The King: The Original Sinners Book 6 (18 page)

20

AS THEY WALKED
into the clinic, Sam refused to let go of Kingsley’s hand. Even when he sat in Dr. Sutton’s office, Sam stood next to him, her hand still in his. Or perhaps it was his hand in hers. She’d twined their fingers together so tightly he couldn’t tell who held on to whom.

Dr. Sutton entered with a file in her hand.

“No speeches. No preliminaries,” Kingsley said before Dr. Sutton could say a word. “Tell me right now—good or bad.”

“Kingsley...” Dr. Sutton took a seat, and Sam clutched his hand even tighter. It was bad. He knew it was bad.

Was he going to die?

What did he have?

Had he given it to anyone else?

He was never going to have children. He was never going to do anything ever again.

Would Søren miss him after he was gone?

Would anyone miss him at all?

Dr. Sutton smiled.

“Good,” she said.

Kingsley’s shoulders slumped, and he breathed out two solid weeks’ worth of terror. Had he ever felt so relieved? So happy? So grateful?

Sam took his face in her hands and kissed him on both cheeks. When he looked at her, he saw tears in her eyes.

Dr. Sutton gave him the lecture on sexual health and responsibility to end all lectures, scheduled him for follow-up testing in six months and then six months after that. Half an hour later he and Sam, still holding hands, left the office. The sun was shining. The birds were singing. The street people weren’t pissing on the sidewalk anywhere near his shoes. A perfect day.

“I’ll admit, I got a little worried when you said you’ve had sex with half of Europe,” she said. “I’d settle for half of Chelsea. Or all of Chelsea if she’s cute.”

“You disapprove?”

“I’m impressed.”

“You might not want me, but other people do.”

“I think you’re very pretty,” Sam said, and patted him on the arm.

“Thank you. Now tell me I have a good personality.”

“Oh, get over it. You can have every other woman in the city.”

“You’re right, I can,” he said, grinning ear to ear. “I can fuck again.”

“You couldn’t fuck before?”

“I had to wait until I got my results back.”

“Is that why you went to Rome for two weeks?”

“Among other reasons.”

“What did you do in Rome?”

“Learned the art of sadism from a notorious Roman madam.”

“Please, tell me you have vacation slides.”

The car pulled up to the curb, but Kingsley stopped Sam from getting in.

“I want you to do something for me,” Kingsley said.

“Anything for you,” she said.

“You take the Rolls and go back to the house. Call everyone in my red book and invite them over tonight. Then go buy a week’s worth of condoms.”

“I’ve never bought condoms before. What’s a week’s worth?”

“I don’t know. A hundred? Wait. We’re having a party. Better make it a thousand.”

“What else?”

“Get big ones,” he said. “Since I’m—”

Sam stuck her fingers in her ears.

“La la la,” she sang. “Not listening...”

He pulled her hands from her ears.

“Call for food. Call for alcohol. We’re having a party.”

“What kind of party?” she asked.

Kingsley grinned.

“Gotcha,” Sam said. “That kind of party.”

Sam took her marching orders and marched. He was glad she hadn’t asked him where he was going. Since she hadn’t made any progress digging for dirt on Reverend Fuller, he decided to take matters into his own hands.

He hailed a cab and gave the driver an address in Queens. He’d learned from Sam that Fuller had a small satellite office in the city. They’d move into their larger quarters once The Renaissance was remodeled.

The driver let him out at the end of the block and Kingsley quickly found the WTL offices. They were housed in a three-story brick building wedged between a school and a run-down apartment complex. Kingsley entered it warily feeling like a soldier encroaching on enemy ground. In fact, everywhere he looked he saw signs and posters warning of the dangers of sin, the inevitability of judgment.

Are you ready to meet your Maker?

The way is narrow.

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Flee from the wrath to come.

He studied another poorly designed poster that depicted human beings stretching their arms toward heaven in supplication even as their lower bodies burned up in a fire.

“Cheerful,” Kingsley said to himself.

He caught sight of another poster—an aborted fetus lying on a bloodied blanket—with the words
I formed you in the womb
underneath in a melodramatic font. A grotesque image, it did nothing to change his opinion about abortion and did everything to make him want to lose his lunch on the church carpeting. Did people truly find comfort or enlightenment in a place like this?

