On a Friday late in May, with spring well underway and a few weeks from yielding to summer, Reid arrived home. It was nearly the end of the academic semester; three months of uninterrupted time stretched before him. Before this, he would have dreaded that time; without the busyness and business of teaching, he would have had little to distract him but his own thoughts and his own loneliness and isolation. Now, though, with Elias, things were much different. He thought now of traveling, of leaving the state, going somewhere else, somewhere different, far enough away that he could forget, for a little while, the mundane and predictable nature of his life. And, of course, he wanted Elias to go with him.
He swung the Pontiac into the driveway, stopped. At the top of the slight rise, near the steps going up to the front porch, there sat an unfamiliar vehicle: a Dodge truck, an older one from early in the last decade, battered nearly to scrap. He didn’t recognize the truck, couldn’t imagine it belonging to Henry and Olivia; they would certainly have chosen something much more reliable.
Reid sighed. He was tired, but looking forward to the evening with Elias, to dinner and a glass of whiskey on the front porch, watching the sun slip behind the ridge, talking quietly of the day… and then, he hoped, with making love with Elias. Six months on in their companionship, he still felt an enormous attraction to the boy and found his thoughts drifting off throughout the day to him and his rough-hewn beauty and the delightful architecture of his thin and wiry body.
He brought his car to a halt, turned off the engine, pocketed the keys. He grasped his satchel—third-year French essays to grade— and slipped out of the car, went up the steps and into the house. As he walked, something in the quality of the light overhead made him stop and look up; the day was still clear but he could see, in the west, an oncoming line of clouds. A storm was on its way to them.
—
Elias sat there, in one of the chairs by the fireplace. He sat awkwardly, bolt upright and unsmiling, with his arms on the armrests, hands grasping their ends. Reid smiled at him, opened his mouth in greeting, but then there was the slightest jerk of Elias’ head and a monitory widening of his eyes, and Reid turned.
He started, then regained his composure. He had waited for this day for some time, knowing that it would come, hoping against hope that it would not.
The man seated in the corner turned to face him, and he knew who it was without having to be told. The truth of it sat there in the man’s face, in the set of his eyes and his mouth. His squarish head was capped by a brushy thicket of black hair dusted with gray. His features were not unattractive in their own fashion; there was a strength to his face that was quite startling. Something about him reminded Reid of John Brown.
And yet, and yet… in the eyes, in the truculent set of his jaw, in the flaring of his nostrils, Reid could see the madness circulating just under the man’s skin.
Calmly, he set his satchel on the desk, reached out and turned the desk lamp on; its isinglass shade colored the light with an amber glow that softened the corners of the room.
He turned to the man, who had, so far, said nothing. “Mr. Hazlett,” Reid said.
At that, the man blinked. “You know who I am?” His voice was rough and sharp, harsh and twangy, with a kind of throaty crackle to it.
“Well, I believe so,” Reid answered. “You must be Elias’ father.”
“I am. You’re Reid. Ain’t that right?”
“It is. Reid Shaughnessy.” Pointedly, Reid made no effort to shake the man’s hand. “May I help you, Mr. Hazlett?”
Hazlett grinned. “That remains to be seen. I come for my boy.”
“I see. Do you mean to take him home, then?”
“I do. He don’t belong here.”
“Has he said that, Mr. Hazlett? Have you asked him?”
“Don’t got to ask him, Reid. I’m his daddy. I got the right to take him home if I see fit.”
At that, Reid turned to Elias. “Do you want to leave, Elias? Do you want to go back home?”
Elias turned to Reid, then back to his father. “No,” he whispered. “No, I don’t.”
“Do you want to stay here? With me?”
“Yes.”
Reid turned back to Hazlett. “Well, I think that answers that. Seems that Elias wants to stay here.”
Mr. Hazlett smiled, slowly. On his face, it looked like a sneer. He shook his head. “It don’t work that way, Reid. He don’t got a choice.”
“Well, I think that he does, actually. He’s nearly a grown man, Mr. Hazlett. He has the right to make his own choices.”
Hazlett smirked. “He may be all growed up, but that don’t mean he can make good choices.”
He made the choice to leave you, Reid thought. “Nonetheless, he is allowed to make them. As are we all.”
