GENUFLECT
Nicholas Bailey shoved his hands in his leather jacket and walked down the beachside sidewalk, passing workers on their way home. Harried families fought foot traffic with lovestruck couples presently too enthralled with each other to hear the tired cries and frustrated sighs of their futures. The din of one-sided cellphone conversations clashed against the call of street vendors, each raising its volume as they struggled to be heard over the other.
Shutting his eyes, wishing it were that easy to shut it all out, Nicholas turned the corner and stared at his destination.
For a person who knew where to look, Donovan’s was built like a veritable magic box, with trap doors and hidden hatches everywhere. There were an obscene amount of ways to secret into and out of this den of decadence disguised as just another trendy downtown club.
There was always the front; the shined steel and tinted glass face at the foot of the deceptively large brick building, that hinted at the writhing, undulating bodies barely veiled behind it as pulsating rhythms poured seductive out into the night like a siren’s song.
Then there was the exclusive back way, reserved for the highly exclusive and highly elite — those who held those keys were the ones with the most to hide and the most to lose. They were the ones whose business-suited exteriors hid more exciting centers, slowly revealed as they mazed their way through the labyrinthine offices that shared their homes and hallways with the increasingly infamous club. Clandestine comfort through corporate covers.
But still too were all the side entrances, doors that were often hidden, marked only by a lone smoker standing sentry or a lounging barfly leaning against black brick, allowing only the authorized and approved attendance.
Those were the doors that, for three years now, Nicholas had preferred. The shadowed passageways in darkened alleys where few deigned to notice and fewer dared to frequent. It offered cover and comfort of a different sort. In his usual costume of dark jeans and dark jacket, it lent Nicholas an invisible anonymity he appreciated. Especially in the past few months, since word about the club and the eccentric clientèle it catered to had spread across the local media waves just in time for splashy seasonal sweeps.
Last night, Nicholas had seen yet another report about protest groups of the devoutly faithful who had posted themselves at Donovan’s front and rear entrances to vehemently preach against not only the club’s members, but the businesses that allowed this hedonistic haven to flourish. “It’s an abomination,” a blond woman in a snow white sweater with pretty, serious eyes, had said into the reporter’s microphone, “to allow such an affront to goodness and decency to stand.”
Nicholas knew he had to be careful. Had to avoid the cameras and reporters and protesters flanking the main ways. Hand hovering over his naked throat, he missed the feel of his stiff, crisp white collar. He felt exposed without it, even as the light weight of it felt like a leaden lie in his pocket. But it was better this way. A necessary sin. Father Nicholas Bailey knew no one would — no one could — ever understand.
Nicholas wasn’t at all that sure he understood.
Nodding to Gabe, the tall, beefy doorman on duty, Nicholas flashed his membership pass — a simple strip of laminated cardboard on his keychain with nothing but a barcode that Gabe scanned before letting him inside the unassuming north side door the doorman had been leaning up against while he smoked. The terse man greeted him with an acknowledging nod and a puff of his ever-present cigarette. Nicholas nodded back and entered.
Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of smoke? Nicholas thought, the passage hanging in the air before him, swirling as it wafted, woven within the cloud Gabe’s cigarette and breath had left.
In the dimly lit hallways, Nicholas could hear the music throbbing from the dance floor in the club proper through the strangely plain walls. He touched the stone-gray walls and imagined that he could feel the pounding beat against his fingers, could feel the heated twist of gyrating bodies against his hand.
Moving down the cave-like hallways, he headed further back, driven and drawn as if called by name. Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest. He let the curves and turns in the walls lead him as he made the familiar pilgrimage back. As he walked, the sounds of the music muted, replaced by a strangely soothing cacophony of muffled murmurs, soft sighs, and sharp gasps.
He closed his eyes, sightlessly sure of his way. Instead, he concentrated on the sounds surrounding him. In one hallway, people recited poetry, their voices low and breathy as their words stroked over the senses. He couldn’t hear well enough to distinguish the words, but the cadence and tone were enough to carry him on his way. Another was nothing but guttural grunts and groans, the sound of flesh pounding against flesh in a struggle that sounded at least as lusty and primal as it was fierce. Yet another was completely silent except for the slightest shuffle and a stifled sigh.
With a sigh of his own, Nicholas turned his final corner and stopped in front of a door. A rather ordinary looking one. Not really different from the others around it, if it weren’t for the air of formal reverence and faint organ music that drifted around it.
Opening the door, the scent of incense — the pungent, piney scent of frankincense — assaulted him. The dim, candlelit room was small, about the size of a classroom, with old, creaking pews lined in a vee around a tall table draped like an altar set atop a small, elevated stage at the head of the room. Pictures of saints suffering serenely hung everywhere as classical hymns played over the speakers at the front of the room.
For a moment, Father Nicholas stood still at the mouth of the mock chapel.
He shouldn’t like this room.
Should hate it and the offense its gaudy, fetishized face made of his faith.
He was a priest, for goodness sake!
