The King

by Tiffany Reisz

  “Just sleeping,” she said. “I mean, we’re sleeping when we’re done talking.”

  Sam kicked off her shoes and yanked off her socks. Yes, it was happening. Sam was taking her clothes off in his bedroom. He must still be dreaming. And having a good dream for once.

  “Do you have something I can sleep in? I usually sleep in a T-shirt and boxers. I get cold.”

  She pulled off her jacket, unbuttoned her vest. And when she started in on her shirt, Kingsley did the only thing he could do.

  He took off his own shirt and offered it to her.

  “King.” It was all she said.

  “Take it.”

  “This is one of your new fancy shirts from Vitale.”

  “It is.”

  “And you’re going to let me sleep in it?”

  “I’m asking you to sleep in it.”

  “What happened to that whole thing about how a woman wearing your shirt is like a man coming on her tits?”

  “I said ‘back.’”

  “Tits are sexier.”

  “Wear it. Sleep in it. I won’t come on your tits or back.” “Face guy, eh?”

  She took the shirt into his bathroom, an act of modesty he found unbearably endearing.

  “I sleep naked,” he called out to her when she closed the door behind her. “Does that bother you?”

  “What? Is all your underwear in the dirty laundry?”

  “I don’t own any,” he admitted.

  “I should have known.” Sam sighed.

  Kingsley stripped out of his clothes and climbed back into bed. Sam emerged seconds later wearing his white dress shirt. On her bare feet she padded across the carpet, came to the bed and slipped under the covers. He hadn’t failed to notice her long bare legs and the tantalizing skin of her chest. They glowed in the gentle lamplight, and he dug his fingers into the sheets, a reminder not to touch her.

  Sam rolled on to her side to face him.

  “Naked?” she asked.

  “Completely.”

  “You’re enjoying this.”

  “More than I should,” Kingsley admitted.

  He smiled but Sam didn’t. Instead, she reached out and touched his shoulder where the crack of a cane had left a twoinch black bruise.

  “What happened to you?” she asked. “Please, tell me this was consensual.”

  “It was consensual. And all your fault.”

  “How is this my fault?”

  “You’re the one who told me to woo Mistress Felicia. I sent her f lowers. She showed up in my bedroom the night of the party.”

  Sam’s eyes went comically wide. He had to laugh at her. “You’re subbing for Mistress Felicia?” she asked. “Seriously?”

  He reached out and covered her lips with one finger.

  “It’s a secret,” he said.

  “Why? Everyone knows you’re bi. How is this different?”

  “A man who likes to fuck other men scares straight men. A man who likes to get the shit beat out of him is a laughingstock.” Their world could spout of all it wanted about sexual freedom and acceptance, but male submissives carried a stigma and he wanted no part of it.

  “I think it’s sexy,” Sam said. “I like a man who isn’t afraid to be vulnerable. It’s how women feel all the time. And if it makes you feel any better, I guessed you might have a little masochistic streak in you when I found out it was Søren you were in love with.”

  “I didn’t mean for you to know that. You’re too easy to talk to. It all came out.”

  She ran her hands through his hair, tenderly and carefully, as if afraid to hurt him more than he already was.

  “You can tell me anything. I don’t care what Søren says— you can trust me.”

  “I want to. But you don’t make it easy with all the secrets you keep.”

  “What secrets do you think I’m keeping?”

  “You went to that camp the Fullers run and you won’t talk about it.”

  “Do you like talking about when you got shot and ended up in the hospital?”

  “Only if it’ll get me laid.”

  Sam laughed.

  “Would it really make you feel better to know about my ugly past?”

  “I want to know you,” Kingsley said. “All of you. And you know so much about me.”

  “Your secrets are sexier than mine,” she said. “I don’t have any bullet wounds or secret lovers.”

  “What kind of secrets do you have?” Kingsley asked.

  Sam didn’t smile, which scared him. Sam almost always had a smile for him.

  “Ugly ones.”

  26

  KINGSLEY WAITED WHILE SAM SETTLED HERSELF INTO the covers. She rolled on to her side to face him, and as Kingsley gazed at her, he made the troubling discovery that he loved seeing her in his bed. She looked so small and defenseless in his grand red bed, almost like a little girl with her pixie cut mussed and her hands under her chin like a child.

  “My family failed miserably at turning me into a girly girl. So my church talked to my parents, and they decided to send me to summer camp. It wasn’t the usual sort of summer camp. It was this place upstate where gay kids got sent to get their brains f ixed.”

