“I did. I do hate you. But I don’t… How can I truly hate the one person who knows me?” Kingsley studied S?ren out of the corner of his eye and ached to touch S?ren’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. S?ren 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 S?ren conjured the memory, Kingsley was a teenager again. He stretched out on the cot on his back, naked, the sheets pulled to his stomach. S?ren lay next to him. Kingsley could feel the heat of S?ren’s skin against his. No matter how many times they touched, it always surprised him how warm S?ren was. He expected his skin to be cold, as cold as his heart. Kingsley’s thighs burned. S?ren 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?” S?ren 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 S?ren 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. S?ren 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.” S?ren 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 S?ren 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,” S?ren said.
“What do you mean?”
S?ren turned his eyes from the sun and gazed directly at Kingsley.
“Kingsley,” S?ren 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
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.”