He changed their embrace to a side hug and drew her down a side hallway. He’d remembered right—there was a door to the outside there but one pointed into campus, not the parking most people would be heading towards.
They walked out the door and collapsed under a tree.
WHY WAS Kim under a tree with Leonard West? Their legs tangled up together, the expression on his face familiar and yet somehow more than he'd had before. He was even wearing a clerical shirt, and God it looked so good and right on him, the white collar against his dark brown skin.
She shivered, and he put his hand on her arm. “Kim.”
“Len.”
“I think you're amazing.” His soft-voiced confession threw her. “I want to know you again.”
“Know me? Again? May I point out you never knew me in the first place, Mr. Celibate.” Anger, disruption was easier than facing what he’d asked.
“And don't think I've ever forgotten that or not yelled at Jesus about it.” He was stroking her arm now. “But you know I didn't mean the biblical sense. I mean I want to know you. To have your number and send you GIFs of The Rock. To hear about your work at the DoL and out here in the streets. To win you away from your kale-hating pastor. I want to know—” His hands went to her face and traced a path around her cheek bones, leaving a trail of sparkles on her skin. “—to know what your greatest fear is, and your deepest joy.”
She was silent for several beats while his hands followed the old acceptable paths—neck, shoulders, sliding to the wrists, caressing every finger—and then pushed every hair off the back of her neck and caressed a circle on the cleared skin and over again.
Finally she took a deep breath, held it, and released it. She pushed his hands away—he clasped them in his lap tightly—and said, “You. You are my greatest fear.”
His face fell. “I kinda meant greatest fear under the current regime.”
But for the first time in months, she wasn’t worried about that. She said the words again, slow and measured, testing out each word on her tongue before she vocalized it. “You—You might be my deepest joy.” It was a statement, but it came out like a question.
“Kim! What do you mean?” He looked like he was about to levitate in his urgency to get an answer.
“I don't know, for sure. I was hating you, hating you for getting a room full of Christian clergy from all different backgrounds to agree without anybody sulking or splintering. And I was so mad at you, but you wanted to help me. You know I hate people seeing me when I'm vulnerable, and you moved me out of the way. You should hate me, not help me.”
Leonard laughed softly. “What can I say? I serve a God of grace. No, but for real, Kim, hearing about you from Jamal and finding out it was you, seeing you again now, I'm just like, it's you. You're the reason I've never married, the reason the church ladies won't leave me alone, the reason I'm here.” Something in her heart, the section of it that had been hard and bitter since college, that she ignored whenever possible, cracked and swelled.
“Not gonna lie, I thought you'd probably be married with a couple kids by now.”
He shook his head, a rueful smile on his lips. “That was my plan for a year or two, but all the women I tried to date were smart enough to see through me.”
“Well, I think I'm glad you're not.” And crap, she could feel the smile on her face. She knew he knew that smile.
He stood up, and reached down to help her up. “You only think?”
She grabbed his hand and pulled herself up, brushing away the tree detritus. “I wasn't lying when I said you were my greatest fear. I've built my life after you in response to our conflict and it took me ‘til last year to think about dating again. You could devastate me again and I'd be forty before I’m able to look around at the world again.”
“Kim—” He was touching her again, now they were standing, his hands moving up and down her arms. “Baby. I don't ever want to hurt you again.”
“You can't promise that, though.”
“Nobody can promise that. It's an essential Christian doctrine.”
She made a big show of rolling her eyes. “Oh yes, the joys of conversations with a divinity school graduate.”
“You haven't talked to me since I started divinity school.”
“And God, I missed our jokes. You know, that's one of the reasons I liked Jamal—he thought I was funny.”
“Yeah, he thinks I'm funny too.”
They were walking aimlessly now. It was surreal because of course it took them to spots they knew. There was the stoop she’d sat on when he cut her processed hair off. He had clippers because he did his own hair. She’d hacked off the long parts, and he’d trimmed and shaped the tiny new growth. She’d been so scared and he’d been so joyful, running his fingers over her scalp after he was done, anointing her with oil, learning the shape of her skull as he kissed her again and again, her head cradled in his hands. She pointed it out to him. “Remember what happened right there?”
“I never told you how nervous I was, did I? But I did love touching your head all over.”
“You were nervous? I was petrified! You told me you could do just as good a job as a stylist. You were so confident! If I’d known you were nervous…”
“I just wanted to support you. And I knew you’d be beautiful even if you were shiny-headed bald.”
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “You are the only one. But I appreciate it.”
Her phone lit up with news notifications she resolutely avoided. Not tonight, Satan. But she did notice it was getting late. Tomorrow was a workday. Her personal life may have exploded in what appeared to be a positive direction, but she still had a little bit to do to save her country.
“Hey, Len, I don’t think we can stay here all night.”
“No? I imagined us just wandering the Howard campus for the rest of our lives.”
“No. I’ve got work and you’ve got a sermon to write, right? And scriptures to pick out?”
“You right, you right.”
“Here—” She grabbed his phone out of his pocket. “I will give you my number. And I will respond to your texts. And I’ll see you at the prayer meeting, okay? Now, walk me to my car, please? I parked over this way.” She stole a look at his face. His distress was written on every droopy feature.