  “Sam…” Kingsley wanted to reach for her, but he held back. If he touched her, she might stop speaking, and he realized now he’d been starving to know the truth of her.

  “I met a girl named Faith on the bus to this camp—this nasty awful camp where God wouldn’t go if you paid Him. Faith had gotten caught in bed with someone at her church, someone important, and they shut Faith up by sending her to that camp.”

  “Where was this place they sent you?” “Pleasant Valley Camp and Nature Center. Can you believe that’s what they called it? What bullshit. There was no canoeing, no archery, no nature walks. Instead of that, there were ‘prayer sessions’ where they made us kneel for hours and pray out loud for God to take our sin away and heal us so we would desire men the way God intended. And there were fun ‘therapy sessions’ where we had to watch slide shows and were given electric shocks whenever the picture of a pretty girl appeared on the screen. Not electric shocks on the arms or the legs. No—electric shocks on our nipples and clits. But the best part was the drugs.”

  “Drugs?”

  “They’d give us campers vomit-inducing drugs and make us watch lesbian porn. Cunts on the screen. Puke on the f loor. We campers called it ‘movie night at Caligula’s.’”

  Kingsley tried to take Sam’s hand in his, but she’d curled up her fingers so tightly he could do nothing but place his hand on top of hers.

  “Even though we were so busy with all these delightful and wholesome camping activities,” Sam continued, her voice dripping with sarcasm and barely restrained fury, “me and Faith did what we could to keep each other strong and sane. Whenever we’d see each other we’d whisper our code words— More weight.”

  “More weight? What did that mean?”

  “Some fundies consider lesbianism a kind of witchcraft. I’m not kidding. Just ask Pat Robertson. So when I heard that, I decided to learn about witchcraft like your typical disaffected queer teenager.”

  “I was a disaffected queer teenager.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Slept with another disaffected queer teenager.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, wait, I did.” Sam laughed and it was good to hear it. Then she spoke again, and neither of them laughed anymore. “I read this book about the witch hunts in colonial times. The law said a person couldn’t be put on trial until they’d entered a guilty or not-guilty plea. This man, Giles Corey, was accused of witchcraft, but he refused to put in a plea. The court had a method for getting people to enter pleas. They’d lay them on a board, put a board on top of them, and they’d pile on weight, slowly crushing the person. They did this to Giles Corey. On went the weight, they’d stop, ask for his plea—guilty or not guilty. And his response was ‘More weight.’ He said it again and again and then finally ‘More weight’ were h
is last words. They killed him, but they never got him to say ‘Guilty.’ When me and Faith said ‘more weight’ that meant ‘Bring it on. The pain. The tortures. We don’t care. They’ll never make us plead guilty. We didn’t do anything wrong. They were the guilty ones.’”

  Kingsley wanted to speak, wanted to stay something. But Sam’s strength had humbled him into silence.

  “After a month at the camp, they told us our progress was ‘unsatisfactory,’ and we would have to stay another month. Faith had an idea, and I thought it was a good one. We broke into the clinic and found all the pills we could find…”

  Kingsley gave up on Sam’s hand and instead pulled her to him, dragging her bodily against him. She rested her head against the center of his chest, and Kingsley put an arm around her shoulders. They were trembling.

  “We held each other until morning,” Sam said. “Just like you and I are right now. I don’t know why we decided to wait until dawn. Maybe we wanted to see a sunrise one last time. But at dawn we swallowed the pills and washed them down with mineral water—like you do. Ten…twenty…thirty pills. And we shivered and burned and it felt like our skin was on fire. And then we slept. Two girls fell asleep. One girl woke up.”

  “You woke up,” Kingsley said.

  “The cops came,” Sam continued. “They were the first people I spoke to when I woke up in the hospital. To this day it pisses me off when I hear people talking shit about cops. Those cops were the first noncrazy adults I’d talked to in weeks. This detective, Detective Feldman, said this camp sounded like it was run by Josef Mengele. I didn’t know at the time what he meant by that, but I knew he was on our side.”

  “What happened to you? Were there charges filed?”

  Sam took a heavy breath.

  “Faith Spencer’s family blamed me for her death. She’d taken more pills than I had, so they said I’d tricked her into killing herself. The truth was we took whatever we could find. We didn’t count the pills. We just swallowed.”

  “What happened after?”

