November 17th, 1944
‘Little Grubsttip’, Syracuse, Italy

~~~

“No, don’t leave!”

The panic in his voice genuine; a real cry of fear, desperation and pleading. It was as if he thought if I let go of him, we’d be torn asunder; separated forever. 

“Hey, shh, I’m not going anywhere,” I assured Justin softly, alarmed by the magnitude of his distress. I gripped the nape of his neck gently and pulled his head back to look into his face. “I just need to pull out ‘cuz the condom is slipping, that’s all.”

“I can’t…” Justin whimpered so softly the words were almost lost in his exhaled breath. His head dropped so that his forehead was resting on my chin, still maintaining his iron-like grip on me with arms and legs. “I’ve got nothing else left to hold on to…”

“Trust me,” I whispered soothingly, my lips on his ear against the silken softness of his hair. 

I felt the boy’s body tremble before he slowly loosened his arms from around my neck and his legs from encircling my waist. He didn’t make a sound as I gently took hold of his hips and lifted him until I had pulled out completely. I grimaced when my knees protested from the unnatural position, Justin’s weight shifting and then dissipating as he slithered off my lap.  

I had disposed of the condom and was flexing my prickling, burning quadrate muscles before I realized that Justin had moved out of my immediate vicinity. I felt a stab of alarm as I twisted my body around to find him sitting some distance away, out of the dappled shadows cast by the trees, on the pebbly shore of the little stream.

He had his back half turned to me, his legs drawn up against his chest and his arms wrapped as tightly around them as they had just been around my neck. His head was resting on his bony knees, his face turned away in the opposite direction. The position made him look physically diminutive, and impossibly young…alone and frightened.

The bright, unobstructed sunlight fell across him, making him gleam like an alabaster statue, the yellowish-green and blue of the bruising on his back standing out starkly like a stain of revolt, a mark of resistance. I had almost forgotten about the sacrifices he had made to be here at this moment, and I felt my heart break for him again.

“Come back here,” I called to him softly, almost pleadingly. I already missed the feel of his lithe little body; his warmth, his scent, his need and desire for me. Justin remained absolutely motionless, not even breathing; although I’m sure he’d heard me.

“I’m not going back.” 

Although his face was turned away from me and his words had been little more than a whisper, I heard them as if they had been bellowed through a bull horn. For a horrifying moment, I thought he meant he wouldn’t come back to me…but I refused to believe that, I couldn’t, not of my golden boy.

“Back where, Sunshine?” I asked gently, slowly crawling a few yards closer to him on my hands and knees. I wanted so badly to touch him, to hold him in my arms again, thinking I should never have let go of him…

“Anywhere. To anything.” Justin must have heard my approach because he lifted his head and turned those blazing cobalt eyes, now shimmering with tears, on my face. “To my life. If I leave this place, this moment…it’ll shatter me, I’ll die…” 

“Justin…” I moved forward and put out a hand to touch his shoulder, but he shook his head and pulled away from me. I felt as if my heart were going with him; felt the physical pain as it was being torn from my soul. He would only allow me to watch in agony as tears began to slide silently down his face is sparkling silver rivulets. 

“I’m not strong like you are…” he whispered, his voice so full of pain and hopelessness it torn at something deep inside me. “I can’t do it, Brian. I can’t go back there and pretend not to know you, to only see you when fluke chance gives us an option. I can’t pretend not to care if you or I are sent away from each other. I’ll always be so afraid of you dying and not even being able to say good-bye…”

I felt tears and bile rising in my throat when the truth hit me like a sledgehammer. Everything about that other world was pitted against us, had us penned up in dark rooms without doors. Justin could be taken from me suddenly and without warning, and I’d be powerless to stop it for the sake of both of our lives. And then I would likely never see him again in this world. 

