What a ghastly place—posters covered in dire warnings and pictures of people with diseases hung on the walls.
“I wish I had a medical fetish,” Kingsley said, looking in horror at the décor of the doctor’s office. “Then I might enjoy this.”
He opened a drawer at the end of the examining table.
“Oh, speculums…”
“Will you please behave?” S?ren said as he took a seat in a chair under a Warning Signs of Lyme Disease poster. Kingsley sat on the examining table feeling as if he were a boy again, at the doctor’s with his father to get vaccinated. He remembered how proud his father had been of him, not once f linching at the needles. He was more scared today than he was twenty years ago. And he missed his father.
“When was your last physical?” S?ren asked.
“Two years ago. And what the hell are you doing?”
“Your intake form.”
Kingsley ripped the clipboard from S?ren’s hand. In his neat, Catholic school handwriting, S?ren had not only filled in most of the blanks on the form, he’d filled them in accurately. Full name, height, age, birth date, address, social security number…
“Someone else to fill out the health forms…” Kingsley said, nodding his appreciation. “Now I know why people get married.”
“Now I know why people don’t have children,” S?ren said, taking the clipboard back. “Now sit down and behave yourself.”
“Yes, Father.”
Kingsley sat on the paper-covered examining table and tried to ignore his racing heart.
“Why are you here?” Kingsley asked. “Really?”
S?ren fell silent and glanced away.
“After our first time…” he began and paused once more. “I should have come to you in the infirmary when you were there. I have always regretted not coming to you.”
Kingsley shook his head. He remembered those first few days after that night with S?ren in the forest when he was sixteen, remembered the almost religious ecstasy he’d fallen into. He had been bruised and bloody and broken, and none of it had mattered. He’d never known such peace. All he wanted then was to be well once more, so it could happen again, so he could be broken again.
“No…if you had come to me, they would have known it was you who put me in there.”
“I know, and that’s the excuse I used on myself. But the truth is I was afraid to find out if you hated me for what I did to you.”
“I loved you for what you did to me.”
“I was equally afraid of that.” S?ren gave Kingsley a look of concern. Maybe he’d learned how to make that face in seminary. “Are you scared?”
“Terrified,” Kingsley admitted. “As you can imagine. Or not.” Kingsley laughed to himself. “Keep forgetting you’re a priest.”
“I wasn’t always a priest.”
It was a simple statement of fact. Of course S?ren hadn’t always been a priest. But Kingsley heard something else in the words, something under them.
“Did you…” Kingsley stopped and reconsidered his question. “I know you didn’t catch anything from me.”
“My father had mistresses,” S?ren said, his voice devoid of emotion.
“Your sister Elizabeth got something from your father, didn’t she? She gave it to you?”
S?ren silently nodded.
“What did you have?”
S?ren raised his hands and clapped once.
Kingsley would have laughed if it wasn’t the most horrible thing he’d ever heard. S?ren, at age eleven, had contracted gonorrhea, the clap, from his sister during their tortured adolescence.
“A Benedictine sister worked at the hospital where they took me after my father broke my arm,” S?ren continued. “She was my nurse. I’ve never forgotten her kindness. We all need kindness every now and then.”
S?ren started to say something else, but then the doctor came in—an intelligent-looking woman in her late thirties— and the words were lost.