Kick (The Jenkins Cycle Book 1) (27 page)

Apparently, the truth whammy was strictly a one-way compulsion.

Before I could stop him, the minister reached over, took my hand and shook it—and nothing happened!

Still holding onto my hand, he said, “Please let Erika know we’ll only be a few more minutes, would you?”

Tim said, “Sure, sorry, absolutely,” and stepped back inside.

I fake smiled for the crowd and pulled my hand away.

“What did you do that for? I thought we were fine.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than us being
fine
, Dan. I had to know that you were here by my will and not yours.”

“What about faith?” I said. “Doesn’t proof ruin it?”

“Good question—care to find out?” he said, reaching for me.

“No no, I was just asking,” I said, backing up a step.

“If anything happens to Nate or Erika, there’s going to be Hell to pay—for both of us. You remember that and then we’ll be fine.”

The minister’s face had taken on a fatherly expression for the onlookers in the kitchen, but to me his eyes blazed like twin supernovas, leaving me physically weak in a way no hangover could compete with.

I looked away.

“I’ll do my best to keep anything from happening to them,” I said, and hoped it would be that easy.

“Then let’s get this sham over with, shall we?”

Together, we walked in.

Chapter 30

Erika looked lovely in her wedding dress. And poofy. Wisely, I substituted any such commentary with an appropriately stunned look. In reality, I barely registered her presence at all. For the first time ever I’d told someone the complete truth about myself, and strangest of all: he believed me.

Throughout the ceremony, I found myself reviewing my strange conversation with the minister, exploring it, relishing the novelty between repeated utterances of, “I do.” Almost absently, I noted the minister wasn’t using his holy powers on me anymore, since I was able to get through my lies to love, honor and cherish Erika.

“I now pronounce you husband and wife,” he said. After a brief hesitation, and a stern look my way, he added, “You may kiss the bride.”

I tried for a chaste kiss to keep His Holiness off my back, but Erika had other plans. Her tongue wiggled in like a bionic anaconda—impossibly vicious and fast and always popping up where I least expected it. Everyone clapped and cheered. Meanwhile, the ex-Catholic priest displayed the amazing ability to smile beatifically while simultaneously glaring at me, leaving me with a sense of vertigo so strong I became dizzy.

Erika reached out to steady me.

“Wow, are you ok?” she said. “Your eyes got all weird for a second.”

“Huh? Oh… no, I’m ok. Just a muscle spasm from standing straight for so long.” I made a show of stretching my back from side to side. “I’m fine, really.”

Narrowing her eyes, she said, “You better not have a headache—I have needs.”

I wanted to tell her,
About those needs,
but it wasn’t the right time, what with a roomful of people watching every little thing we did. Everyone wanted to offer congratulations, so I shut up and gave myself over to handshakes, back slaps and the same question repeated over and over again: “How’s it feel to be married?”

There are really only two answers to that, tailored to your audience. “It feels great!” to women, or “Just shoot me …” to fellow husbands.

At one point, Tim surprised me by taking up an amplified classical guitar and playing some of the most beautiful Spanish guitar I’d ever heard. Almost effortlessly, he breezed through lovely, romantic stretches of complicated picking that seemed almost conversational, punctuated frequently by sudden rushes of strumming, sometimes soft, occasionally thunderous and savage. Judging from the applause, almost everyone loved it.

Erika and Betsy had walked out somewhere in the middle.

The rest of the evening proceeded uneventfully. Secretly, I’d hoped for a throw-the-garter fight worthy of something from
America’s Funniest Home Videos
, but Erika’s interaction with anyone other than her friend seemed forced. Sure, she turned around and tossed her garter, someone caught it, clapping all around, yes yes, but afterward it seemed like the room breathed a collective,
Glad that’s done
. Then everyone went back to whatever they were doing before the interruption. I couldn’t figure it out. I wondered what they knew about her that I didn’t.

The party officially ended at ten but people started leaving a bit earlier. Rob and Tom left after the cake was cut, but I’d given up figuring them out. The minister left shortly after the ceremony, though not before taking me by the elbow for a quick, final word. I tensed up when he touched me—but again, nothing happened.

