Kerasma, Southern Peloponnese
**All characters are fictitious and over eighteen years of age””
After two decades away, former First Lieutenant Theofilos Christodoulou returns to the quiet Greek coastal village of Kerasma. Wounded in body and soul, he returns to claim the seaside cottage of his late grandmother (Yiayia) and to confront a life he was forced to abruptly abandon in youth.
Dormant memories are stirred among the villagers: most poignantly, in Aris Alexiou, the baker’s son, who once shared a moment of forbidden love with Theo.
When Theo left abruptly, Aris married out of fear and desperation, Aris carries regrets and broken ties. The village watches and the sea murmurs like memory. There are a thousand reasons for Theo not to stay.
This time, he means to remain.
The Mercedes-Benz G-Class growled its way down from the heights and into the empty stone square of Kerasma on the coast. Its dull olive paint veiled in dust like a veteran returning from another war. The vehicle looked out of place here, its military bulk clashed against the sleepy charm of crumbling balconies, sun-faded shutters, and the scent of oregano hanging in the air.
The driver sat still, cigarette clamped between his lips, boot heavy on the brake. He didn’t glance around. He didn’t need to. The village had already noticed. Villages have a way of seeing everything and saying nothing to outsiders.
Conversations ceased mid-sentence. Coffee cups hovered in the air. A string of lemons tumbled from an old woman’s bag and rolled toward the gutter. Children, half curious, half startled, darted behind the olive carts like sparrows in a wind.
Then the driver stepped out and moved crisply to the passenger door, pulled it open.
Former First Lieutenant Theofilos Christodoulou of the Hellenic Army emerged slowly, unfolding himself like a relic from memory. His boots hit the stone like punctuation.
Theo glanced once at the horizon, then offered a lazy salute to the driver, neither mocking nor formal, just the gesture of a man who understood the ceremony but no longer obeyed it. The driver saluted, smiled and made his goodbyes.
The villagers watched in silence.
They knew, of course, about the man called Theofilos, soldier, spy, and almost a ghost. Most thought he’d died years ago in an explosion in Libya where Hellenic forces were deployed to help curb illegal immigration in the Mediterranean.
His grandmother had spoken of him as if he lived, prayed for him, even cursed his silence and refusal to reply to her letters. A curious woman, who loved the memory of Theo but sometimes said she would never have him in her house again for some reason.
That was years ago. Now she was dead, and here was her grandson and heir in the flesh. Not in a taxi. Not limping down the road like normal people but in an armored vehicle. Foreign, loud, and very visible. There was always a tension in Greece between hospitality and alienation, welcome and wariness. Even within families. Especially in families.
His limp was pronounced, left knee stiff as rebar, the kind of gait that never healed properly. He shifted his weight with a subtle grimace and reached for the collar of his field jacket, faded olive with sun-worn edges.
The twin stars on his shoulder marked him as a 'Ypolochagos', First Lieutenant in the Hellenic Army, but he wore them like an afterthought. In truth, rank had never aligned with function. His title was official fiction, a formality for the record. Inside the office, Theo operated as a full Colonel, no questions asked.
No medals. No ceremony. Just the understated insignia for public consumption, and the bearing of a man shaped by years of discipline and service. The vehicle had pulled away, leaving him alone with a modest rucksack and the kind of presence that didn’t need embellishment.
His eyes swept the square the way they once swept Libyan border towns and mountain passes, calm, alert, calculating. Not aggressive. Just trained. The instincts hadn’t faded, nor had the quiet authority that made people pause, mid-step or mid-sentence, and look. Not because he demanded it. Something in him still commanded it.
Father Leonidas lingered in the church's doorway, half in shadow, half in light. His cassock hung loose, softened by years of use, confessions spoken into the silence, not shouted anymore. There was a time he could fill a chapel with fire, sermons delivered with the clipped precision of a psalm and the heat of incense curling upward. Time sculpts even iron, and now his stillness said more than his voice ever did.
He nodded to Theo, neither warm nor cold. Just the sort of nod exchanged between men who’ve survived their own storms and recognize the wreckage in others.
Handsome still, Leonidas carried himself with a quiet gravity. To strangers, he offered smiles shaped by habit and the traditions of filoxenia, that ancient call to welcome. There was something more tightly drawn in him now, something turned inward. He watched men closely, how they moved, how they filled a room, how they held command of a moment. A flicker in his eye when someone was assertive, sure of themselves. Not envy, not judgment, just something like relief.
He spoke rarely of his visits to Palmers Green, Wood Green, and Tottenham in North London, only saying he visited “family” in a voice that invited no questions. Even a priest has family.
The occasional trip to Albania was dismissed with a wave of the hand, as though it hadn’t happened at all. No explanation, no elaboration, just silence, practiced and deliberate. But the clues were there, tucked into the margins of his life. Books left open on Hellenic sculpture, pages marked with figures carved in heroic tension, bodies caught mid-stride or mid-battle. He lingered near strong voices in a crowd, drawn not by volume but by something else, presence, force, the echo of command.
