“Good.”
“Good? Aren’t you supposed to love your enemies?”
“Put me alone in a room with him, and I could conveniently forget that command.”
“He’s in hell now,” Kingsley said. “Then again, so am I.”
Søren took a long deep breath. Meanwhile Kingsley considered falling asleep. Falling asleep and never waking up. The dead don’t dream.
“Can I touch you?” Søren finally asked.
“Toujours,” Kingsley said, laughing again. Always.
Søren reached out and cupped the side of his face. Water ran down Kingsley’s cheek. He hoped it was water from the pool and nothing more.
“It shouldn’t have happened to you. You didn’t deserve it.”
Kingsley smiled. “You’re good at this. They should make you pope.”
“A Jesuit pope? It’ll never happen.”
Kingsley closed his eyes again, cupped water into his mouth and spit it out. He couldn’t remember when he’d been this tired, and yet he never wanted to sleep again.
“There’s something I never told you,” Søren said. “Something I wanted to tell you, but never found the words or the reason to tell you.”
Kingsley opened his eyes.
“What?” he asked.
“The semester before you started St. Ignatius, a visiting priest came to teach church history. I was in his class. He was a young priest, thirty-five. Charming, Irish, handsome. He taught me Gaelic in his free time.”
Søren fell silent. Kingsley let the silence stand.
“Three weeks before Christmas we were alone in his office working on a translation of the Fiannaidheacht. In the middle of a sentence, Father Sean simply stopped talking. And he shut the door to his office and locked it. He knelt in front of me on the f loor and begged me in the most hushed and desperate whispers to take him. He said ‘Anything… You can do anything to me, Marcus. Anything you want. Anything at all.’ He tried to touch me.”
Kingsley had no words. His mouth was dry, and he couldn’t swallow.
“I was almost seventeen then. It was growing more difficult all the time to control myself. I ran miles every day, worked myself into exhaustion, cut myself in secret trying to cool the fever in my blood. And I could have had everything I wanted right then and there with Father Sean. I could see in his eyes he would have let me destroy him right there on his office f loor.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him to stop touching me or I would kill him. It shames me to admit I meant it. If he touched me again, I would have killed him. I told him to stand up. I told him to find an excuse, any excuse to leave St. Ignatius, because if he returned next semester, I would tell Father Henry he’d tried propositioning a student for sex.”
“You wanted him?”
“I wanted to hurt him.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t love him,” Søren said.
“You hurt me. The next semester you—”
“I loved you.”
“Well…” Kingsley said. “Now you tell me.”
Kingsley met Søren’s eyes. It was past tense, the word he’d used. Loved, not love. But it was enough. Tonight it was enough.
“Here’s my confession,” Kingsley said. “I fuck for money.”
Søren looked at him in shock and dismay.
“Why?” he breathed. “You have all the money in the world.”
“It’s not the money. It’s the paper trail. Makes it easier to blackmail people if I have the paper trail. That’s where I was going when I left you alone with Blaise. A DA’s wife. The DA I paid off to get your Virgin Queen her ‘Get Out of Jail’ card.”
Søren didn’t say anything at first. The silence was the purest hell.
“How much do you charge?” Søren finally asked.
“Why? You want to buy an hour with me? I’ll give you the friends-and-family discount.”
“I want to know what price you put on something I considered priceless.”
“Sex isn’t priceless.”
“It was with you.”
Kingsley’s stomach cramped from guilt and sorrow. Søren laid a hand on the top of Kingsley’s head.
“I absolve you,” Søren whispered.
“I’ve killed people.”
“I absolve you.”
“I’ve fucked half of Manhattan and three-fourths of Europe.”
“I absolve you.”
“Absolve me? I’m not Catholic.”
“I absolve you of that, too.”
Kingsley laughed once more, a real laugh this time. Søren laughed with him. Then the laugh died, and the room was silent once more, silent but for the slight sloshing of the water against the side of the pool whenever Kingsley moved. Søren stepped even closer. Kingsley rested his forehead on Søren’s chest, too tired to hold it up any longer.