But, as he made his way down the aisle of pews, his fingers brushing the slick, slightly nicked wood, he felt a weight lift from his shoulders.
This week he’d counseled two rehab groups — one for alcohol addiction, another for drugs. He’d mentored children in hospices, his heart breaking as he tried to comfort kids hooked up to monitors and machines who knew things about life and death that Nicholas didn’t think he was ready to understand.
Today, he’d spent hours trying to urge a woman to report her husband’s abuse. They had five years of marriage, only three of them good. She had a busted lip, a bruised cheek, and a child on the way. And he…
Nicholas had had a sickened heart and none of the right words.
So when his brothers had urged him to take some time for himself — to get out and away for a bit — he hadn’t gone for the walk he’d told them he would. He hadn’t gone to the park or the store or to get some coffee like perhaps he ought to have.
He’d come here.
God only knew why.
Nicholas knelt, dropping into a gentle genuflect and made the sign of the cross, before taking a seat in the second row. It should have felt wrong to perform the rituals in this space, to perform the sacred within the profane.
Except it didn’t feel profane.
Nicholas checked the clock on the wall. Any minute now, the mass would start. Lowering himself onto the padded kneeler, he bowed his head and laid his folded hands onto the back of the pew in front of him. Quieting his mind, he opened himself to the room. To the experience. Letting the day’s pressures lift.
The room was hushed, filled only with the soft whisper of ecclesiastic strains and the reverent shuffle of silent feet as the pews began to fill. He could feel the collective anticipation — the shared held breath that seemed to fill the air in the room. It was heavy, heady, this thick thing in their midst. Like the moment right before a storm, it was excited and exciting as it built with each quiet tick of the clock.
He began to pray; the familiar words a comfort, a steady habit that even here — especially here — he couldn’t break. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
And then he heard it.
Nicholas’s eyes popped open as he raised his head. He turned, his ears searching for the sound. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.
It started low, this rhythmic tap — just a small ting against tile — like the beat of a heart.
His hands clenched as his pulse raced. On earth as it is in heaven.
She took her time — as was her tendency to do — letting just the sound of her speak. The soft sigh of skin against the rough rasp of cloth. And that slowly approaching tap with each stilettoed step.
Give us this day our daily bread.
His gut clenched when she stepped into the room, as it always did in that moment, titillation tingling, taboo and thrilling, along his whole body. Not just under the skin, but soul-deep.
Catholic guilt, he thought blandly, almost matter-of-factly. The belief that everyone is born guilty, that the very act of breathing held within it the essence of sin. The idea that life — this precious and fragile and beautiful gift — was meant to be mourned, was preordained to be spent miserable and wanting.
Nicholas, no matter how much he’d studied the belief at seminary or thought and meditated on it now, had always felt it had no place in his faith.
Yet, as the woman, Solomon, in her store-bought clerical costume took her place at the head of the makeshift altar, Nicholas wondered if he would crave — would love and need and be so moved by — this experience if not for its transgressive nature.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
She signaled them to rise. As a whole, the room — men and women, the loved and the lonely, the lost and the found — stood.
Not a great beauty, Solomon was tall and thin, her small breasts buried and hidden beneath the men’s garb even as her shoulders and hips pressed tight against the ill-fitted material. Her frizzy cloud of dark curls was left wild about her face like a dark halo, framing angles too sharp and lines a little too harsh to be called truly feminine. Her lips, painted a dramatic red, were thin but firm, a definite and expressive slash across her face.
Her eyes were the only really soft quality about her. Deep and brown, they gazed out at her flock with a tenderness and caring Nicholas understood well. Whatever their differences, he knew he — more than anyone else in the room — understood that look. It connected them somehow. Made him feel close to her. Intimate, in a way.
“‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love.’” Her voice was clear and sure as she addressed the room with arms still outstretched as if to embrace.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
“Amen,” he said along with the chorus of others before she gestured for them to sit.
Again, he wondered why he came here. Why he felt so compelled to watch as they aped at holy acts and parroted passages and sacred psalms.
As a priest, he could see the inaccuracies. The falsehood of the farce. Dressed in polyester in a room filled with old, mismatched church trappings, Solomon made for a ridiculous officiate. With her crimson lips and her five-inch stiletto boots, she wasn’t even really trying. Sure, she had the words — if a snickering child’s understanding of them, like a puckish preteen giggling over cuss words in confirmation class. It ought to have felt fake and wrong.
Yet that look. That look of compassion and love; it felt more honest than Nicholas could remember being in a long time. There was something safe and soothing in the way she looked at the pews filled with her followers. In the way she looked at him.
“‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come,’” Solomon said as she gestured out to the small gathered crowd. “Have no fear. Have no shame. For ‘thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.’”
Nicholas moved to once again kneel, his supplicant hands folded against the pine, itching — to take, to hold, to reach — for something as he watched people — first just one tentative follower, then another and then another — walk through the pews, trickling into the aisle to line up before her.