“Com’n, man,” she teased. “You didn’t think we’d magically just live happily ever after, did you? It has been good, good-good, to be with you again, but I’m still scared. You’re still a pastor, remember? You gotta give me time, okay?”
She grabbed his hands reassuringly, and he squeezed it like a lifeline. They’d walked in silence. The campus was breezy and green dark, spring making itself noticed when the street lights shone on the trees. She felt like spring herself, like a seed had been planted—really, a long dormant bulb had all its requirements satisfied to grow. But it needed a little light, a little water to keep on growing. Not a flood, not summer heat.
When they got to her car, Leonard put his arms around her and held her again like he’d done in the hallway—but she could feel that this time he was the one trembling. “Len. You’re gonna be okay.” She got her arms out and patted him on the shoulders until the trembling stopped.
Then she reached up and kissed him. As far as reunion kisses went, it was tame—just a long slow press of her lips on the corner of his mouth, wide against his lower lip—but it made her feel like she could grow roots and a vine and live in it, right there in the corner of his mouth.
Then Leonard crushed her to him. “Kim,” he breathed. “I promise I won’t screw this up. I’ll make it work.”
She pushed against him to get free, clicked her key fob to unlock her car, and slipped in. She rolled down the window to look at him. “Text me.” He still looked like he wasn’t sure if he was awake or asleep. “Text me and I’ll see you at the prayer meeting, okay?”
So she drove off, barely able to hold on to the steering wheel. She was resolute, brave, and helpless. She couldn�
��t wait to see him again, but she knew she wasn’t ready.
CHAPTER 5
T he embarrassing part was Leonard had sort of thought they would wander around the whole night and they could magically end up living life together, the last missing years swept away and as if they’d never happened.
But then he woke up. Alone.
So he texted her. The minutia of his day, every single Dwayne Johnson GIF he could find. “Don't you wish you could do this with me?” selfies.
He wondered if he looked too desperate, but he shook his head. He was desperate. This was what she’d given him. So for two weeks until the prayer meeting, he texted.
She didn’t always respond, and that was okay, mostly. But he had days when he was cornered by despair. She was afraid that he would wreck her life? His was already destroyed. No matter what happened, he’d never be the same. He’d put his time with her in the “managed” box, and instead of staying there, it had exploded at his feet the moment he’d seen her at the protest.
Even while he took joy in messaging her, sending silly selfies, and saccharine yet true statements of his feelings and his hopes, he stopped eating. If there wasn’t an immediate need for him to be in the office or to visit someone, he stayed outside and went on long walks. He told everyone they were prayer walks, which wasn’t a lie, per se, but they probably thought he was praying for the neighborhood, not “Jesus, please don’t let me fuck this up” over and over.
He went through the rhythms of ministry life, all the while wondering if this thing for which he was called and gifted and equipped would destroy this new tender thing he had with Kim. He was living in a shifting pool of futures. The one where he was a broken-hearted celibate pastor for the rest of his life. The one where Kim married him and they lived happily ever after. The one where Kim married him, decided she couldn’t do the pastor’s wife life, and the divorce shattered his life and his occupation. He was drinking a little more in the past two weeks, too.
Finally, he got a phone call. Not, sadly, from Kim, but from another important woman in his life, one of his first mentors in the ministry. She pastored a church in an adjacent neighborhood and had talked and walked with him through all the hiccups of being a baby pastor in an established church.
“Sister Meshelle, what's up?” It was Monday. The prayer meeting was the next day, and his sermon the day before had been terrible. Writing it had felt like he was vomiting out every word, one at a time. By the end he’d had only bile and Calvin’s commentaries.
“We gotta defend the honor of the cloth, son,” she said. He know, from her tone, the exact pitying expression on her face. “Not look like we’re about to cuss everybody who moves. People have been calling me, worried about you. They say all you do is walk the neighborhood with a crazed expression on your face.”
“Yeah, they’re not wrong.” He took a deep breath and told her everything, treading a path around his office while he talked.
Her response stunned him. “Son, you know God is always at work? He does not need you. It sounds to me like this woman was a gift to you that you rejected for your own glory, so you could tread a path to ministry success.”
“But, but—” he tried to interrupt and came to a stop in his pacing, staring out the window. Was what he’d always thought was his greatest sacrifice for Jesus, actually for the idol of self? He felt his throat close up as his whole body protested against the implication.
“I know, I hear you,” she told him. “I don't question the work you've done or think it's of no value. Mrs. Webster called me this week, talking about how your last sermon series blessed her. But I want you to think really hard about your motives and your future. If your idol is your success you will be angry. I'm not saying you can't be angry at God, because the Psalms put the lie to that but I am saying it's hard to reach people with God’s love when you don't really believe he loves you. Now, what you’ve told me about you and Kim? God is good! You are gifted and talented and blessed, but God don't need you.”
He rocked back on his heels and almost fell over. He sat down on desk, breathless. This woman. She could see to your heart of hearts in a second if you gave her a tiny hole to peek in. He was pretty sure she didn’t like what she saw. He wasn’t sure he did either. His hand went to his chest to make sure his dirty ol’ heart was still beating.