“You have to stop punishing yourself,” Søren said, cupping the back of Kingsley’s head. “Judgment is for God alone. You’re committing slow suicide with the way you’re living. That is a sin I cannot absolve you of.”
“I’m so tired,” Kingsley confessed, ashamed to admit even this one small weakness. “The nightmares make me afraid to sleep. No matter how tired I am, I don’t want to sleep. But if I have someone in bed with me, I sleep better. They expect me to fuck them first. Can’t disappoint them, can I?”
“Are you at least being careful?”
“Not very often.”
“Kingsley, you have to be.”
“I’m getting a condom lecture from a priest.”
“You’ll get more than that if you’re not careful. And you have to stop taking drugs. And you can’t drink like this.”
“I’m a bon vivant.”
“You’re the most miserable bon vivant I’ve ever met. Drinking is for celebrating, not for suicide.”
“I have nothing to celebrate.”
“I do. Celebrate with me.”
“What are you celebrating?”
“For years I had no idea where you were, what you were doing, how you were living. And then you were shot and in the hospital and dying. And that’s why they contacted me. That’s how I found you. Now here you are, right in front of me. God brought me back to you, brought you back to me. I haven’t stopped celebrating from that night I first stepped in this house and saw you again.”
“You were angry at me.”
“It breaks my heart to see you like this.”
“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe you have a heart.”
Søren pressed his hand to the side of Kingsley’s face and with his thumb stroked the arch of his cheekbone. A gentle touch, a loving touch. He would have preferred a slap. It would hurt less.
“Do you remember all those notes you hid inside my Bible?” Søren asked.
“I wrote them in French so no one could read them.”
“I still have them. They’re still inside my Bible. I think the Kingsley I remember is still here.”
“You kept my notes?” Kingsley asked. It was the last thing he expected to hear. The notes, the remnants of his bullet… What other pieces of Kingsley did Søren still have in his possession? Other than his heart?
“All of them.”
“Why? You aren’t in love with me anymore.”
“I treasure the memory of what we had. And I pray we can have something even better, deeper now.”
“What?”
“Friendship. A real friendship.”
“You’re never going to fuck me again, are you?”
“Could you be faithful to me if I did?”
“Is that a serious question?” Kingsley asked.
“Let’s say it is. Let’s say I would break my vows with you. Let’s say I’d even consider leaving the priesthood for you. Could you be faithful to me?”
“Just you and I?”
“You. Me. Eleanor. The three of us, like we dreamed of that day.”
“You aren’t serious.”
“Pretend
that I am,” Søren said with unbroken eye contact. And for a split second Kingsley almost believed him. “This will be the one time I make you this offer. You. Me. Eleanor. The three of us. Forever.”
“Forever?”
“Eleanor agreed to forever. Can you?”
Kingsley closed his eyes. He could have Søren and the girl they dreamed of. And what? No one else? Ever? Forever was such a long time. And he’d been free of Søren for eleven years now. Only Søren? Only this girl he’d never met?
“I take it back,” Kingsley said. “You’re still a wolf.”
Søren grabbed a towel off the stack by the steps. He took a corner of it and dried Kingsley’s face. If Kingsley could fall asleep right here, right now, when Søren was taking care of him, he could fall asleep and never wake up. If he died now, maybe he could die almost happy.
“Can you remember…” Søren began as he squeezed water from Kingsley’s hair. “Was there ever a time when you felt like you were doing what God put you on this earth to do?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“When we were lovers.”
“Kingsley, be serious.”
“I mean it. You were so alone,” Kingsley said. “I’ve never met anyone more alone than you were back then. Everyone was afraid of you. No one ever talked to you. They treated you like a leper. You wanted them to.”
“You didn’t.”
“I was scared. But I loved you more than I feared you. I had to know you. And that night in the hallway when you said you wondered why God had made you the way you are, you wondered what the reason was…”
“Je suis la raison,” Søren repeated. “That’s what you said to me.”
“I am the reason,” Kingsley whispered.
Søren nodded.
“That was it,” Kingsley said. “That night I felt like God put me on earth to show you why he created you like He did. You needed me as much as I needed you.”
