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He clasped his hands in front of him between his knees.
“It is the most real thing I’ve ever done.”
Kingsley raised his hands in surrender and confusion.
“When? Why?” He gave up on his English and fell back into his French. Quand? Pourquoi?
“I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but I’ve wanted to be a priest since I was fourteen,” Søren answered in his perfect French. It felt good to speak his first language again, to hear it again, even if every word Søren said stabbed his heart like a sword. “I converted at fourteen, so I could become a Jesuit. It was all I ever wanted.”
“You never told me.”
“Of course not. When I met you...”
“What?”
Søren didn’t answer at first. Weighing his words? Or simply torturing Kingsley with silence? Kingsley remembered those long pauses before Søren would speak, as if he had to examine every word like a diamond under a jeweler’s lope before allowing it to be displayed. Kingsley could live and die and be born again waiting for Søren to answer one little question.
“When I met you,” Søren said again, “it was the first time I questioned my calling.”
Kingsley let those words hang in the air between them before tucking them inside his heart and locking them away.
“Did you think I would try to talk you out of it?” Kingsley asked once he could speak again.
“Would you have tried to talk me out of it?”
“Yes,” Kingsley said entirely without shame. “I’ll try to talk you out of it now.”
“You’re a little late. I’m ordained. You know religious orders are sacraments. They can’t be revoked. Once a priest...”
“Always a priest,” Kingsley finished the famous dictum. He wasn’t Catholic, but he’d gone to a Catholic school long enough to learn all he needed to know about the Jesuits. “But a Jesuit? Really? There are other sorts of priests. You had to join an order that takes a vow of poverty?”
“Poverty? That’s your problem with the Jesuits? Not the celibacy?”
“We’ll get to that. Let’s start with the poverty.”
Søren leaned back on the sofa and rested his chin on his hand.
“It’s good to see you again,” Søren said. “You look better than the last time I saw you.”
“The last time you saw me I was dying in a Paris hospital.”
“Glad you got over that.”
“You’re not the only one, mon ami. I should thank you—”
Søren raised his hand to stop him.
“Don’t. Please, don’t thank me.” Søren glanced away into the corner of the room. “After all that happened, after all I put you through, terrifying a doctor on your behalf was the least I could do.”
He gave Kingsley a tight smile.
“You did more than terrify a doctor. I shouldn’t tell you this, but my...employer at the time had decided to burn me.”
“Burn?”
“Remove me from existence. Letting me die in the hospital was a nice, clean way to get rid of me and everything I know. The doctors, they’d been encouraged to let me die peacefully. I would have, if you hadn’t shown up and given the counter order.”
“I’m good at giving orders.” Søren gave him the slightest of smiles.
“How did you find me? At the hospital, I mean.”
“You listed me as your next of kin when you joined the Foreign Legion.”
“That’s right,” Kingsley said. “I had no one else.”
“You had our school as my contact information. A nurse called St. Ignatius, and St. Ignatius called me.”
“How did you find me today?”
“You don’t exactly fly under the radar, Kingsley.”
Kingsley shrugged, tried and failed to laugh.
“It’s not fair, you know. I couldn’t open my eyes that day in the hospital. You saw me last year. I haven’t seen you in...too long.”
“I was in Rome, in India. I’m not sure I want to know where you’ve been.”
“You don’t.”
“What are you doing with yourself these days?”
Kingsley shrugged, sighed, raised his hands. “I own a strip club. Don’t judge me. It’s very lucrative.”
“I judge not,” Søren said. “Anything else? Job? Girlfriend? Wife? Boyfriend?”
“No job. I’m retired. No wife. But Blaise is around here somewhere. She’s the girlfriend. Sort of. And you?”
“No girlfriend,” Søren said. “And no wife, either.”
“You bastard,” he said, shaking his head. “A fucking Jesuit priest.”
“Actually, a nonfucking Jesuit priest. They haven’t rescinded the vows of celibacy yet.”
“How inconsiderate of them.”
Kingsley tried to smile at Søren, but he couldn’t. Not yet.
“Celibacy.” Kingsley pronounced the word like a curse. It was a curse. “I thought you were a sadist. When did you become a masochist?”
“Is that a rhetorical question or are you looking for the exact date of my ordination? I’m a priest. Once you’re firmly convinced that God exists, it’s not that great a leap to ask him for a job.”
Kingsley stood up and walked to the window. Outside, Manhattan had awoken and stirred to life. He had CEOs and Nobel Prize winners and heiresses as his neighbors here on Riverside Drive. They were the men and women who owned the city. And yet the only person in the entire borough who meant anything to him sat on his sofa in the music room and didn’t have a cent to his name. Søren once had a cent to his name. A few billion cents to his name. And he’d given every last one of them to Kingsley.
“Why are you here?” Kingsley finally asked the question of the night.
“You might regret asking that.”
