The King (The Original Sinners: White Years, #2)(48)

“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.

“Kingsley, this is Dr. Sutton,” S?ren said. “She attends my church. Dr. Sutton, this is my brother-in-law, Kingsley. He is a reprobate. You’ve been warned.”

“I’ve had my fair share of reprobates. They keep me in business.” Dr. Sutton smiled in that placid seen-everything way doctors always smiled. “How are you, Kingsley?”

“I hate being here, so, please, get this over with as soon as possible,” Kingsley said.

“As you can tell, Kingsley is also charming and pleasant.”

“It’s all right, Father Stearns,” Dr. Sutton said, giving him a motherly pat on the knee. “I’ve had worse. Now, Kingsley, we’re getting tested?” she asked, pulling up a wheeled stool.

“I don’t know what we’re doing,” Kingsley said. “But I’m getting tested.”

S?ren gave him the “behave yourself ” glare.

Dr. Sutton rattled off a long list of questions that Kingsley answered without making eye contact. Yes, he’d had the clap and syphilis. Yes, he’d been treated. No, he had no current symptoms. When she asked how many sexual partners he’d had, she did a double take at the answer.

“I think that’s a record,” she said, writing the number down.

“I’m French,” Kingsley said.

“That’s your excuse for everything,” S?ren said.

“It’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation.”

“You’re half French,” S?ren reminded him with a scowl.

“Yes, and if I was all-French that number would be twice that.”

“Is there anything in particular you think you’ve been exposed to?”

“Yes,” Kingsley said, staring at S?ren who’d forced him to do this stupid testing. “Catholic guilt’s a venereal disease, oui? I wonder who I caught it from.”

He expected another glare from S?ren. Instead, he received something far worse—a look of compassion mixed with pity.

“Tell her the truth,” S?ren said.

“The truth?” the doctor asked. “You can tell me anything. Whatever you say is confidential. Doctors are like priests in that regard. We can kick him out of the room if you’d like.”

Kingsley turned away from them both and stared blankly at a yellow smiley-face poster.

“I was doing some work in Eastern Europe last January,” Kingsley finally said, his tone as casual as possible under the circumstances. “Don’t ask me what I was doing, because I’m not allowed to say. But I was taken prisoner and shot. At the hospital they said…they said I’d been assaulted. While I was unconscious, I mean.”