In a low voice meant only for me, the minister said, “I’m counting on you to keep your word. Are we clear?”

“If I’m lyin’ I’m fryin’,” I said.

“This isn’t a joke,” he said, clipping his words tightly, as if ready to cast out the unclean spirit at any moment. “When I call you, you will answer. And when you’ve moved on to your next possession, you made a promise to contact me and that is what you will do. Now, here, shake on it.”

He stuck his hand out, as if daring me to take it.

I shook his hand.

“You had my word before and you still have it.”

“… word of a demon,” I heard him mutter, before turning to leave.

I didn’t think he believed I was anything other than what I claimed, but he also didn’t trust himself and worried it’d be a mistake to let me stay. If he had asked me, I would’ve assured him he’d probably made a mistake, but there you go.

Mark and Clara stayed right till the end—mainly because Mark hadn’t stopped eating since he’d arrived. There hadn’t been a time all evening when he didn’t have a piece of cake in his hand.

Nate’s wedding cake was huge—a genuine four-decker. I kept the half-eaten middle and gave the untouched bottom half to Mark to take with him since he liked it so much. Tim made sure to secure the top piece—a pretty little pastry with pink and blue cupids in flight. He wrapped it up in wax paper and popped it into a little box the delivery people had left for it, then placed it carefully in the freezer. He said Erika and I were supposed to eat it on our next anniversary. I never would have thought to do that. Tim had convinced me that being gay came with a lot of neat perks.

Tim said goodbye, and as soon as the door shut behind him, Erika began tearing off my tux.

“Hey what are you doing?” I said, alarmed. “This is a rental!”

She responded with a snorting rendition of a mad cackle and dragged me to the ground, whereupon she deftly pulled a reversal, forcing me into a jujitsu guard as my only defense.

“Erika, come on, wait—the baby. We shouldn’t—”

“Huh?” she said, panting.

“I thought we’d wait until after the baby—”

“What are you talking about,” she breathed, kissing my now bare chest and—
oh yeah
, she had strong hands. Like a sex-crazed blacksmith.

Struggling to my feet, I yelled, “Erika, stop! Wait, think. You’re pregnant.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

It had finally dawned on her I was serious. More importantly, it occurred to me that her poofy wedding dress, her livid expression and sudden burst of profanity were sexy as hell.

Patiently, I said, “I’m just concerned that all the, you know,
activity
—I’m afraid it could harm the baby. We have what, six more months until the baby’s born? And a lifetime after that, so why are we rushing?”

Erika leveled me a look of weird, wanton outrage that would have been frightening if I wasn’t bigger than her.

“You’re kidding, right? We’re going on a hiking trip tomorrow—for our
honeymoon
. If that won’t hurt the baby then neither will fucking me.”

“Hiking?” I said, grasping for something and then immediately regretted it. Surely Nate knew his own honeymoon plans.

Come to think of it, that explained why the guests kept giving us camping gear.

“Oh pu-
lease
,” she said. “Don’t give me that. What’s wrong with you anyway? You didn’t used to be this shy.”

Shrugging, I said, “I’m a little bit country. And you’re… a little bit Norwegian death metal.”

Erika squinted at me suspiciously.

“Is that from TV or something?”

Nate and Erika were just a tad too young to know who Donnie and Marie were.

“Yeah, one of the
Matrix
movies I think.”

“Whatever. And just who the hell was that Mexican woman Betsy told me about? She told me you were having a good time talking to her.”

“She’s nobody. Don’t worry, I hate her guts.”

I crossed my heart.

“Uh huh,” she said, and then began taking off her dress.

Despite it looking incredibly complicated, she managed to get it off in about seven seconds. To my surprise, she had both breast implants
and
a tramp stamp, but that wasn’t a problem. That was just awesome.

She struck a challenging pose, staring at me dangerously in nothing but her bra and dental floss, the tattered remains of her poofy dress heaped sullenly at her feet like something conquered.