“I do already. I’m guessing this is more than a friendly reunion? And I’m guessing you aren’t here to pick things up where we left off?”
“Would you really want to?”
“Yes.” Kingsley answered without hesitation. It didn’t seem to be the answer Søren expected.
“Kingsley...” Søren stood and joined him by the window. Dawn had come to Manhattan. If dawn knew what she was doing, she’d take the next bus back out of town.
“Don’t say my name like that, like I’m a child who said something foolish. I’m allowed to want you. Still. Always.”
“I thought you would hate me.”
“I did. I do hate you. But I don’t... How can I truly hate the one person who knows me?” Kingsley studied Søren out of the corner of his eye and ached to touch Søren’s face, his lips. Not even the collar could stem the tide of Kingsley’s desire. Not even all the pain and the years between them.
“Do you remember that night we were in the hermitage and—”
“I remember all our nights,” Kingsley whispered.
Søren closed his eyes as if Kingsley’s words hurt him. Kingsley hoped they had.
“It was a night we talked about others. We were wondering if there were others like us out there somewhere.”
“I remember,” Kingsley said. And as soon as Søren conjured the memory, Kingsley was a teenager again. He stretched out on the cot on his back, naked, the sheets pulled to his stomach. Søren lay next to him. Kingsley could feel the heat of Søren’s skin against his. No matter how many times they touched, it always surprised him how warm Søren was. He expected his skin to be cold, as cold as his heart. Kingsley’s thighs burned. Søren had whipped him with a leather belt, then they’d made love on the cot. He knew it was teenage romantic foolishness to consider the sort of sex they had “making love,” but he needed to believe that’s what it had been—to both of them. He needed to think it had been more than mere fucking.
“Do you remember what you said to me?” Søren asked. “You said you would find all of our kind and lay them at my feet.”
“And you said you didn’t need hundreds. But...” Kingsley raised both hands as if he could conjure the memory between his palms and look into it like a crystal ball. “One girl.”
“‘A girl would be nice,’ I said.”
Kingsley laughed. “We were trapped in an all-boys’ school. ‘A girl would be nice’ might have been a radical underestimation of how much we wanted to fuck a girl for a change.”
“I didn’t want you to think you weren’t enough for me. You know I’m—”
“I know,” Kingsley said.
Kingsley knew Søren wasn’t like him. For Kingsley, sex was sex, and he had it when he wanted with whomever he wanted. Male or female or anything in between was simply a question of strategy. Søren had told him once he considered himself straight, that Kingsley was the sole exception to the rule. “That girl we dreamed of—I wanted black hair and green eyes. But you wanted green hair and black eyes? I assume you mean the irises would be black, not that you planned on punching her in the face.”
“I’m not that much of a sadist.” Søren smiled, and the world turned to morning from the force of that smile. Had Kingsley ever seen him smile like that? “And this girl of ours, she would be wilder than both of us together.”
“We dreamed beautiful dreams, didn’t we? But a girl like that? Impossible dream.”
Kingsley had once dreamed he and Søren would spend their lives together. They’d travel the world, see it all, wake up together, sleep together and fuck on every continent.
“Nothing is impossible,” Søren said.
“What do you mean?”
Søren turned his eyes from the sun and gazed directly at Kingsley.
“Kingsley,” Søren began and paused. Whatever words would come next, Kingsley felt certain his world would never be the same again once they were spoken.
“What is it?”
“I found her.”
5 (#ulink_6384a841-1670-5959-acfe-f00afe3537ac)
KINGSLEY COULDN’T SPEAK at first. What was there to say to that? What do you say to an otherwise reasonable person who suddenly looks at you and says he saw a unicorn on the side of the road or met Saint Peter while out for a walk?
“You found her. You’re certain?”
“I have never been more certain of anything in my life. And that includes my call to the priesthood. It’s her. Black hair and green eyes. Green hair and black eyes.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Her eyes change color in the light. Green to black and back again. When I first saw her, she had streaked green dye through her black hair. She’s violent and foul-mouthed, and she told me I was an idiot. Not only did she say that to me, it was the first thing she said to me.”
“Wild, is she?”
“I’d go so far as to use the word feral.”
“Feral. A wild cat, then. With claws?”
“Sharp ones. Sharp mind, too. Very intelligent. Cunning. Quick and clever. Almost fearless.”
“My type of girl. Where did you meet her?”
“I was sent to pastor at a small parish in a town called Wakefield in Connecticut. She’s in my congregation. I recognized her the second I saw her. You would have, too.”
“What’s she like?”
“Dangerous. She doesn’t even know how dangerous.”
“How dangerous?”
“She...” Søren stopped and laughed. “She made me make her a promise.”
“Made you? No one makes you do anything.”
“She did. I needed her to agree to something, and instead of being cowed like every other person I’ve ever attempted to terrorize before, she refused to accept my terms. Unless...”