There was a restlessness in him, barely concealed. A priest by title, yes, but not always by rhythm. His absences were brief and unannounced, his returns quiet. No one asked, and he offered nothing. Yet there were whispers, of late-night walks, of meetings in border towns, of names never spoken in the parish. The cassock fit him well, but it wasn’t the only uniform he wore.
Leonidas kept fit. Swimming at dusk just around the bay, lifting weights with the focus of someone trying to hold back time. Outsiders often found him hard to read, an enigma in priest’s robes. Those who knew what to look for, the careful gestures, the way he held silence, the choices of company could see the map he left behind.
Across the square, Aris Alexiou gripped a baking tray still warm from the oven, the scent of koulouri, normally sold in the morning, but thick in the air. His hands steady, but his chest betrayed him, rising too fast, cheeks touched pink. Flour clung to his apron like a second skin. He didn’t speak, didn’t smile. Just stared and in that stare lived decades of stale compromise, and the impossible fact of finding Theo standing there again.
Dimitrius Filaktis leaned against the lemon tree beside his gate, arms folded, jaw set like stone cut by hand. In his youth, he’d been first to judge, sharp-tongued and rigid with pride but losing a wife, growing old in a house full of echoes, had worn the edges smooth. Like a pebble in a mountain stream, tumbled by the ages.
Still, Greek men don’t forget. They mellow, yes, but they guard their names, their legacy and their land like a fortress. Watching Theo now brought back long-dormant memories: dusty afternoons hauling sacks of olives, shared cigarettes beneath the fig tree, promises that never made it past the lip of the well.
One man had left for the Army, although Theo had previously shown no love for the armed forces. All the others had remained.
Men had aged beneath the weight of duty, silence, fatherhood or being a widower and they took codes of masculinity that allowed for grief, but not new life.
Theo reached the gate of Yiayia’s house on the beach, its wrought iron window screens flecked peeling paint and rust, painted long ago in hopeful blue. A riot of rosemary spilled down the front steps like a stubborn battalion, fragrant, resilient, fiercely alive even in the droughts.
Grandmother’s cottage hunched against sea breezes like an old woman clutching her shawl, its white plaster mottled and sun-paled, cracked in places where the salt air had gnawed for decades. Shutters hung like tired eyelids, half-devoured by termites, clinging to their hinges out of sheer pride.
In the garden, what remained was half memory, half surrender: two splintered wooden chairs pushed up against a tilting table; a sagging clothesline. Terracotta pots lined the low wall, some boasting geraniums or dried out old mint, others abandoned to dry soil and faded labels. A small icon of the Virgin tucked behind the front basin watched in silence, her paint worn thin by time and prayer.
The sea murmured just beyond the last olive tree, a breath away, always near. The scent of brine clung to the windowsills and drifted through the jasmine vines that tangled themselves greedily over the side fence.
Theo stepped forward, the old key pressing into his palm like a relic. From the deep crease of his coat pocket, he drew it out, small, worn, cold with memory. It slid into the lock with a resistance that felt ritualistic, as though the door itself remembered every hand that had passed it by. Yiayia never locked her door. It wasn’t Greek. The notary’s letter had arrived with quiet finality, and the key came with it inside the package of official papers, the kind of package that suggested secrets and finality.
He lingered before turning it, the air holding its breath. When the bolt shifted, the sound cracked sharp and sudden, a noise loud enough to slice through years left untouched. The threshold was no longer hers. It was his now and with it, everything they’d left unsaid.
The door to grandmother’s house on the beach swung wide.
Inside, the scent of old house lingered in the corners like a Church hymn, mingling with the faint dampness of coastal air and a family history that hadn’t yet loosened its grip.
In the far alcove, the εικονοστάσι, or Yiayia’s icon corner faced east, still stood exactly where she had kept it. A small shelf draped in old lady lace, flanked by votive candles and a flickering oil lamp that had run dry. Theo stepped toward it quietly. He could still see her in his memory, bent slightly at the waist, fingers brushing forehead, chest, shoulders, lips whispering Kyrie Eleison, lighting the flame like it was the start of every good day.
He crossed himself, slowly, deliberately, each movement echoing hers. Then he kissed the tips of his fingers and pressed them softly against the icon of the Virgin Mary, her painted eyes calm and knowing, framed in tarnished silver. For a moment, everything stilled. Theo wasn't a man built for ritual anymore, but in this act there was gravity, a gesture of reverence, of apology, of fragile gratitude.
He didn’t say a word. Just offering thanks, for surviving his service in the army, that explosion, for returning after twenty years, for being welcomed back into the home of a woman who had never said I understand you, or, I accept you, but who had left a place ready for him all the same.
The living room barely deserved the title. One sofa with threadbare cushions. A crucifix above the wooden cabinet, its varnish peeling. Embroidered cloths everywhere, on tables, under cups, over icons. A small TV that hadn't been turned on in years, dust clogging the screen. The floor tiles were chipped, sea-blue once, now faded to memory.