Hazlett fell silent; the two men stared at each other across the room. For some reason, Reid liked having the mass of the desk between him and Hazlett. Abruptly, Hazlett grinned. “You ain’t foolin’ nobody, you know.”
“How’s that?” Reid said, his voice distant and detached.
“I know what it is the two of you are up to, Reid.”
Of which Reid was quite certain… but he wanted to hear the man say it. “And what is that, Mr. Hazlett?”
And here, inexplicably, Hazlett showed some restraint. “Do you need me to say it?”
Reid sighed. “Mr. Hazlett. Your son is staying here as my guest. He came to me needing help, and I was only too glad to give it. He hopes to attend classes this fall at the college and he needs a place to stay until he gets his feet underneath him. If you have anything to add to that, I’d be glad to hear it.”
“Fine,” Hazlett answered. “You and my boy… you… you… you’re… well, you’re living in sin.”
“Two men, living in the same household? That’s a pretty interesting definition of sin.” Reid grinned. “One that might apply to most of the houses in this county.”
“It’s more than that, Reid, and you know it. The two of you… you’re… you’ve committed the sin of—” and here he broke off, took a deep breath “—sodomy,” he whispered, his eyes flaring wide, as if even whispering the name of this supposed sin might somehow bring down some kind of divine retribution upon them.
“How can you be so sure of that?” Reid asked. “I don’t believe I’ve given you any cause to think that of the two of us.”
“I know my son,” Hazlett answered. “I know what he’s capable of. I seen him, once. With that… with that boy. Caleb. That nig—”
“That’s enough, Mr. Hazlett,” Reid said. He glanced at Elias, who returned his gaze evenly, not giving anything away. Reid turned back to Hazlett. “Whatever your son may or may not have done in the past—before I knew him, I might add—is of concern only to him and this… Caleb. I know nothing about that.” Which was not true; Caleb and what he and Elias had done with each other was one of the first things Elias and he had discussed when Elias had come to him that first time.
Even as Reid finished, Hazlett smiled, shook his head. “C’mon, Reid. You think I can’t see it? What are people gonna think? Handsome man like you, you oughta be married by now. Couple o’ kids running around. Wife in the kitchen where she oughta be, puttin’ together your dinner. But here you are, single, with all kinds of pretty things in this pretty house. And here’s my son, a known sodomite, sharing the house with you. Probably sharing your bed as well, I think.”
At this point, Reid wanted nothing more than to go over to Hazlett and punch him. He knew that he could do it; something told him that Hazlett was built much along the same lines as his son: short, slender, wiry… probably strong enough, but Reid saw that he was easily a head or more taller than Hazlett and much, much stronger. But he had no idea if Hazlett might be armed with a knife, or worse. “You have no proof of that,” he answered.
Hazlett chuckled. “Well, see… there’s your first mistake. I don’t know if I need any real proof, to be honest. Something like that, people hear what they wanna hear, almost like they need to hear it, have maybe been hopin’ to hear it. People like… oh, I don’t know… your neighbors, maybe. Place where you work? College, right?”
And, with that, the reason that Hazlett was here became a little clearer. Reid remembered what Henry had said about his visit to the Hazlett farm, how he was struck by the abject poverty and the meanness of the place. Reid started to make his way to the place he thought Hazlett wanted him to go. “Why do you need him to go home, Mr. Hazlett? Wouldn’t you be better off with one less mouth to feed?” Reid glanced at Elias, saw a frown on his face, as if he, too, was just beginning to understand where this was going.
There was, then, a distant rumble of thunder. Through the window, Reid could see the line of cloud, now much darker and grayer than before, and much closer. There was wind high up in the trees, and the sky was full of leaves and twigs that had been dislodged by the strong current. As he watched, a thin, spidery trace of lightning came down from the sky to splash along the top of a hill, along with more thunder.
“I need him to come home to help me out,” Hazlett said, when the thunder had played itself out. “I need him to come home so that he can be brought back to the word of God.”
“Why? So you can beat it into him?” Hazlett said nothing to that; his nostrils flared wide and a sharp intake of breath echoed around the room. “I’ve seen the marks, Mr. Hazlett. I’ve seen what you’ve done to your son.”
Hazlett’s voice was quiet, as he answered. Even so, Reid could hear the naked threat behind it. “Ain’t none of your business, Reid.”
“Mmm, perhaps not… but it might be of interest to the sheriff.”
