Читать книгу The King - Tiffany Reisz, Tiffany Reisz - Страница 13

4

FOR A SILENT eternity they only looked at each other.

Finally Kingsley raised his hand.

“Wait here,” he said and turned around. He turned back around again. “S’il vous plait.”

Søren said nothing. Even if Søren wanted to speak, Kingsley left before he could say a word.

Kingsley strode from the music room and shut the door behind him.

As soon as he stood alone in the hallway, Kingsley pushed a hand into his stomach. A wave of dizziness passed over him. He fought it off, ran upstairs to his bedroom and changed from his rain-soaked clothes into dry ones. He grabbed soap, a towel. He scrubbed at his face, rinsed the taste of Justin out of his mouth, toweled the rain from his hair and slicked his hands through it. In less than five minutes he looked like himself again—shoulder-length dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin inherited from his father. Did he look like he did ten years ago? Was he more handsome? Less? Did it matter to Søren anymore what he looked like?

“Søren...” He breathed the name like a prayer. How long had it been since he’d said that name out loud? What was he doing here? Last year Kingsley had been dying in a hospital in France, dying of infection from a gunshot wound. He remembered nothing of those days after his surgery but for the few minutes Søren had visited. He’d been too ill, barely conscious. He’d only heard Søren’s voice speaking to a doctor, demanding they treat him, heal him, save him. Kingsley thought it only a dream at the time, but when he awoke to find he’d been left a gift—access to a Swiss bank account with more than thirty million dollars in it—he knew it had been real.

That should have been it. That should have been the last time they’d seen each other. Kingsley knew that bank account had been blood money—Søren’s way of saying he was sorry for what had happened between them. The second Kingsley spent the first cent he’d accepted that apology. They were even now. No unfinished business.

So why was Søren here?

Kingsley took a steadying breath, but it did nothing to quell his light-headedness. He was almost giddy with shock. He laughed for no reason. As much as wanted to, he couldn’t leave Søren alone in the music room all night waiting for him. He had to go back, talk to him, look him in the eyes again and find out what he wanted. And he would. He could do this. Some of the most dangerous men in the world pissed themselves at the mere mention of Kingsley’s name. People feared him. They should fear him. He feared no one.

He took one more breath and readied himself to leave the bathroom and go to Søren. But then he stepped back, kicked the seat of the toilet open and vomited so hard his eyes watered.

Once he was certain he’d fully emptied his stomach of all its contents, he sat on the cold tile floor and breathed through his nose. He laughed.

Here he was, eleven years later, and Søren could still do this to him without saying a word. God damn him.

Slowly he stood and washed his mouth out again. He could run. He had money. He could leave. Go out the back door, fly away and run forever.

But no, Kingsley had to face him. He could face him. His pride demanded it of him. And if Søren had found him here, he could find him anywhere.

Outside the music room Kingsley willed his hands to stop shaking, willed his heart to slow its frenetic racing.

He threw open the door with a flourish and stepped inside.

At first he didn’t see Søren. He’d expected to find him waiting on the divan or on one of the chairs. Or perhaps even standing by the window or sitting at the piano. He hadn’t expected to find Søren bent underneath the top board of the piano. He’d turned on a lamp now, and warm light filled the room.

“What are you doing?” Kingsley asked as he came to the piano and peeked under the open lid. He spoke with a steady voice.

“Your bass notes are flat.” Søren hit a key and turned a pin inside the piano. “You shouldn’t have the piano near the window. The temperature fluctuates too much.”

“I’ll have it moved.”

“When was the last time you had it tuned?” Søren asked.

“Never.”

“I can tell.” Søren hit another key, turned another pin. Kingsley watched Søren’s hands as he worked. Large, strong and flawless hands. His clothes had changed, he’d grown taller, more handsome, and now he was a priest. But his hands hadn’t changed. They were the same hands Kingsley remembered.

Søren stood up straight and lowered the lid of the grand piano back down.

“The action is stiff. Has it not been played very often?”

“You were the first. No one’s allowed to play it.”

“No one? Then I apologize for playing it.”

“Don’t apologize. When I say no one is allowed to play it, I meant...no one but you.”

Søren glanced up and met Kingsley’s eyes. It took all of Kingsley’s resolve, fortitude and the alcohol left in his bloodstream not to break eye contact. Søren always had this way of looking at him that made Kingsley want to confess everything to him. Even back when they were teenage boys in school together, he’d had that power. But Kingsley kept silent, kept his secrets. They weren’t boys anymore.

“I’ll call someone,” Kingsley finally said. “I’ll have it tuned.”

“Call a music store. They’ll be able to recommend a good tuner.”

Kingsley and Søren studied each other over the top of the piano.

“Do you want to keep talking about the piano, or should we have a real conversation?” Søren asked.

Kingsley gave him a halfhearted smile and sat down on the piano bench. The adrenaline had subsided, but the disorientation remained. If he awoke to find himself in bed and all this was a dream, he wouldn’t be surprised.

“So...parish priest? Dominican? Franciscan?” he asked, the old words coming back to him like a language he used to be fluent in but hadn’t spoken in years.

“Jesuit,” Søren said, taking a seat on the white-and-black-striped sofa across from the piano bench.

Kingsley rubbed his forehead and laughed.

“A Jesuit. I was afraid of that. I knew they wanted you in their ranks.”

“I wasn’t recruited. It was my choice.”

“So it’s real? The collar? The vows? All of it?”

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.”