  “Nothing much. I got sent to a state-run psychiatric facility for thirty days. Faith Spencer got buried. WTL paid for Faith’s funeral expenses as a ‘gesture of Christian charity.’ Leave it to Fuller to turn a suicide pact into a public relations win for WTL. The church closed that camp, but they still have others. There are kids there now, right now at those camps. More weight… They’re all getting crushed.”

  “Sam…” Kingsley rubbed her shoulders trying to get her to relax. Instead of relaxing, she pushed back from him and sat up in bed.

  “This is why you have to make the club happen,” Sam said. “The kingdom you want to build—you have to do it. You have to stop Fuller and WTL from building a church in our town. Faith Spencer is dead because of him and his camps, and he’s a hero to his congregation because he threw some bills at her family to upgrade her coffin.”

  Kingsley stretched out his arm and touched her hair. She leaned her face into his hand and closed her eyes.

  “I will build my kingdom,” Kingsley said, “and the gates of Fuller’s church will not prevail against it.”

  Sam grinned broadly, and tears lined her eyes. She had never looked so beautiful to him.

  “You’re going to hell for that,” she said.

  “I’m taking you with me.”

  “I go where you go,” Sam said. “Someone has to take care of your boots.”

  She rolled back down and lay once more on his chest. Her head hit a bruise, and Kingsley f linched before he could stop himself.

  “Shit, I’m sorry,” she said, and tried to pull away.

  “No, no, no, you stay. If I like pain enough to have these bruises, then I like pain enough to feel you against them.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m a masochist, Sam.”

  “Like…a real masochist?”

  Kingsley hesitated before answering. He far preferred to keep secrets than to share them. But this was Sam, and he trusted her.

  “Nothing arouses me more than pain and fear.”

  “Your pain?” she asked. “Your fear?”

  “My pain. My fear. And the only things that arouse me as much as my pain and my fear are someone else’s pain and fear. I didn’t know the word switch until four years ago when I found a club in Paris. That’s what I am. A switch.”

  “I thought you’d been doing kink since you were a teenager.”

  “I was doing kink before I’d even heard the word kink. We didn’t know what we were doing or why we were doing it. We only knew it was what we needed.”

  “We? We as in you and Father Eyelashes?”

  “He wasn’t Father Eyelashes when we were together. He was a student like me. The first time we were together he was a student,” Kingsley corrected. “The second time he was a teacher—Mister Eyelashes.”

  “So that was the teacher you seduced?”

  “He was,” Kingsley said with pride. He knew Søren would never have pursued him if Kingsley hadn’t pursued Søren first.

  “Did he hurt you like this?” She touched the bruises on his chest and shoulder.

  “He hurt me much worse than this, which is why I loved him more than anyone.”

  “He hurt you worse than this?” she asked, sounding mildly horrified. “I’m going to be honest—right now I’m struggling with my warring feelings of burning hatred of Søren and total fascination with him.”

  “Welcome to the club. But don’t hate him for beating me. I wanted him to. And there were fifty other boys in our school, all of them terrified of him. He was taller than them, stronger than them, smarter than them and had them all in his thrall. And he didn’t touch any of them.”

  “So why you, then?”

  “They were afraid of him. Some of them might of hated him but it was probably jealousy, not hate. I don’t blame them. I didn’t hate him. I wanted him, and I told him so,” Kingsley admitted without shame. “I stared at him, followed him, sat with him—uninvited—in the library while he was trying to do his homework. I even kissed him. Also uninvited.”

  “You devil. Did he kiss you back?”

  “He pushed me back on to the bed and held me down so hard I heard something pop in my wrist. It made masturbating one minute after he walked away from me painful. Not that it stopped me.”

  “Almost getting your wrist broken turned you on?” Kingsley took a deep breath.

  “It not only turned me on, it turned me on more than anything had ever turned me on before in my life.”

  “You were sixteen.”

  “I’d been having sex for years by that point.”

  “God damn, the French start young.”

  “Not young enough. All my first lovers were older by a few years. But nothing prepared me for him.”

  “He was your first guy?”

  “First person to hurt me during sex, too.” Kingsley laid his hand on the center of Sam’s back and mindlessly rubbed up and down the length of her spine. “He’s the reason I want to build my kingdom. He’s the reason I have to do this.”

  “Oh, do tell.” Sam snuggled in more closely to him. Snuggled? They were snuggling now?

  “You really want to hear about the sexually deviant escapades of two teenage boys at a Catholic boarding school?”