Hazlett smirked again. “You ain’t got no proof. Coulda been anybody who did that to him. Come to think of it, coulda been you.”
“What was it you just said? Maybe nobody needs any proof? Maybe they just want to hear it?” To which Hazlett said nothing. Reid knew he didn’t dare call this a stalemate; Hazlett was too smart to let himself get boxed into a corner. Despite his appearance, despite his demeanor, he struck Reid as a very shrewd man. Not an intelligent one, not an educated one, but one who knew how to get what he wanted from people. Reid took a deep breath, risked a quick glance to Elias. Forgive me, he thought. Forgive me for what I am about to do. He turned back to Hazlett. “How much, Mr. Hazlett?”
Hazlett’s frown looked so much like Elias’ that there could be no doubt about Elias’ paternity. “How much for what?” he rasped.
“For your son.”
“Reid…” Elias murmured, his eyes gone wide. Reid refused to meet his gaze again, lest he back down.
“I don’t follow,” Hazlett said, but Reid could see that he did.
He tapped on the desk. “I cannot, in good conscience, let you take Elias out of here, because I am afraid that if you do, you’ll kill him. You may not mean to, but it could happen. Will happen, I think. And I don’t know if my neighbors will believe you if you go bruiting about whatever you think is going on between me and your son. They may… but they may also just write it off as the ramblings of a crazy man. So, to get back to my original question, how much would you be willing to accept for the life of your son?”
“Reid…” Elias said, again, his voice louder. Again, Reid ignored him. He watched as a veiled look stole across Hazlett’s face, could see him doing the calculus, afraid to name a price that he thought Reid might be unable to afford, but he was greedy enough to take the bait.
“Well, I don’t know…” Hazlett said, after a moment.
And, with that, Reid knew that he had the man.
He glanced at Elias and saw that his father’s equivocation hurt him deeply. Elias’ head was bent down, looking at nothing, and Reid wanted nothing more than to go to him and take the boy in his arms and tell him that he loved him. Reid turned back to Hazlett. “Well?”
Hazlett licked his lips. “How… how much you thinking?”
Reid shook his head. “No. This is not how this goes. You tell me how much you think your son is worth to you.” Reid hated even to say the words, was disturbed that Elias’ father seemed willing to reduce a man’s life—his son’s life—to a sum of money. He watched and waited. His heart was pounding.
Hazlett cleared his throat, having come to a decision on how much he might extort from Reid. “Five… five hundred?” A question more than a statement; perhaps he had been hoping that Reid would have been willing to go for more.
Five hundred dollars was a decent sum of money in this community, more than enough for a person to get his head above water and keep it there for some time if he were careful. Reid would have given Hazlett more, but he would never tell the man that. In response, Reid went to his desk, opened a drawer, took out a portfolio bound in red moroccan, opened it. He scrabbled for a pen, uncapped it, started filling out the check.
“Reid…” Elias rasped, nearly in tears. “Don’t. Please don’t.”
Reid ignored him. When he was done writing the check, he tore it out with his left hand, fanned it in the air to dry the ink, walked over to Hazlett, who looked up at Reid with a knowing leer that Reid wanted to slap off his face. He extended a hand for the check.
Reid held it just out of Hazlett’s reach. “Before I give you this—and be sure that I hate doing this with every fiber of my being—I need you to make me a promise.”
Hazlett’s eyes shot up. “Which is…?”
“Which is that—if I give you this—we are done. I don’t want to ever see you or hear from you again. I don’t want you to have any more to do with Elias. You’re done with him, and with me. And if I find out that you’ve gone behind my back telling people what you think has happened, I’ll… well, you won’t like it.” Reid let the rest of the statement trail off, hoping that it sounded dire enough to scare Hazlett, trying not to give away that he had no idea what he could do or would do if Hazlett failed to keep up his end of the bargain. “Do we understand each other?”
Hazlett stood. “Yeah. Whatever.”
It wasn’t quite the firm acceptance Reid had been hoping to hear, but it would have to do. He stuck out his right hand; Hazlett looked down at it, back up to Reid, reluctantly shook it. Reid handed him the check, which he tucked into the breast pocket of his sweat-stained work shirt.
Reid then walked pointedly over to the front door, opened it, stood beside it. Hazlett slipped past him without a glance, stepped onto the front porch and went to the battered truck and got into it. Reid watched as the man started it—acrid blue smoke erupting from somewhere underneath—and put the truck into gear, maneuvered it down the driveway and onto the road, turning right and heading south.