Ok, I’m the guy who can’t forget anything, but right then I think I forgot to breathe. I felt trapped. Worse, she was getting off on it, judging from the wicked smirk playing across her face. And because I’m damned for all eternity due to a little misunderstanding over this one time I killed myself in college, she took off the rest, put her hands around my neck and climbed me like a stripper pole. Though light, she unbalanced me enough that I came down on top of her in a barely controlled crash, causing her to scream with delight.

In a last-ditch attempt at resistance I tried to stand up, but Erika’s nails were like cat’s claws—you were fine until you tried to pull away. She snorted again, making me wonder why I’d never realized before how adorable her little laugh was…

***

Twelve hundred million years ago, according to my friend Kirk’s mostly legible notes from freshman biology, a small but momentous event occurred: a single-celled, asexual, eukaryotic organism came waltzing along one day, when
bam
, it got eaten by another eukaryote. But unlike all the other times this had happened since that other momentous event two billion years before that—the emergence of life—this time a miraculous thing occurred. The DNA strand from the eaten eukaryote became entwined with the DNA of the cannibal.

According to Kirk, it was kind of like the creation of the peanut butter cup, only “way weirder.”

From that moment on, whenever the cannibal ate another cell (sex), instead of the offspring from cell division having one double-helix of DNA, it now had two copies, resulting in the very first living thing with DNA from two parents. The implications were staggering. Before, if a strand of DNA became damaged, the cell would die. Now the cell had a second copy of DNA to splice-in for repairs.

The competitive advantage of the cannibal so outclassed all the asexual organisms that today its descendants account for the majority of species in the fractal of life: from plants and fungi to insects, fish and mammals.

But even within a species, there are differences. Men are larger and have stronger muscles, and women hurtle down expressways applying cosmetics while talking on cell phones. It is as if those millions of years of divergence have taken that identical pair of DNA strands, once merged into a single species, and created two new, entirely different species all their own, separated by chasms of time and experience so vast as to be all but reconcilable.

That is until Erika and I, defying eons of exile, merged our divergent flesh back into a single, completed organism.

The next several hours weren’t pretty. Nate’s McMansion had a lot of rooms, and Erika and I did our best to sully and defile most of them before ever making it to the bedroom. Once or twice I reflected that I was going to fry like a chicken roaster for this one.

To hell with it, I did my best.

I mean, it’s not like I was an unknown quantity here. The Great Whomever should have sent one of his saints instead of a guy who hadn’t been laid in fifteen years. Of course, the odds were the old guy would’ve lost a perfectly good saint.

If the neighbors called about the noise, we wouldn’t have heard them. If teams of scientists came to witness the event, we would have gone on blissfully unaware, like rutting leviathans in an ocean of astonished minnows.

I didn’t remember sex being this strange when Sandra and I were dating. Unlike Sandra, Erika would swear and say things I couldn’t understand, but our love transcended mere English. Once, she got some of the wedding cake from the kitchen and made me eat it off her—and that’s really stretching the definition of the word “off.” But when she went downstairs and returned with the locked pink trunk that had been such a mystery, that’s when things started to get out of hand.

The kinky little trollop. Peeking inside, I saw multicolored bottles of lotion and weird sex toys, no less colorful. It wasn’t something I was into, but hey, judge not lest ye be judged, and Lo unto the mimsy sea goes he who walketh in the tabernacles of sin…

“Oh Hun Bun,” Erika purred, pulling out two sets of handcuffs, each wrapped in something fuzzy. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Actually, no, I wasn’t thinking what she was thinking. Just looking at the handcuffs brought back vivid images of Jill, the daughter of that seedy drug dealer, but I couldn’t tell her that.

Nervously, I said, “Uh, you’re thinking of arresting me?”

She flashed me a frightening smile.

“Would you like that very much, Hun Bun?” she said, snapping one of the manacles around my wrist. Then she nipped at my chest, playfully.

At the last second, just before she went to secure it to the bedpost, I resisted.

“Uh, honey,” I said, unable to clear the images from that house in Memphis from my mind. “Listen, it’s not that I’m not into… you know… adventures and all. But I have this phobia, right, and—”

Her neck arched back seductively as she broke into a peel of wicked laughter.