The King

by Tiffany Reisz

  “Ahh…Elizabeth. You still talk to her?”

  “She’s my sister, not my ex-girlfriend.”

  “That, mon ami, is debatable,” Kingsley said, watching the burgundy liquid swirl in his glass. “You are good, you and she? You and her? Fuck, I hate English. Tu et elle.”

  “We’re…better. We try to avoid being in the same room together. Too many memories.” He stared into his wine like a red looking glass. “But we speak on the phone once or twice a month.”

  “How drunk are you?” Kingsley asked, raising his head to look at Søren. The room swam underneath Kingsley, and he could have sworn he heard the ocean. “Am I on a boat?”

  “Five.”

  “I’m on five boats?”

  “No, I am five drunk. You are not on a boat.”

  “Five?”

  “On a scale of one to five.”

  “Clergy Appreciation Day…” Kingsley said. “Why haven’t I celebrated this day before?”

  “It was only invented last year.”

  “That would explain it.” Kingsley rolled up and crossed his legs. He sat next to a fireplace with no fire in it. There was some symbolism in that, some meaning. If he were sober he might have recognized it. As he was not, he merely considered starting a fire. “Do you have a lighter? I left mine at home.”

  “You’re not allowed to start fires when you’re so drunk you think you’re on a boat.”

  Søren stood up and walked to Kingsley. At least Kingsley thought that was what was happening. Søren held out his hand, and Kingsley took it.

  “I’m not holding your hand, Kingsley. I’m taking the wine bottle away from you.”

  “That’s much more in character,” Kingsley said, taking his hand out of Søren’s grip and replacing it with the bottle. “You were never much of a hand-holder.”

  “I held your hand,” Søren said. “Didn’t I?”

  “You held my wrist,” Kingsley corrected him. “And almost broke it.”

  “The wrist is part of the hand,” he said without any hint of remorse. Søren took the bottle into the kitchen.

  “I wasn’t complaining. I liked it. You can break my wrist whenever you want.”

  “You’re speaking Russian now. Thought I would let you know in case you didn’t realize that.”

  “You’re speaking English,” Kingsley said.

  “So?”

  “You’re speaking it with a British accent.”

  “I am?”

  “You sound like John Major.”

  “How much alcohol is in this wine?” Søren asked, examining the bottle.

  Kingsley mentally f lipped his brain back to English. He hoped.

  “What am I speaking now?”

  “English,” Søren said. “More or less.”

  “Bon. And you can’t do that. You can’t put pinot in a glass with cabernet sauvignon. That’s worse than incest.”

  Søren ignored him and finished pouring the remnants of his pinot into the glass of cabernet.

  “Can I ask in which direction your moral compass points?” Søren asked as he came back into the living room and sat down in his armchair again. Kingsley gestured in the direction his moral compass pointed.

  “I’d figured as much,” Søren said.

  “I like your house,” Kingsley said, looking around. “It’s like a little wizard’s house.”

  “Thank you. I think?”

  “It’s little and pretty and you have trees. What’s the word? Cozy.”

  “Hyg ge,” Søren said.

  “No Danish,” Kingsley said. “Anything but Danish.”

  “Ja, Danish. The word you’re looking for is hygge. Coziness, comfort and being surrounded by friends and family. Hygge.”

  “I tried to learn Danish. It’s an evil language.”

  “It’s not an easy language to learn,” Søren said. “Even other Scandinavians struggle with it. Did they want you to learn it for your job?”

  Søren put suspicious emphasis on the word job. Kingsley didn’t blame him for it.

  “Non.”

  “Why did you try to learn it, then?”

  “Because you said something to me in Danish once, and I wanted to know what you said.”

  “You could have asked.”

  “Would you have told me if I did?”

  “Probably not. I certainly wouldn’t have told you the truth,” Søren said with a grin over the top of his wineglass. The smile, the sadism and the wine hit Kingsley all at once. He rolled onto his back again and looked up at Søren from the f loor.

  “You have the most interesting eyes of any man I’ve ever known.”

  “Kingsley.”

  “I want my club, and I can’t have it. Give me more alcohol.”

  “You can have your club. Find another building. And I’m cutting you off.”