Reid looked up after that, to see a line of rain coming at the house, a curtain of water nearly opaque. He could trace its passage as it crossed the road and marched resolutely, implacably, toward him. He could hear the sound of it hammering down upon the metal roof of the house, knew it to be a rain of hail, hoped that the roof would survive the onslaught and that the thunderstorm would pass quickly. He looked to his right, could see Hazlett’s truck just disappearing over the ridge.
Only then did Reid go back into the house.
To an empty living room.
He sighed. He knew that Elias was angry about the check, and he thought he understood the reason for it. Of course, there was the reality of his father’s estimation of his own son’s worth, plus the fact that he so readily had agreed to it. But there was his own role in this as well, Reid also understood, something which might have weighed even more heavily upon Elias.
In effect, Reid understood, he had just paid a ransom to Hazlett for his silence and—with that—he was as complicit as Hazlett in this thing.
He went upstairs and went to Elias’ door, which was shut. He rapped lightly on the panel.
“Elias,” he said. Silence. He tried again. “Elias.” More silence was his only response; he sighed. “Elias, I understand. I know why you’re angry. I would be, too. But I had to do it. I hope you understand that. I had to at least try with him. He doesn’t deserve to be a part of your life. Of our life. If this keeps him out of it, it’s a price I am all too willing to pay.”
“He won’t—” was the start of a response that broke off. Reid waited for the rest of it, but it didn’t come. In the silence, he could hear nothing but his own heart beating.
Presently, he went back downstairs.
—
Soon enough, Elias came down, went to the couch, sat across from Reid. The two men looked at each other silently, but the conversation banked behind those stares was as clear to Reid as the spoken word. The thunderstorm had settled down into a steady, insistent rain.
Finally, Elias cleared his throat. “He’s not done with us, you know. He’ll come back, ask for more.”
“We’ll deal with that if it happens.”
“When, not if, Reid. He will come back.”
“Let him.” Reid sighed. “You have to stop being afraid of him, Elias.”
Elias said nothing for a bit. Then, “You don’t know him, Reid. You don’t know what he’s capable of doing. I’ve seen it Reid. I’ve seen him do things that no rational person would ever think of doing.”
“I’m not afraid of him, Elias.”
“Well, maybe you should be.”
“We haven’t done anything wrong,” Reid countered.
“I’m not saying we have, Reid! That’s not the point!” Elias paused, took a breath. “Look, I… I know it’s not anybody’s business what we do here, in this house. But it is. They’ll trot it out, cite chapter and verse, throw it back in our faces… all the while doing whatever they feel like doing because they can hide behind it, profess a faith and a piety that, deep down, they don’t really feel. And my father knows that. He knows how to play them. And he will, believe me. He’ll turn every single one of them against us until…”
“Until what?”
“Until… I don’t know. We end up in jail. We’re forced to leave, to go somewhere else, to start over.”
“I would do that,” Reid said. “For you. I would do that.”
“And he wins.”
“So what?” Reid countered. “He wins. So what? He gets a bit of money from us. A kind of ransom, I guess. Ransoming our love from him. We can pick up our lives somewhere else, Elias. I know we can.”
“Now? As things stand?”
“It won’t last. We’ll get past this. Things will get better and we’ll just start a new life somewhere else, anywhere else. Far away from him.”
To which, again, Elias said nothing. Again, they stared at each other, but Elias’ face, this time, was a nearly illegible blank.
“Well?” Reid prompted. He watched Elias’ jaw worked as he thought about Reid’s offer.
“No,” Elias said, finally.
“No? No, what?”
Again, silence. They stared at each other until Elias relented, leaned his head back, stared up into the ceiling. Then, “There were six of us, you know. From the woman who was my mother. Six of us. That lived, that is. Out of eleven.”
Which, Reid knew, was not an uncommon thing, even now and especially here, in this part of the country. He waited, thinking of what Henry had seen, the number of children he’d noticed in the Hazlett compound. How many mothers? Reid wondered. How many children?
Elias sighed. “I’m… well, I’m in the middle, somewhere. Not the oldest, not the youngest. But the only one like… well, like me.”
Homosexual, Reid intuited. “Yes.”