“Leonard, you still there?”
“I don't know, Sister Meshelle…I don't know. You might've just blown me up.”
“Yup, that's me, always with the truth bombs.” He could hear her chuckle. “We love you though, Leonard. I don't want you to end up a bitter secret drinker.”
“Wha…”
“You can't go to the liquor store in your collar anymore, brother. People notice.”
“I was wearing a sweatshirt!”
“It was a church sweatshirt. Anyway, I got to go. But do think about what I said.”
“Okay, sis. I don’t think I have a choice.”
“That's good, Leonard. And hey—I want an invite to the wedding.”
She hung up before he could do more than sputter. But then he began to think and pray and repent and dream and remember.
He remembered going to church together with Kim and getting lost in the richness of her skin. It was church, but he couldn't stop looking at her collar-bones. Her shirt was totally modest, but her skin was like a promise. Yeah, maybe he'd spent too much time in Song of Solomon that week.
But he remembered the wanting he'd stuffed down so deep, the wanting only bearable because he planned on fifty or sixty years of having. He remembered the time they took a class together, and the way, once she got started on a topic in a class discussion, the professor would just sigh, and until Kim was satisfied that they’d seen upside downside and into the subject, the classroom was hers. Her dogged persistence and almost complete recall during that class had inspired him. And he remembered the absolute peace he’d felt, for the first time in forever, when she was in his arms outside the meeting room.
He thought about his ordination service, he thought about leading the Lord’s Supper, baptizing people who’d come to faith in the church, and he thought about his own motivations, even the ones he’d hidden from himself. And he prayed. “Jesus, Father, Spirit. I believe, help my unbelief. Jesus, my church is yours. Kim is yours. I am yours. Forgive me for the times I’ve claimed the church, Kim, my own work, as mine. When I’ve pursued paths to my own glory, not yours. When I’ve made choices for my own little kingdom, not yours. Jesus, when I dismissed the good gift you gave me in Kim Jones and her love to chase my own dreams, however much I thought they were your dreams. Forgive me, Jesus, guide me. And Jesus, most of all, bless and keep and protect Kim. Please don’t let me fuck this up. Show me your path. Amen.”
While he was ending his prayer, breathless after the amen, a plan, fully formed, swept into his head. If Kim could turn towards him again despite it all, he could deal with his church. If they didn’t want her, he didn’t want them. And the prayer service tomorrow would be the perfect venue.
KIM’S HEART quickened every time her phone dinged with a text alert. She didn’t even attempt to hide it from herself. She went from dreamy to petrified and back a few times a day. Those little texts about his day were so precious. He prayed with a widow! Read through Malachi (for a new series, he said). Sat through a boring meeting. And The Rock GIFs?
She’d finally had to put her phone in a drawer on silent because too many people asked her “hey, what’s so funny” at work.
Her answers weren’t quite a lie, but they were better than the truth: I’m considering a reconciliation with an old boyfriend and freaking the fuck out.
Sunday afternoon, she couldn’t control her restlessness. Leonard had finally given her the scripture text to read at the prayer meeting, followed by an all caps message: SORRY IT’S SO LONG, BUT I’M STILL GOING TO TEXT YOU BECAUSE I AM LOST WITHOUT YOU OKAY? Too bad she’d deleted Jamal’s info—she might’ve asked him to go check on his boy. She’d re
ad the verses and then had to get out of her apartment. She’d gotten into her car and drove around the city, thinking and praying.
The text was two chapters of Isaiah. It was a lot of verses—she’d imagined just reading one or two. The first chapter started, “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, he has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prisons to those who are bound.”
The verses that finally sent her out of her house, though, were Isaiah 62:4-5. “You shall no more be turned Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called ‘My Delight is in Her,’ and your land, ‘Married.’ For the Lord delights in you and your land shall be married. For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your sons marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”
She and Leonard weren’t young-young anymore—and certainly she wasn’t quite the same person she was at 21—but she had felt the force of Leonard’s rejoicing over her. The moments after the prayer meeting, the frequent texts. And she remembered, too, from their early time together, before his so-called calling had thrown a wrench into all her plans.
But since she’d been the one to refuse to choose a preacher, someone devoting his life to God’s work, she’d always felt God must only tolerate her. She pursued more secular paths to do good work. She didn’t stop going to church altogether, but besides making sure she went to a church in a denomination that wasn’t Leonard’s, she stayed on the periphery—this resistance group thing was the first time she’d really done anything more than Sunday worship.
This passage was talking about God’s rejoicing over her (…and/or the nation of Israel, but she’d worry about exegesis later). My delight is in her. His delight is in me. She’d been a Christian almost her whole life. Why did she feel like she’d been born again? Like the world was new and fresh? Leonard couldn’t have known what this passage would do to her, could he? She thought, again, about his being a pastor. Not just the person that preached but someone who was pastoring. She knew her roots words. He was a shepherd.
Rogue Desire: A Romance Anthology (The Rogue Series) Page 29