  Kingsley tossed his empty glass into the cold fireplace and relished its shattering. Søren didn’t say a word about it.

  “This hotel, I love it—beautiful, abandoned, lost. She needs me.”

  “She needs you? Don’t you mean it needs you?”

  Kingsley ignored him. “It’s safe, too. I looked at it. Two exits. Easy to watch, easy to guard, easy to protect the people inside.”

  “Who are you protecting?”

  Kingsley paused before answering. In that pause he thought of all the people he’d failed. Mistress Felicia. Lachlan. Irina. Sam.

  Himself.

  “Mistress Irina. She’s my Russian. Her husband fucked her every night, she told me. He said it was his right as her husband. Sick, tired, bleeding—he didn’t care. Even if she said no. My Irina. Who works for me. Who I’ve played with. She’s twenty-two years old and her husband…” Kingsley met Søren’s eyes. “I was your slave. You remember that?”

  “I remember.”

  “You owned me…body and soul. Do you know why you owned me?”

  Søren gazed at him steadily. Kingsley was certain Søren already knew the answer, but still he said, “Tell me why.”

  “Because I wanted you to own me. And I wanted you to hurt me. And I wanted you to treat me like your property. And that’s what made it right. That’s what made it beautiful. Irina’s husband treated her like a slave. She didn’t want that. She was his slave, and it wasn’t right and it wasn’t beautiful.”

  “It’s good what you did for her. What you are doing for her.”

  “You know who introduced me to her, to Irina?”

  “Who?” He stood up, took two steps forward, and then sat next to Kingsley on the f loor.

  “He’s a cop. Beat cop. Cooper. Big man, big as a house. He’s black, too. Grew up in Harlem. Submissive. Loves submitting to women.”

  “It’s always the ones you least suspect.”

  “He’s terrified his squad will find out what he is. The biggest man I know, scared of other men, of lesser men. It’s not right.”

  “No, it isn’t right.”

  Kingsley turned his head back to face Søren.

  “They put electrodes on Sam because she likes girls. They gave her drugs to make her vomit while they strapped her to a chair and forced her to watch lesbian porn. She was sixteen. She still has the burn scars. You want to look me in the eye and say our kind doesn’t need protecting?”

  “I know we do,” Søren said. “And more than that. Eleanor has scars on her arms from where she burned herself. Seconddegree burns.”

  “Someone needs to teach her how to hurt herself the right way.”

  “Someone does, yes.”

  “I could teach her,” Kingsley said. “I’m good at it. Didn’t know I was until I started teaching Irina. I used to do all this dirty work for a living—spying, tracking, guarding important people… I have all these skills. I wanted to put them to good use. You know, for us. We need that in this city. Someone to watch over us. Someone who can protect us. Someone to stand between us and them. What’s the word for that?”

  “A king,” Søren said.

  “A king…�
� Kingsley laughed. “Nice dream.”

  “You sacrificed your kingdom for your subjects. There is no greater sign of worthiness to be king than the willingness to set aside the crown for the sake of your people.”

  “A lot of good it does me.”

  “It doesn’t do you any good. That’s the point. I would sleep well knowing you were king of us all.”

  Kingsley narrowed his eyes at him. “You would?”

  “I trust you with my secrets, with my life. I’ll even trust you with my Eleanor.”

  “The Virgin Queen?” Kingsley rolled up. “Here? Where?”

  Søren put his hand on Kingsley’s chest and pushed him on to his back again.

  “Behave.”

  “She’s so…” Kingsley began, sighing with exaggerated drunken bliss.

  “She’s so what?” Søren asked, increasing the pressure on Kingsley’s chest.

  “Vicious.”

  Kingsley felt the pressure of Søren’s hand on his sternum and tried to ignore how good it felt to be held down so roughly.

  “Don’t,” Søren warned.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t enjoy this.”

  “Too late,” Kingsley said. “It would help if you moved your hand off my chest.”

  “I can’t,” Søren said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m enjoying this.”

  Kingsley looked at Søren, who took measured breaths through his parted lips.

  The heat from Søren’s hand permeated through Kingsley’s shirt and into his skin. With so much pressure on his chest, Kingsley had trouble taking a full breath. Or was it his intense arousal that set him panting?