“Although I never understood that, until much later.”
“It’s a… difficult thing to understand,” Reid responded. “Especially if… well…”
Elias glanced at Reid, looked away. “I imagine that it happens more often than we think, Reid. You have to understand that it’s a thing that doesn’t respect… well, boundaries, I guess. Just because you’re this versus that doesn’t mean that you can escape. It just… happens.”
“I know that, Elias.”
“Do you?” he asks. “I wonder.”
“Elias…”
Elias chuckled quietly. “Well. That’s not the point of this story, really.”
Reid waited, knowing that Elias would get to where he wanted to be, eventually. And Reid was a patient man, if nothing else.
Elias picked up his story. “I… well, I had a sister. An older one. The first of us, actually… God help her. Not what he wanted, of course, first thing out of the gate. He wanted a son. Somebody he could… well, shape into whatever he wanted. That’s how he looked at all of us. Little bits of… well, clay, I guess. Something he could mould, work at, sculpt. Like God with Adam. Until we were whatever he wanted us to be, needed us to be.” Again, he sighed. “Tamara, though…”
Reid’s heart started pattering in his chest. He had an idea where this story was going, and he knew that he could not stop the boy.
Elias continued. “She was… well, she was a lot like our mother, really. Pretty, in her own way. But smart… not sassy smart, but quiet smart. Knew well enough to keep quiet, but… watching, always watching. She spoke only when she knew that what she might have to say was… correct, I guess. Of course, she did well in school, for as long as she was allowed to attend. Her teachers loved her, wanted more for her. She never showed off, never put on airs, but if she told you something, it was never wrong.”
Reid could not help but notice the tense into which Elias had put this terrible tale. “Elias… I…”
Elias held up a hand. Reid waited.
“He just never…” Elias started. “Just never…”
“Elias, you don’t have to—”
“She was supposed to keep quiet. Like our mother. Just… there. Someone who had to be there for all of this to make sense, but… a bit player. A non-speaking role, so to speak.
“But she wouldn’t stay silent. She couldn’t. She saw things as they really were, maybe… not how he wanted them to seem. She saw past his bluster and his bravado into the real him. She saw how weak he was, deep down in his soul. And he just couldn’t accept that. And, one day… one day…”
He broke off, bent his head low. “She… she… he did something… I don’t know what it was. Something stupid, probably. Short-sighted. He only ever sees the immediate result, not the long view. And she said something. Trying to help. But he wouldn’t have it. And… he hit her. Not hard, not really; we’d all been slapped around at one point or another by him. But, sometimes… it doesn’t matter that you got hit, but where and when it happened. They were at the top of the stair. He had gone upstairs to rid himself of her and she’d followed him up, from the kitchen.
“They got into a real argument, a shouting one, that echoed off the walls. All that the rest of us could do was stand there and watch it and hope that it didn’t go beyond the two of them. And, then, he… he hit her and shoved her backwards. She dropped the bowl she still had in her hands—cornbread, I remember, that she was making—and managed to slip in it and just… fell and fell and fell… and it… it…”
He sighed. “That was it. She ended up on her back on the floor and her eyes rolled back into her head and she started convulsing. Well, he just left the house, left the rest of them to handle it. They wanted him to get a doctor out to see her, but he wouldn’t do it, didn’t want to have to admit what had happened, didn’t want to have to deal with the police. It wouldn’t have mattered, really. By the time a doctor could be summoned and brought back, she would have died anyway.”
And now Reid could see that a kind of rage had replaced the sorrow and the pain in Elias’ face. The boy excused himself and went out to the front porch to stand at the rail, grasping it tightly, staring off into nothing, trying to fight past it. Most of the storm seemed to have passed; Reid could see a line of bright sky in the distance: the back edge of the storm.
Reid knew that he should go to the boy and try to take some of the pain away. Instead, he went to the kitchen, pulled a bottle of whiskey out of the cupboard, went about pouring it into glasses, hoping that that kind of solace might help blunt the worst of it. He and the boy could talk about this thing and what it meant. He would try to calm Elias, to make him see that they could deal with Ephraim and his actions.
When he was done with the whiskey, he stood there, inert and paralyzed, unable and unwilling to move, wondering if he had indeed made the mistake that Henry had tried to warn him about: getting involved with this family and its madness. He looked at the two glasses of whiskey sitting on the counter; the light from overhead created two ovals of amber light on the countertop, like topaz.
