Aidan was seventeen when they lost everything. This of course was not how his parents chose to see things; they preferred to use words like "embracing change" and "fresh beginnings," but Aidan saw things for what they were. For all his father's promises and creative re-wordings, they were unsuccessful, floundering, bereft, and now all that was left was to turn tail and run.
The farmhouse was a far cry from the lavish penthouse they had called their own. Here, the high ceilings were adorned with splintering exposed rafters, rather than the gleaming steel and glass of the home he had always known. Instead of a city of human rabble laid out before their feet, theirs for the taking, in the shadow of this crumbling house there was nothing but dust and grass. He was disgusted.
His parents were pleased with the move. His mother had always held 'Mother Nature' in high regard; vegan since time out of mind, she had imposed her lifestyle upon her family with an almost religious fervor. She in particular had embraced the move away from their life of "soulless steel," as she had always put it; the city had always been a cage to her, and it had always been her prayer to return to the land with which she identified so closely. His father, of course, reaped the benefits of her newfound joy: Although in public his mother celebrated her favored pagan holidays with an almost tongue-in-cheek, light humor, even from two floors above them Aidan could hear the sounds of their raucous, celebratory lovemaking.
Although Aidan said nothing in the awkward, silent mornings that followed, they found his inability to make eye contact with them somewhat troubling. What they did not know, of course, and what he would never dare to share, was his silence was born of humiliation, not derision. They need not know he holed up in his room because his hands remembered too well the shape of his mother's body, or that his own flesh responded to each sound that wafted from her room to his. He had not touched her since his earliest days, falling asleep to the thump of her heart beating soft against his temple, his small hands still clutching at her breast, but somehow that knowledge only served to stir him further. In the cool of night, his lights long doused, his breathing long slowed to mimic the sounds of sleep, he listened to them. He imagined her hair, falling dark and thick in locks to her waist. He envisioned her skin, the same deep brown of the doe that haunted their fields in early morning. He gripped himself, too tight; awoke sore and raw and weak from desperate fantasies and sweat-slick dreams.
These secret pleasures were small comfort. They left him feeling uncomfortable and more alone than before. The space between him and his family grew wider by the day; in time he came to avoid even his mother's briefest smiles, her smallest touch. Consequently, Aidan was left with no desire to further explore the miles of farmland and forest that surrounded him. So caught up was he in his misery and self-pity that it took him more than a year to find the little glade, and still longer before he met the woman who would be his ruin.
Winter was fast approaching when at last he ventured out. The ground was hard beneath his feet; the heavy thud of his graceless footsteps carried easily, announcing his presence to all within earshot. He turned a corner and the forest opened before him. He stood at the foot of a hill, his feet at the edge of a narrow stream, his shoulders brushing branches hanging low over the glade's entrance. His skin pebbled with gooseflesh; the hair at the back of his neck stood up. This was a secret place. This place was hidden from the world. This place was his.
Without thinking he stepped out of his shoes, barefoot and trembling as he passed through the stream. On the other side the grass was thick and lush. It softened his steps, guarding and concealing his passage through this temple. His lips parted in a wordless sigh. His hands raised to his shirt, lifting it up and over his already sweat-slick back. He dropped it to the forest floor, forgotten offering in a forgotten sanctuary. His trousers soon followed, discarded even as he walked toward the hill that filled his line of vision. There was something there, he knew, something beautiful and strange, and the very thought of it stirred new heat in his veins.
The upward slope was a gentle one, soft beneath his feet. He followed as the path directed, his bare feet finding a carpet of tender, new grass laid out as if for him and him alone. The path lay beneath a lacework of branches and leaves, dappled with sunlight and shadow, but the hilltop itself lay naked to the sky, filled with brilliant brightness and surreal, bone-deep warmth. And she was there.
Aidan knew no other way to respond than to go to his knees before her. He tried to avert his eyes, but her presence drew him like a moth to flame. His eyes roved her body, all softness and curves and dark, lineless tan. Her eyes, the rich black-brown of fresh-tilled earth, met his and engulfed him entirely. Heat pooled low in his stomach. He opened his mouth to speak, but words fled.
