“I took the vow of celibacy, not you. And I’m pleased to hear you’re feeling more yourself again. I can’t imagine you being content to only top.”
“You should meet her. You two can talk shop.”
“Did you have a f lashback with her?”
“A few times,” he confessed, still embarrassed about the one he’d had in front of S?ren. “They’ve mostly stopped. Not completely, but they aren’t stopping me anymore.”
S?ren pressed the f lat of his hand into the knot of welts on Kingsley’s rib cage. He winced and inhaled sharply.
“It hurts coming back to life,” S?ren said. “It’s a brutal, dirty business. Paddles on the chest pushing electric current into the dead heart, Dr. Frankenstein shooting lightning through his monster’s corpse. Life is a force so strong it can blow a stone off a tomb. It’s never easy—resurrection. It’s violent and it hurts.”
“It’s better than the alternative, non?” Kingsley asked, turning around to face S?ren. He pulled his shirt down. “Staying dead?”
“It’s good to have you back.”
“I’ve missed me,” Kingsley said.
“You were always very fond of yourself.”
“I charmed the pants off of me,” Kingsley said as they walked out of S?ren’s office.
“I’ll blame you if we lose today because you’re bruised all over. There will be consequences, possible eternal.”
“We aren’t going to lose. Go, change. I’ll meet you at the f ield.”
When S?ren was gone, Kingsley considered heading straight to the field. He considered it for one split second before deciding on an entirely different course of action.
Somewhere in this church was S?ren’s Virgin Queen. And Kingsley was going to see her.
Once outside the sanctuary Kingsley poked around until he found the breezeway that led to the attached annex. Once inside the annex, he heard voices—loud, obnoxious voices— and knew there were teenagers ahead. He found a door and peeked inside. About two dozen teenagers ranging in age from thirteen to eighteen sat in folding chairs arrayed in a semicircle around a very young and scared-looking man. S?ren had called the man a seminarian, so he must have been a priestin-training. Apparently his training included being subjected to a trial by fire. Kingsley nudged the door open a little wider and heard the seminarian attempting to talk over the din of three teenage boys who seemed determined to punish him for ruining their Saturday.
Behind the three rowdy boys sat a girl in black combat boots, a ratty denim skirt and a black low-cut shirt. She ran her fingers through her mass of wavy black hair and stretched luxuriously in her seat with the decadent unapologetic laziness of a cat that’d been forced out of bed too early. Had to be her, right? All the other girls looked like girls. This girl looked like a woman. She had a woman’s curves, a woman’s confidence and a woman’s utter boredom with the boys who surrounded her. She wore gobs of black eyeliner, which gave her eyes a smoky, seductive look, and Kingsley couldn’t stop staring at her.
He’d already mentally put the girl in his bed and made her come five times before he discerned that an argument had broken out in the room. One of the boys, a tall skinny punk in a Terminator 2 T-shirt, was telling the seminarian that there was no reason for him to listen to a man who was never going to get married, have kids and wasn’t even a real priest yet. What did he know about God’s plan for his life or anyone else’s? And the girl, that strange seductive girl with the creamy skin, was politely telling the Terminator to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. The Terminator ignored Combat Boots in favor of standing to give a high five to a boy two seats over.
That was a mistake.