Reid shook his head. No, he thought. Not this. He took the two glasses, carefully poured their contents back into the bottle. Whatever he and Elias decided to do about the boy’s father, he did not want this to be a crutch. They needed to get through this thing with their senses unadulterated.
As he worked, there was a noise as of someone coming back into the house, then something—a drawer?—being opened and shut, and the noise of a door slamming again. Shortly after that, another sound: the sound of an engine being started and put into gear.
With that, he was freed from his inertia. He set the glasses down, darted into the living room and to the front porch to see Elias’ truck at the end of the driveway, turning right, heading south.
And Reid knew where the boy was going, knew that he could not stop this.
As he stood there, another thought crossed his mind. Something about the sounds he’d heard. Suddenly, he understood it. He went to his desk drawer, opened it, rifled through it over and over, trying to make sense of what he was looking at.
Or, not looking at, as it were.
The gun was gone.
And he knew that Elias had taken it with him.
—
Reid waited on the front porch. He waited until the storm clouds cleared and revealed the last of the setting sun. He waited until the sun set behind the hills and the first stars started to appear in the sky. He waited until the night was filled with an impromptu symphony of cicada and katydid. He waited until he thought that the boy would not return, that he was well and truly gone, fled back into the remote safety of the mountain valley. And, really, he wondered… might he not have been better off with the boy gone and out of his life?
And, then, he heard it, even before he could see it: a soft puttering of sound, the sound of a motor, an engine. Then, the twin beams of yellowish light cutting through the trees, across the fence line paralleling the road, washing across the set-apart houses. It was a soft, buttery kind of light, somehow warm and comforting.
And then, there it was, the truck, his truck, wheeling into the drive and up the rutted path to come to a stop in its usual spot by the shed, next to Reid’s Pontiac.
The driver’s side door opened. Elias climbed out.
Elias walked towards him, was on the front porch and past him, slipping into the house, before he could rouse himself to speak to him. Reid rose and followed him into the living room.
Elias stood there, in the middle of the room, his face cast down. He was utterly still.
Reid walked over to him. “Elias.”
Elias turned, and on his beautiful face Reid could see the truth of it. He noticed, then, that the boy was not carrying the gun.
“Where is the gun, Elias?”
“I left it there. With him.”
“You left it there? Why?”
“Why do you think, Reid?” Elias ran a hand through his disheveled hair. The hand shook with a nervous energy. “It was his, anyway. It would… well it would just complicate things, if I brought it back with me.”
“Complicate…?” Reid started. “What… what did you do, Elias?”
In answer, the boy dipped a hand into the pocket of his trousers, came out with a scrap of paper, rumpled and torn. He handed it to Reid. Of course, it was the check he’d made out to Ephraim. The ransom.
Reid took it, his hand shaking. He turned it over, looked at the back. It had not been endorsed.
Or, rather, it had been, after a fashion. There was, smeared across the paper, an odd calligraphy in a rusty red-brown color, an arcane ideography of that unholiest of languages, the language of death. The language of blood.
He looked back up at Elias. Only then did he see that the lower half of him was caked in dried mud, great green-brown-black smears of it, from hip to ankle. Its scent tickled Reid’s nose, something dark and atavistic and primeval. Elias’ hands were smeared with it, as well; a trace of it streaked across his forehead.
“What did you do, Elias?” he asked again.
“What I had to do,” the boy answered.
And, Reid knew. He didn’t know the specifics of it, but he knew. He knew that he would no longer be bothered by Ephraim’s unwelcome presence.
“Where is he, Elias?”
In answer, Elias’ head swiveled around the room, looking up at the ceiling, around the room, down to the floor… anywhere except towards Reid. It seemed as if he were listening to unheard voices, of angels or devils. He gestured with one arm. “Up there,” he answered. “On the ridge.” Something elicited in him a spasm of movement, a bit of laughter tinged with fear, with horror. With something bordering on madness. “Or… well… not quite…”
“Will they know what you’ve done?”
Elias thought about it. “No,” he answered. “I don’t think so.”
Reid slipped the check into his shirt pocket, went to stand directly in front of the boy. He reached out, turned Elias’ face towards his, traced a finger along one side of it, down his jaw. “Tell me,” he said.
And Elias did.