He’d found comfort and acceptance back at St. Ignatius Academy, the Catholic school where he’d met Søren. He wasn’t Catholic, never had been, but the Jesuits at the school had been hard-drinking, open-minded intellectuals. Jesuits were notoriously liberal, at least by Catholic standards. He remembered one brave boy in a social ethics class asking Father Henry under what circumstances an abortion could be permitted. Father Henry had answered, “Never on an empty stomach,” and the class had been too shocked to laugh for a full five seconds.

Something told him abortion jokes wouldn’t be welcome in this church.

“Awful, isn’t it?” Kingsley turned and saw a young woman standing in the door to an office at the front of the church. “That poster.”

Kingsley took the necessary two seconds to reorient his brain, so he could speak without any trace of his French accent.

“It is awful,” Kingsley agreed. “My religion forbids engaging in propaganda.”

“Excuse me?”

Kingsley gave her a placid, nonthreatening and therefore entirely fake smile.

“I was wondering if Reverend Fuller was in. I’d like to speak to him.”

“He’s not here,” she said with a nervous lilt in her voice. The girl was pretty and could have been beautiful if she wasn’t hiding under a shapeless floral dress. She looked young, twenty or twenty-one, and she had a sweet innocent gleam in her eyes. “The WTL headquarters are in Stamford. He doesn’t stop by here very often. He’s a busy man.”

“I hear he’s also a very godly man.”

The girl smiled broadly.

“He is. So inspiring. Reverend Fuller truly loves the Lord, and his church loves him.”

“No one loves men of the cloth more than I do.”

“My name is Chastity. Could I do something for you?”

“No, Chastity does nothing for me.”

“Sir?”

“Actually you might be able to help me,” he said, walking up to her and putting the bare minimum of socially required distance between them as possible. “I have a friend. She has a serious problem.”

“What sort of problem?”

“She’s a lesbian.”

Chastity’s eyes widened.

“That is a problem. Have you talked to her about it?”

“I have. She’s unrepentant.” He exhaled heavily in faux disappointment.

“Those people often are. The heart of the homosexual gets hard the longer they stay in their sinful lifestyle.”

“Yes, her heart is very hard. So hard it makes me hard.”

“Oh, no, you can’t let your heart get hardened. God loves a soft heart.”

“So I should be soft?”

“You should. Soft and open to God.”

“Are you soft and open, Chastity?”

The young woman blushed a little. When she spoke she’d developed a slight stammer.

“I try to be. For God.” She coughed and took a small step back. “So, you’re here because you’re worried about your lesbian friend and the life of sin she’s living?”

“I heard that Reverend Fuller’s church has programs to help people like her. Camps, even. Is that true?”

“Yes, we do have some programs. There’s the New Paradise program. It involves intensive reorienting therapy.”

“New Paradise? Sounds promising.”

“It’s a program that helps homosexuals return to an existence like that of Eden and the Garden of Paradise.”

“So, it’s a nudist colony?”

“No, silly.” Chastity blushed and giggled. Then she slapped a hand over her mouth to silence herself. “In Eden it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

“Poor Steve. He can stay with me.”

“Sir?”

“The New Paradise program?” Kingsley prompted.

“Right. Yes,” she said, clearly relieved to get off that train of thought. “In the New Paradise program she’ll undergo intensive therapy to help her understand a woman’s place in the world.”

“Which is?”

“Underneath men.”

“Women belong underneath men?”

“Of course. Women are submissive to men. That’s the biblical model of the family.”

“I’m a man,” Kingsley said. “And you’re a woman. So you should be under me?”

“In a biblical way,” she said, stammering again.

“That’s my favorite way.” Kingsley stepped closer, close enough he could feel her body trembling with nervousness. But this time she didn’t take a step back. “I’m worried this therapy won’t be enough for my friend. She loves to seduce straight girls.”

Chastity’s blush deepened.

“She is in deep sin, then.”

“So very deep,” Kingsley agreed. “She has short hair and dresses like a man.”

