Chapter Text
Chapter 1
The dorms of St. Augustine’s smelled faintly of rain-damp uniforms and cheap cologne — a cocktail of teenage sanctity and sin. The hallway light buzzed overhead, a dying halo that flickered over the lockers, the crucifix at the end of the corridor gleaming dully in its stuttered glow. Leone passed it every night, fingers ghosting over the cold brass out of habit, not faith.
He always walked slowly back from evening mass — slower still when he knew Euan would be waiting.
Their relationship was… complicated, though that word barely brushed the edges of it. Leone was the kind of boy who looked like he had been born pressed into prayer — clean collars, steady voice, a cross glinting at his throat like a brand. His mother led the choir, his father argued morality in marble courtrooms.
Their house was quiet, expensive, holy.
Euan’s wasn’t.
His home smelled of coffee and laundry powder, laughter always fighting to exist in the silence his father left behind. His mother was kind — the sort of woman who loved her children loudly enough to spite the man she’d married. His sister, Eliana, was chaos in eyeliner and courage, her bisexuality a secret to no one except, perhaps, herself.
Euan was quieter. He was careful with his words, with his body, with the space he took up. Trans, and tired of explaining it — and yet, he loved Leone with a softness that made him reckless.
Leone loved him too. But love, for Leone, was a fearful thing — a thing that needed dim lights and trembling apologies. When they were close, he would ask Euan to turn off the lamp, voice catching like it hurt to speak. In the dark, it was easier to pretend. Easier to breathe. Easier to forget that holiness had conditions, that love wasn’t supposed to look like this.
Sometimes, Euan would whisper his pronouns against Leone’s skin just to remind him — I’m still me, even when you can’t look. And Leone would flinch, not out of cruelty, but from the tangle in his head that screamed blasphemy where there was only affection. The guilt came in waves, holy and suffocating.
By day, Leone was all laughter and sunlight — the boy who made teachers smile and girls blush. Tina Johanson, his girlfriend, was one of them — a pretty Christian girl with soft hair and a secret that ate her alive. She smiled for photographs and kissed his cheek in public, but her eyes lingered a little too long on Eliana across the cafeteria.
And Euan watched from his seat by the window, chewing the end of his pencil until it splintered.
Leone would find him later, usually in the art room, hands stained with charcoal, the air sharp with turpentine. That was when he was gentlest — when the weight of the day had stripped him down to something real. He’d bring Euan little things — a coffee, a pen he thought looked like him, a book from the library that smelled like rain. Acts of devotion disguised as errands.
Euan loved him for that. For the smallness of his kindness.
But loving Leone was like pressing a bruise to see if it still hurt. Every touch carried guilt; every kiss, confession.
Leone’s cross would sometimes slip against Euan’s throat when they kissed, cool metal against warm skin — and Euan could feel the war inside him, the way Leone clung as if holding on could make it right.
They were both too young to understand that love could rot just as easily as it could bloom.
In the quiet after curfew, Leone would lie awake in his dorm, rosary beads tangled in his fingers, whispering prayers he didn’t mean. And across campus, Euan would be staring at his ceiling, wondering if it was possible to love someone who kept trying to pray you away.
It wasn’t that they didn’t love each other. It was that they didn’t know how to love each other without breaking first.