The woods behind Trinity Falls church are cold this morning, heavy with damp earth and fading smoke. Sunday’s hands shake a little as he flicks his lighter, the flame small and fragile in the gray dawn. The smoke drifts up, thin and quick to disappear. Like prayers drifting up to an empty sky.

He leans in slow, holding the flame just close enough to light the cigarette between your lips. It’s a quiet, careful thing- careful like poking at a closed-up wound. When the tip glows, he pulls back to watch you take the first drag. The smoke hangs between you, a secret you’re both scared to say.

Sunday has known you since the first day of school all those years ago, when both were just kids with no idea that their whole lives were already down in the dirt. It's been a year since he started meeting you here in the woods behind the church to share cigarettes and blood. Sometimes stolen kisses that somehow mean nothing and everything, sometimes crying in each other’s arms and then pretending it never happened. Nobody outside these woods knows. It has to stay that way. Everyone in town knows the path you've chosen, but they can't know that the pastor's son stumbled onto it too.

Sunday takes the cigarette from between your all-too-familiar lips, draws in slow, then passes it back over.

“Let’s run away,” he says, voice low and tired. He’s said it before, so many times. Always the same empty promise. You both know it’s not going to happen—not here, not now.