If he was forced to leave me, I would spend every second of my life wishing I’d held onto him; regretting that I didn’t until the day I died.

“I’ve thought over and over of going back and pretending none of this happened,” Justin continued softly, his teary gaze fixed on the opposite shore of the stream. “I tried to tell myself that you and I were just something spontaneous and fantastic that happened once. But I couldn’t make myself believe it; it was a vicious untruth.” 

Justin looked over at me as he said this, and I felt the pricking of tears behind my eyes at the expression on his face. 

“You can’t back out of loving someone. No one was ever meant to; that’s what love does, its how it works. That’s how I know this is real…and I’d rather die than deny us of it.”

It had been years and years since I’d wept real tears, and I as I felt the first one spill down my face, I felt suddenly very young and vulnerable. The lump in my throat made it difficult to breathe and I found I couldn’t talk. Instead, I held my arms out to Justin and silently begged him to let me hold him to comfort us both.

Justin hesitantly moved over to where I was sitting cross-legged and crawled into my lap. I held him tightly to my chest and buried my face in the crook of his neck as I felt his arms slide around my neck once again. We clung to each other, our hopelessness and desperation flowing between and around us like an electric current. 

It came to me then, like a blazing flash of lightning.

The plan, the ingenious plot; a solution to everything, to all of our problems. It was so simple…and yet bordering on the impossible. Its execution would require a magnitude of courage and fortitude even I couldn’t envision. A perilous escapade that would last a lifetime. 

But challenges had never discouraged or stopped either of us. The thought gave me the strength I needed to swallow my tears and the power I had been seeking to be strong for us both.

“Justin,” I began softly, shifting him into the crook and my arm and touching the wetness of his cheek with my fingertips. “I have to go back. If I don’t, I’ll lose everything I have ever worked for; my job, my home, my savings…” 

I caught Justin’s chin as he began to shake his head in silent despair, and made him look into my eyes.

“I want there to be something to take you home to.”

He electric blue eyes bore into mine, not daring to believe what I was insinuating. I stared back down at him, stroking my thumb along his cheekbone, smearing the tears across the bridge of his nose and over his lips. His face crumpled and he shook his head again, having lost his foothold in everything familiar to him. 

“I don’t understand,” he whispered brokenly.

“Look at me,” I ordered, shifting him so that he was straddling me again, our bodies chest to chest. I wrapped an arm around his waist and gripped the back of his neck with the other hand. I felt his hands on my shoulders as he looked back into my face; confused, frightened, perplexed, and yet absolutely trusting.

“Listen to me. Are you listening?” I waited a moment until I saw him nod, knowing he had to understand every syllable of what I was about to tell him.

“There is a way for us, Justin. There’s a way we can be together. But it comes at an extreme cost…Now I need to know something; think carefully before you answer. Are you willing to give up everything for this, Justin? I mean everything; every single part of your life now; your home, your past, your family and friends. Would you sacrifice it all?”

Justin was silent for a long, long time. For me, the seconds stretched into eons until time seemed to stand still. In that moment, I saw my whole life stretching out before me; not black and white like the life I had left behind, but in full technicolor brilliance. And at the end of it, where the road ended and the sky began, I saw my happiness going on and on into infinity.

Something to die for. Something to live for. Someone to love forever and always.

“I have nothing to go back to.” Justin’s voice called me back from my reverie and I looked down into his face, his eyes glowing as if illuminated from within. “I would die for this. I would sacrifice everything, anything.”

His words were immortalized, branded into my memory in golden fire. They would echo though my mind for the years and decades that were to follow, only growing louder and stronger as the years went by.

“Wherever you go I’ll follow, even to death. Because whatever happens, I’ll never stop loving you.”