“I did. Until you, I thought I was the only one who wanted the things I wanted.”
“You never hurt me. Do you know that? Even when you hurt me you never hurt me. I loved it. It wasn’t until you stopped that I felt the pain.”
“It hurt me, too.” Søren ran his fingers through Kingsley’s hair. Eleven years since their last night together, and yet Søren still knew exactly how to touch him in the way he most needed. “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have married Marie-Laure. I thought I was solving all our problems. It was arrogant and foolish, and I realize that now.”
“It was fucking stupid is what it was,” Kingsley said. “Your Virgin Queen was right. You are an idiot.”
Søren dropped his hand into the water and splashed Kingsley in the face in punishment.
“Good to know you’re still as much a bastard as always,” Kingsley said, grabbing the towel and swiping his face with it.
Kingsley tossed the towel on the f loor and looked up again.
“I don’t know what to do,” Kingsley said, watching the light dance once more on the ceiling. It danced faster now as he and Søren set the water moving.
“Now? Tomorrow? Forever?”
“With my life. I don’t have to work. You saw to that. I don’t know what to do with myself. I make enemies as a hobby. I drink to kill time. I fuck to forget.”
“I can’t tell you what to do with your life,” Søren said. “That’s between you and God. But first you have to know that you do want to live. Once you’re certain you want to live, you’ll find your reason for living.”
“I don’t know if I want to live. I look at the future, and I see nothing. It’s all black. I have no dreams, no visions, no hope. And you don’t even want me anymore like you used to.”
“If that beautiful, proud Kingsley Boissonneault who chased me down the hall and watched me sleep and confessed he thought of me all the time and yelled at me for breaking the rules of a game without rules… If he walked into this room right now, then I would be tempted to break my vows. That boy was a king, which is why I took so much pleasure in making him kneel. But this self-pitying, self-loathing, selfdestructive Kingsley Edge in front of me? There’s no honor in breaking someone already broken. There’s no fun in it, either.”
“I want to be him again. But I can’t. He’s gone, he’s dead. I’ve done too much. I’ve seen too much.” He closed his eyes and raised his hands, wanting to push away the visions in his mind—the crimes, the corpses, the missions into war zones. He’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and found himself wandering the back alleys of hell.
“You can be a new man, Kingsley. If he’s dead, then he’s dead. But you don’t have to live the rest of your life walking around inside his corpse. You can have a new life.”
“It’s so easy for you to say and so hard for me to do.”
“It’s not hard at all. You only have to want it. You have to want the life where you’re doing what God created you to do. If the one time you felt like you were fulfilling your destiny was by helping me, then go find the others like us and help them, too.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. You’re one of the most intelligent men on this earth. You can figure it out.”
“I don’t even know where to start on a new life.”
“Do you truly want one? Do you want to give up all this self-destructive foolishness and do something worthwhile? Do you want to be a new man?”
Kingsley paused and thought about the question. It seemed too good to be true. It sounded like a magic trick. Voila. New man. New life. But he wanted that magic even if it was an illusion. What he wouldn’t give to feel that way again, feel the way he felt when he and Søren had been lovers, when his mere existence gave Søren reason for hope. When Søren’s existence gave him hope.
“Oui.” Kingsley met Søren’s eyes. “I want it. What do I do?”
“You die and then you’re reborn. New life.”
Kingsley rolled his eyes.
“I die? That’s going to take some doing. I’ve been trying to die for ten years now. No luck.”
“With this I can help.”
“How? Are you going to kill me?”
“Yes.” Søren grasped Kingsley by the front of his shirt and dragged him to his feet.
“Life.” Søren looked straight and deep into Kingsley’s eyes.
“What?”
“Death.” Søren pushed him underwater.
Immediately Kingsley thrashed and jerked, trying to fight off Søren’s iron grip that held him under the surface of the water. He was drowning, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t get back up. He knew how drowning worked. He knew he would be dead in a minute. The water covered his head and face, and he couldn’t get traction, couldn’t get air. He looked death in the face and clawed at its eyes. He’d