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,”
