The silence surrounded them, rising through the pines up into the star-strewn sky, and Peter’s heartbeat stirred. Here, silence wasn’t the absence of sound. It was a presence that had no sound. He pressed his hands to his knees to stand and the peace of the world arrived, settling among the trees like a living thing to greet him. And out there, amid that silent wonder, something appeared beneath a tree. It was so white, it was brighter than the snow that dusted the jagged bark behind it.

All at once there was all of Cooper. His chest, buttocks, hips, hands, fingertips, nipples, earlobes and thighs. There were all the parts of him that Peter already knew. But Cooper’s body was so luminous that the thick bed of black hair around his groin gave dark strength to those parts of him that Peter didn’t know. Cooper’s fingertips journeyed across the flat of his stomach, travelling over the navel into the hair below. He tipped his head back, eyes lost in moonlight, and took the weight of himself in his hand. His fingers played across his own body, stroking, holding, and it should’ve been so easy for Peter to imagine himself there instead. He could fall into those two dark pools so full of starlight right now and disappear inside Cooper’s eyes to the boundless galaxies that existed inside him, and Cooper would do the same. Then there would be no separation. Then they’d be one. But there was nothing but cruelty here. Cooper’s nakedness was triumphant. Peter’s was nothing.

Peter looked away, his throat at once tight, suffocating. He would never be enough for Cooper. Never.

Further back inside the woods another figure, this one clothed, passed from one tree to another. It started to make its way uphill. Others broke out from inside the forest now, weaving, wandering, treading softly in the snow, moving one by one and then on together to higher ground. Cooper picked his clothes up to dress and followed. Peter hung back, watching the figures pass along the sharp ridge of the hill, spindly in the moonlight like the roughened hackles of a coyote’s back.