“That’s awful. A woman’s femininity is a gift from God. Women shouldn’t even wear pants as they disguise her womanliness.”

Kingsley glanced down at the shapeless dress she wore. Sam in her suits looked more womanly than this girl in her house dress.

“I agree. I try to get her to take off her pants, but I haven’t made any progress yet.”

“Shameful. She should take her pants off for you. I mean, she should wear dresses. All women should wear dresses or skirts. That’s what I mean.”

“Skirts do make it easier for me.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Tell me more about the camps. I might be able to trick her into going to a camp.”

“Well,” the young woman began. “There are a few of them, and they run for twenty-eight days. There are three sessions every summer. We have camps in Texas, Colorado, Ohio and Pennsylvania.”

“None closer than that?”

“There was one upstate,” she said, lowering her voice as if imparting a secret. “But it closed down ten years ago.”

“Upstate New York would have been perfect. Why did it close?”

The young woman raised her empty hands. “I heard...”

Kingsley leaned in close, very close, as close as this poor plain virgin girl had probably ever been to a man.

“What did you hear?” he asked, putting his mouth at her ear and letting his breath tickle her neck.

“I heard a camper died there,” she whispered. “Suicide. It wasn’t Reverend Fuller’s fault at all. The investigation cleared him and the church of any wrongdoing. You see, suicide is nobody’s fault but the person who commits it. But still, they shut the camp down.”

“That’s too bad.”

“But there’s still Pennsylvania. Do you think your friend would like to go to camp in western Pennsylvania?”

“I think she would like it as much as I would like it.” Kingsley would rather have his testicles soldered to his eyeballs than go to a sexual reorienting camp in western Pennsylvania.

“Oh, good.” Chastity smiled broadly. “Then wait here. I’ll get you some brochures.”

She walked off, and Kingsley pondered the possibility of seducing her. Fucking a girl named Chastity—how poetic. It would probably be good for her, give her a taste for what the world had to offer outside the walls of her church. Then again, why set her up for a lifetime of unreasonable expectations?

Chastity returned with a sheaf of brochures and a hardcover book.

“I brought this for you,” Chastity said. “
Miraculous Womanhood
by Lucy Fuller. Wonderful book. Changed my life. Maybe it’ll help your friend.”

“You can keep it,” Kingsley said. “I’ve already read this one.”

Out on the street he found another taxi, and once inside he flipped through the brochures the girl had given him. One detailed the work of the ministry. Reverend Fuller’s church focused on personal sin and accountability. Kingsley took that to mean the church didn’t actually do anything to improve the world. Lots of programs for people to quit adultery, quit drinking, quit smoking even, and programs for girls who were pregnant out of wedlock. He assumed they talked them out of abortions, had them give up their babies for adoption and then promptly forgot the mothers existed. He didn’t see anything about soup kitchens or homeless shelters. Søren would likely have something to say about that.

He should call Søren. He spoke over a dozen languages. Maybe one of them was fundamentalist Christian.

Back at the town house, he found Sam making phone calls with his red book of names open in front of her.

“We will need vast quantities of alcohol,” Sam said into the phone. “The good shit.”

Kingsley snapped his fingers to get her attention. “Who’s coming tonight?”

She held up one finger.

“One person is coming?”

She pointed at him. Of course he was coming tonight. Several times.

“You should come, too,” he mouthed. She held up a sheet of names, confirmations for the party. In red she’d circled the names of half a dozen women. He raised his eyebrow at her in a question.

“Targets,” she whispered.

Kingsley laughed, and Sam handed him the list of names. It would be a packed house tonight. Good. For the first time in a long time he felt like celebrating. On his way out the door he heard Sam snapping her fingers. She put a hand over the receiver.

“Your priest called. You’re supposed to call him back,” she said before returning to her own phone call. As he walked out of the room he heard her on the phone with the caterer.

“We’re having an ‘I Don’t Have AIDS’ party tonight, and we need food for a hundred people. Caviar? Good call.”

In his bedroom he found that Signore Vitale had a suit and some shirts delivered. Sam had put them on his bed with a note that said, “Wear the suit and even I might consider spreading for you. I won’t do it, but I might
consider
doing it.” She had underlined
consider
three times.