can and find his prostate. He shudders so hard and cries out, I can see it in his face, in his furrowed brows, how he has to pull himself off me with all his self-restraint, how he has to force his lips to shape the word: "Wait." Instead he sinks down and lies back, opening his legs for me, raising his arms above his head and bracing them against the headboard. I kneel between his thighs and sit back on my heels, lifting his hips so the small of his back rests between my knees. His writhing intoxicates me, the tension in his muscles and his hiss of breath like a coiled viper about to strike, and the desperate look in his eyes, silently begging me to fuck him. . . .

Then he's trembling and stretching and knitting his dark brows, gasping, biting down on a choked moan as between his legs I find my paradise. But it's not a Garden of Eden, more like some Boschesque garden of earthly delights, where asexual human figures with heads stuck in overripe fruit are sodomized by all the unclean birds. Like some dream where it doesn't matter how grotesque the act is, it just leaves me needing more. Had I been expecting something purer? It seems as though at one point I had found something that was, but now I wonder if even that was just a delusion. Because somehow even in this vulgarity I find a decadent kind of beauty, but beauty nonetheless.

I find it in the sight of my cock disappearing inside him. In each one of his throaty groans that make me wonder how long it's been since he's been fucked and not the other way around. And I wonder if it is only in my grief that I find that overwhelming desire to push him so hard, to relish the faintest glimmer of pain marring his beautiful face just as I'm sure he has caused it in others.

Or is it something darker, that same thing that kept me hard inside Izuru even as he was dying?

That same thing, perhaps, that makes this all feel so right, while all the teaching of my youth that tells me what I'm doing is wrong, and a sin and abomination, seems so arbitrary in comparison, so hollow. Even if it is the truth.

"Ahhh . . . Sensei . . ." Fujisawa breathes, and for a moment he sounds just like Izuru did in my ear, in that voice that led me only too willingly to my downfall, like a lamb to the slaughter. Like his Judas goat. I look down at the boy beneath me, for a moment hoping I will see Izuru's eyes staring back at me, full of all his love for me that I never deserved, that I never could appreciate like I should have until it was gone, and his hard body straining to meet mine, clenching around me like the sweetest embrace. Instead, Fujisawa greedily takes in every thrust like it all belongs to him, his dark eyes watching his own cock lying heavy across his soft stomach until I grasp it and he comes beneath the pad of my thumb.

The obscenity, the exquisiteness of his orgasm, so tight and so total around me, is more than enough to trip me over the edge. But it's Izuru's name that threatens to spill from my lips, no matter how hard I bite my tongue. It's him I want, it's his forgiveness for everything I've just done I crave. It's him I miss more than anything in the world.

Naturally I never realize more clearly than at the moment of that last thrust, at Fujisawa's final, satisfied groan, just how much I want him back.

How much I hate myself for what I've done.

But I was such a fool. I can see it now in Fujisawa's breathless smile as I collapse beside him, how he never thought of me as anything other than a game since the instant he decided to come to me in the chapel. His revenge is what I am, for some offense of Izuru's I can't even guess at, but knowing that I was complicit in it is enough. Trembling, I roll onto my back. I just can't bear to look at him anymore, to be reminded of my stupidity and my betrayal and, by God, how weak I was all over again just at the slightest temptation of being buried to the hilt inside some beautiful youth dangled in front of me. How deep I've dug myself into this hole of sin. . . . And I can't delude myself into thinking there wouldn't have been some other boy if Fujisawa hadn't found me first. Or Izuru before him.

No. He may have started this, but I never had the strength to finish it when I should have. I didn't want to. Because no matter how wrong I was told it was, this longing of mine for a teenage boy, for one of my students, there was nonetheless something pure in Izuru's touch, in his shuddering and sighing beneath me. There was a salvation in it I can't begin to describe, but somehow I managed just fine to completely defile it.

I wish to God Fujisawa would just leave me alone, but he doesn't. He wraps one arm around me, raising himself above me and tangling his fingers in my hair, mercilessly smothering my lips with kisses as I try to catch my breath. I'm not sure if he really mistakes my disgust for exhaustion, or if he's just rubbing his victory in, but it doesn't seem to matter one way or another. If his mouth was once intoxicating to me, now I feel like I will drown in it.

I wouldn't have a problem with that except . . . he isn't Izuru. He never can be.

Close your heart to every love but mine, Izuru had said to me, hold no one in your arms but me. Love is powerful as death, passion as strong as death itself. But those were borrowed words, and for so long I thought I could just keep him in my arms by will alone, just pray my repentance at the end of it and everything would be all right, and I refused to understand what he meant.

What he meant when he said he loved me so much he could die.

But now I get it. Too late. Too late to save him. Now I know.

"It bursts into flame and burns like a raging fire," I'm muttering under my breath, against Fujisawa's skin, crying and I don't even know quite when it started. "Water cannot put it out. No flood can drown it. . . ."

"What are you talking about, Sensei?"

He laughs at me, at his crazy professor. But the truth is, by the waver in his smile, I think I might have scared him just a little. I think for just a flash he might have seen me, not as he wants to see me, but for what I really am.

I only wish I'd seen things this clearly before.

—o—

Good Friday, 2007.