  “I’m going to stop right now,” Søren said. The buttons on Kingsley’s shirt bit into his skin.

  “You don’t have to stop,” Kingsley said.

  “I have to.”

  The hand remained. The pressure increased.

  “I fucked a blond teenager because he reminded me of you,” Kingsley said. “That’s my drunken confession for the night.”

  “I never let you fuck me,” Søren said, and Kingsley shivered at hearing Søren swear—a rare and erotic occurrence.

  “Which is why I fucked him. What’s your drunken confession for the night?”

  “If you’d begged hard enough, I might have let you.”

  Kingsley’s eyes went huge. Søren laughed, and then the pressure was gone from Kingsley’s chest.

  “I said you didn’t have to stop.” Kingsley rolled into a sitting position again. This time Søren let him up.

  “Yes, I did. I wouldn’t want to accidentally kill you. If and when I kill you, it will be on purpose.”

  Kingsley met Søren’s eyes.

  “You want me, don’t you?”

  With a groan Søren rolled backward and stretched out on the f loor. Kingsley rested his head on Søren’s stomach and waited for him to object. He didn’t. Without a time machine, without magic, they were teenagers again, hiding in the hermitage at their old school.

  “I wanted this club for you,” Kingsley confessed. “The truth is, I was building it for you. I wanted you to have somewhere safe you could go and be you. Because I love you,” Kingsley said.

  “Kingsley—”

  “I don’t mean I’m in love with you. I’m not,” Kingsley said hastily. “But I mean…”

  “I know.” Søren lightly tugged on Kingsley’s hair. “I know what you mean.”

  “That day in the Rolls when we went to visit your sister, I promised you I would build you a castle, and you said to build you a dungeon instead. Why not both in one? I’ll keep the promise someday. Once all this bullshit with Fuller blows over.”

  “You don’t—”

  “I know I don’t have to. I want to. And not only for you. I want to do this for me. And for all of us.”

  “‘Not what I have, but what I do is my kingdom.’ Thomas Carlyle. You are a king when you act like a king, not simply because you have a kingdom.”

  “I can’t believe you quoted a Calvinist.”

  “Proof of how drunk I am.”

  “They’re nice words, but it’s all a dream. I’m not a king. I don’t have a kingdom. I don’t have subjects. I don’t have—”

  “I’ll be your subject,” Søren said.

  Kingsley rolled his eyes.

  “You’re not subject to anyone,” Kingsley said. “You only pretend to be for job security.”

  Søren took a deep breath, one that Kingsley could hear and feel.

  “I, Father Marcus Lennox Stearns, priest of the Society of Jesus, son of Lord Marcus Augustus Stearns, sixth baron Stearns, do swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty Kingsley Theophilé Boissonneault, his heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.”

  Kingsley sat up and turned around. He looked down at Søren still lying on the f loor.

  “That’s the oath to the British monarch,” Kingsley said.

  “I’m American,” Søren said. “I can make it to whomever I want. I made it to you. And since the kings of old were always anointed by the high priest…”

  Søren sat up and took the corkscrew off the side table. Without f linching or blinking he pressed the end of it into his palm, breaking his own skin as easily as popping a cork. He let a few drops of blood fall into his glass. Kingsley held out his hand, palm up.

  “You are in the mood to play with fire tonight, aren’t you?” Søren asked.

  “Felicia doesn’t do blood-play. I miss it. So do you,” Kingsley said.

  Søren’s eyes f lashed at him, but he said nothing. He took Kingsley by the wrist, thrust his palm up and pushed the sharp tip of the corkscrew into his skin. As drunk as he was, Kingsley hardly felt a thing. But Søren clearly felt something. His pupils dilated and his breathing quickened. But he sat the corkscrew aside, f lipped Kingsley’s hand over and let a few drops of blood mingle with his in the wineglass. Søren then dipped his two fingers into the blood and wine. With two wet red fingertips, he anointed Kingsley’s forehead with the wine, then touched his lips and the center of each palm.

  Kingsley felt something strange as Søren touched him with his wine-red fingertips. Even drunk, wasted even, he felt power. Power and the weight of responsibility.