The kitchen was still as cramped as Theo remembered, walls closing in. The mismatched plates stacked unevenly in the cupboard, some chipped, some floral, all survivors of decades of meals. Dry garlic bulbs hung from twine above the sink like offerings to forgotten saints. The fridge still buzzed with stubborn dignity, its enamel yellowed, its contents sparse: a half jar of fig jam, a wedge of graviera cheese wrapped in wax paper, and a bottle of cheap tsipouro, from Thessaly.
On the shelf above the table, a photo stared back at him, black-and-white, faded at the edges. A boy with wide eyes and scraped knees, cradled in the arms of a woman who had never said “I love you,” but had shown it in every ladle of lentil soup, every folded koulourakia, and every whispered prayer over a pot of fasolada. the national food of most Greeks.
Yiayia had cooked like God was watching. Her hands moved with ritual precision, rolling dolmades with fingers that never trembled, stirring avgolemono soup until it shimmered like silk. She made galaktoboureko on feast days, and on quiet nights, grilled sardines with lemon and oregano, served with bitter greens and a splash of vinegar.
Now, standing in her kitchen, Theo felt absurd. His body still bore the shape of military service, broad shoulders, calloused palms, a limp that told stories no one asked to hear. He had spent years in the shadows, trained for silence and precision.
The Hellenic National Intelligence Service (NIS) had sculpted Theo into a shadow. Founded in 1953 and originally modeled after the CIA, it evolved into an agency fluent in silence. By the time Theo joined its ranks, he was trained not just to observe but to vanish.
His assignments ranged from tense deployments in the Balkans to whispered surveillance along the Aegean coast and in Libya. He slipped through neutral zones and ambiguous allegiances during joint NATO operations, missions so delicate they could only exist in half-spoken briefings. Legal lines blurred. Loyalties bent.
Theo became fluent in subtext, crossing borders that didn’t appear on maps, gathering intel from strangers, trading secrets behind tinted windows and between cigarette drags. He left no trace. He took no credit. His rank of First Lieutenant hardly did credit to the roles he performed. When dawn broke, he was already gone although in this kitchen, with three teaspoons and a jar of jam, he felt more exposed to life than he ever had in uniform. It was in this secret world that he was a Colonel and not outside in the open.
The fig jam was crystallizing at the edges. He dipped a spoon in anyway. It tasted like his memories of Yiayia, sweet, stubborn, and sometimes slightly harsh.
He removed his jacket, set it down on the sofa. Beneath the jacket, his body was still hard, still shaped by years of survival, his arms muscles, chest broad, though the limp gave him a tilt that ruined symmetry. Then he entered the bedroom that had been his own.
There, the air shifted. He paused at the doorway. The bed, small, iron-framed. Quilts folded neatly, as if Yiayia expected guests even in death. He moved to the old pine wardrobe, opened it slowly. Inside was her archive. Tin boxes filled with photographs, young soldiers, weddings, beaches from the 1950s. He pulled one out, it was himself, age eighteen, leaning on the broken-down garden wall down by the beach, grinning like he had no idea what was coming. Even then, the wall was collapsing.
The room hadn’t changed. The iron-framed bed, the single window smudged with salt and memory, the faint scent of lavender rising from the floorboards. It was here in this room that everything unraveled.
Theo had been eighteen, suntanned and bold from wine and the heat of summer evening. The other man was the same age, barefoot, grinning shyly, with too much lust in his eyes. They’d touched under the light of a half-moon, fingers trailing like secrets across thighs, stomachs, shoulders.
The village feast in the nearby square still echoed in their blood, music, meat, dancing, and this was the quiet aftermath. On this bed, they discovered a hunger neither knew about before or could name without shame.
The room pulsed with the dense hush of summer heat heavy in the air, mingled with something older than memory: longing held too long in quiet. Theo’s skin shone, slick with exertion, every inch of him coiled with masculine intent. His body moved with a certainty that left no question unanswered, no desire unmet.
Theo came at the smaller man like a storm claiming the shore, deliberate, unrelenting, with the kind of focus that left no room for negotiation. The man didn’t resist. He gave himself to Theo, breath hitching, fingers clawing at the sheets like anchors in a rising tide. The linen twisted beneath him, rumpled and marked, not just by movement, but by revelation. Theo didn’t hesitate. He fucked like it was instinct, like it had always been his right. Not hesitating. Not tender. Just male. Just inevitable. Like a bull breeding for the first time.
Theo wasn’t loud. He didn’t need to be. His presence filled the room with command, with the kind of control over the smaller male that made silence feel thick, electric. Every breath, every shift of weight rewrote the air between them. Heat and history clung to the walls.
Theo tried to keep his breathing low, tried to swallow the groans that rose from his chest. Although the smaller man beneath him being fucked was too loud, too raw, too undone. Theo pressed a firm hand over his mouth, not cruelly, but with purpose. The sound had to be contained. Yiayia’s house wasn’t built for secrets.
Theo didn’t speak. He never did. His body told the story, of years spent denying, of hunger that had outgrown shame. The night air whistled through the shutter cracks as flesh met flesh, rhythm slow then seizing, the iron bed frame groaning against the plaster wall. It wasn’t just sex. It was reclamation. It was memory, rewritten in sweat and skin.
