“I’ll sniff him someday.”
“You should,” Kingsley said, although he almost wished he hadn’t told Sam about it now. To know the scent of someone’s bare skin was to know that person in the most intimate, primal way. “I would breathe him in when we were in bed together. Drove him crazy. If he caught me doing it, he would pinch my nose and hold it. Bastard.”
Sam rose up and smiled down at him. She pinched his nose and held it.
“You’re in love with him, aren’t you? Still in love with him?”
Kingsley nodded. She released his nose.
“I understand. Continue your story.”
Kingsley wrinkled his nose. Sam had a vicious pinch.
“You have to know something about S?ren,” Kingsley began. “He had a bad childhood.”
“Didn’t we all?”
“I didn’t,” Kingsley said. “I had a beautiful childhood. My parents were in love with each other, and they adored my sister and me. There is no better city than Paris to grow up in. The City of Light? The City of Love? Nothing bad happened to me. Until everything bad happened to me. My parents died, and I was sent to live with my grandparents in Maine. It was bad. I hated my school. I stayed sane by sleeping with as many girls as possible.”
“That’s my recipe for sanity, as well.”
Kingsley grinned. “My grandparents sent me to an all-boys school. No girls to seduce. And then I fell in love with a sadist who…”
“Who did what?” Sam asked.
Kingsley had almost said “put me in the infirmary” but decided to keep that part a secret. He wasn’t ashamed, wasn’t protecting S?ren. But that first night he and S?ren had had sex, that night on the forest f loor, had been the most important night of his life. He’d been having sex since age twelve, but in his mind, his heart, that was the night he had lost his virginity.
“A sadist who was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. Love at first sight. Or lust. Hard to tell the difference when you’re sixteen. Hard to tell the difference when you’re twenty-eight.”
“I have that problem, too.”
“S?ren and I had sex one time the first semester I was there,” Kingsley said, summing up the most meaningful night of his life in a few words. “And then I went home for the summer. When I came back for the fall semester, he’d graduated and was teaching. We started sleeping together then. For the first month of school, it was once a week maybe. Then two, three, four times a week. We couldn’t get enough of each other. I’d wait until the students in my dorm were asleep, then I’d sneak out and run for it. He’d already be there in the hermitage waiting for me. We had to sneak around all the time. Exhausting but worth it. We had to sneak around even more after my sister, Marie-Laure, came to visit.”
“What did you do?”
“Got off campus one day. S?ren had gotten a letter from his sister, Elizabeth, and he needed to take care of some family business. He asked Marie-Laure to take over his French classes that Friday so he could deal with it.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“When the teenaged sadist in the family is the relative you turn to for help, you know there’s a problem.”
Sam winced. “Sounds like it. What was the problem?”
“Elizabeth learned their father had gotten remarried, and his second wife had another daughter. She asked S?ren to warn the new wife what kind of monster she’d married.”
“Dad was bad?”
“S?ren had the father of all bad fathers,” Kingsley said. A joke, yes, but neither of them laughed at it. “Since my sister was substituting for him that day, I skipped class and went with him. I couldn’t believe he’d let me skip, but we’d had so little time together since she showed up. He said yes.”
“Where did you all go?”
“New Hampshire, to his father’s house.”
“How did you get there?”