~~~


Exert from ‘THE NEW YORK TIMES’

Saturday, October 13th, 2007

THE GREATEST LOVE STORY NEVER TOLD
-Shocking discovery suggests world famous artist lived under a false identity,
links him to late founder of ‘Kinnetic’-

A discovery made yesterday at the home of the late world-renounced artist 
Jordan Tremont has left historians reeling in what may well prove to be the most
extraordinary love story never told. 

Tremont, often called ‘the modern day Monet’, died last Wednesday at the age of 80,
following two weeks after the death of his great and distinguished friend, Brian
Kinney. Kinney, 92 at the time of his death, retired as the C.E.O of the global
advertising giant ‘Kinnetic’ in 1990.

The discovery that triggered the unearthing of this extraordinary tale was made
yesterday by late artist’s legal executor who discovered, amongst Tremont’s most
valued possessions, a tarnished WWII dog tag bearing the inscription ‘ Pte. J. Taylor’.

Tremont himself neither served in the Second World War nor had any connection
with anyone of that name and age. Therefore, his possession of this article raised a
number of interested eyebrows.  

Through tracing the identification number on the tag, it was discovered that its
original owner, Justin Taylor, had been a 17-year-old American serving in southern
Italy sometime between 1943 and 1944. 

Taylor was declared missing in action in November 1944 when the BSA Sloper motor
bike he was last seen riding was found abandoned, smashed, and riddled with bullet
holes. When an exhaustive search of the surrounding countryside yielded no sign 
of Taylor or his body, it was assumed the young solider was murdered by 
fascist Italian rebels, and his body burned or buried.

It may be pure coincidence that the regiment Taylor disappeared from was the very
same one that Kinney, then 29, had been serving in as head cryptographer. 
While there is no evidence to suggest that the two men knew one another, they
certainly occupied the same camp contemporaneously for at least two months. 

Kinney and Tremont (whose childhood and upbringing remain obscure) met 16 years
after the war ended when Kinney attended Tremont’s groundbreaking 1961 exhibition
at the Pittsburgh Museum of Fine Arts. 

By that time the artist, then 34, had made a name for himself among the world’s most
talented and successful painters. He and Kinney, who at 45 was also a very wealthy
and influential man, remained close friends from that point forwards.

Or perhaps, that was what the world was led to believe.

It is very interesting to note that the paintings Tremont produced between 1950 and
1960 (prior to his first meeting with the C.E.O of ‘Kinnetic’) all feature the same
figure; a tall, slim dark-haired main bearing a striking resemblance to the young 
Brian Kinney.

Other art experts have indicated that the backdrop of Tremont’s most famous 
and valuable painting, his 1951 “Little Grubsttip”, strongly resembles that of 
Southern Italy- specifically Sicily, where Kinney served and Taylor disappeared.  

And stranger still, many noted that Kinney never referred to Tremont as ‘Jordan’, 
but always as ‘J.T.’ Lindsay Peterson, a close acquaintance of the two men, 
reports that when speaking to Tremont directly in private, Kinney always addressed
him as ‘Justin’.

“I always assumed it was a kind of inside joke,” Peterson confessed, “Brian 
and Jordan seemed to have a lot of private jokes and secrets. I am certain that 
Brian loved Jordan, as scandalous as some claim that to be. If you knew them as I 
did, there was absolutely no doubt.” 

Peterson is among those who believe Tremont and Kinney were evolved in a 
love affair, sighting the fact that both remained unmarried, and that the two men 
often took long trips abroad together. Some even claim now that Tremont died 
of a broken heart because his death followed less than two weeks after Kinney’s.

Is it possible that the internationally renounced artist the world knew as 
Jordan Tremont was, in fact, the missing Justin Taylor? Did he meet Kinney 
in that army base in Sicily 16 years before either of them would admit?

“There only seems to be one likely explanation,” says Oxford historian 
Janet Clasher, “In order to protect his young lover, Kinney persuaded Taylor
to fake his own death which allowed him to hide Taylor away in the 
Italian countryside until their return to America when the war ended in 1945.”

“Once they were safely in America, it would have been much easier for Kinney 
to keep Taylor a secret while they were living together. In order for Taylor to 
begin his new life, he changed his name to Jordan Tremont, claimed he had 
never served in the army, and that he’d had no contact with Kinney until they met in 1961.”

If Clasher is correct, Kinney and Taylor kept their acquaintance a secret until 
both men were successful enough to make their relationship appear merely
professional. Only later did they allow a hint of the depth of their relationship 
to show through publicly.

Could such a powerful love affair, demanding that both men risk their lives 
and reputations over and over again, last for sixty-two years? If so, this is 
surely one of the greatest, powerful love stories of all time.

Ultimately, Kinney and Tremont took the truth with them to their graves, 
but if there are still those who doubt, perhaps they should be directed to the 
graveyard where these two great men now rest in peace. 

Is it just a fluke that the plots were purchased, by their current occupants, 
to lie side-by-side? And is it coincidence that both head stones bear the 
same inscription;

“Now fear of death bows to death of fear; from the eternal stream 
that ran below the surface of life, now springs our love immortal.”


THE END


Thanks to all for reading and reviewing. I think this is a personal best for me, so I hope you enjoyed it! -Sapphire