“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.