With bowed heads, the three stood at the lip of the small stage, shaking with nerves while the room stared at their bent backs. They looked scared. They looked excited. And still there was a quality inside them that Nicholas couldn’t place. Something familiar and recognizable flushed across their skin, like humility or shame, but not.
Stepping away from the altar, Solomon gestured to the first man, a forty-ish man with thinning hair and a strong jaw. Moving with a smooth grace to stand statuesque before him, she looked so ethereal and benevolent. The man fell to his knees at her feet. “My child,” she intoned and placed a long-fingered hand atop his balding head.
“Forgive me, Father,” the man began, “for I have sinned. It’s been six weeks since my last confession.”
Solomon nodded, her spiraled hair bouncing as she urged him to continue. Her fingers curled, letting her long, red nails scrape against his exposed scalp.
“I’ve committed the sin of impure thoughts,” the man admitted, his jaw tightening slightly — from the confession or his confessor’s attention, Nicholas couldn’t be sure.
“Impure thoughts?” Her tone was almost casual if it wasn’t for the commanding force laced in her every word and movement. “And what thoughts have you been having, my son?”
“They’re not often,” he stuttered to assure. “Not even that impure — ”
He winced again, this time surely from the pinch of Solomon’s grip as she palmed his head, her nails now driving her unsaid point home. “What,” she repeated more forcefully, “impure things have you been thinking?”
Nicholas cringed at her voice — so cool and hard — even as he leaned forward, pressing his body close to — into — the unforgiving pine. Her words washed over him like a current. It felt as if she were painting his own soul so she could see his sins.
“They’re of my son’s fourth grade teacher,” the man sputtered quickly before letting out a relieved sigh when she loosened her grasp, turning her clasp into a caress that encouraged him to continue. “Ever since my son’s last conference, I keep playing the scene over and over in my head. Not really what she said or even really what she did. I just,” he gulped guiltily, “like to imagine her lips.”
“Her lips?” Solomon let her hand drift low to stroke his face.
“Yes.” The man hissed, tipping his head back like a cat into her touch. “She wore red lipstick.”
“Like mine?” Solomon asked.
The man’s gaze narrowed and heated, staring at her lips as if remembering, as if seeing another pair. “Yes.”
Nicholas looked too. Watched as her lips slipped into a slow smile, flashing just the barest hint of teeth. “Do you think about kissing her?” Solomon’s own lips pouted as they formed the words, the slight bow of her mouth bending in deliberate dips of lips and teeth and tongue. “Do you imagine the feel of her mouth upon yours?”
Nicholas licked his lips — his tongue slicking across his mouth in time with the man’s — anticipating his answer as if it were a taste stuck on his own skin.
“Yes.” The reply was barely more than a breath.
“What else did you imagine?” Solomon trailed her nails up and down the man’s cheek.
His face was sweating and his whole body tensed. The man shook his head, begging her not to push him with eyes so wide and worried the look felt like a hit to the heart.
Unmoved, she simply said in an implacable, undeniable command, “Speak.”
The middle-aged man sighed — looking impossibly young in that moment, like a recalcitrant child. “I imagine her licking her lips as she looks up at me.”
“Up at you?” she asked over the already heavy breathing in the crowd.
“She’s on her knees. In front of me,” the man admitted.
“Like you are.” Solomon smiled. “With me.”
“Yes,” he said slowly, his voice quiet and unsure. “And no.”
“Is she naked?”
“No,” the man said hurriedly. “No, she’s always just as she was in the conference. A red sweater, full-covering and too bright, and a long, baggy, shapeless denim skirt.” The man shook his head, bewildered, bumping her hand as he did. “I don’t even know why. I don’t find it attractive. Except...”
Solomon waited, letting the pause stretch a bit before asking, “Except?”
“With the rest of her covered,” the man said, his words now quick and his breath short, “all I can see are those lips. A little pouty as they purse.”
“Then what?” Her hand stroked his face, cupping as her skin smoothed along his rough, square jaw.
“Then she takes me into her mouth, her lips and tongue,” he marveled, awe and reverence lifting his voice like a revelation, “are like nothing I’ve ever felt before. Better than my wife. Better than any woman I’ve known. Better than the very first time I’ve ever had really good head.”
He shook his head, his face suddenly changing as realization overtook the fantasy. “Even sitting two feet from my son — sitting two feet from my wife — it was all I could think of. It’s still all I can think of.” His shoulders slumped as he turned his face from her touch, leaving her hand still in the air, reaching.
“And this,” she said as she turned his face toward her again, “made you feel guilt?” The man nodded, his large jaw held firm in her palm, still not meeting her gaze. “Guilty enough to come to me?” Again, he nodded, his whole upper body now bowed low before her.
“‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come.’” She pulled him upright with the hand still clutching his chin. “The truth of your confession has helped set you free, but penance will soothe your soul. Come.”
Nicholas shifted, his twisted limbs tense, and watched the other man stand, struggling to find his feet beneath him as she pulled him to the lip of the stage. Giving him a small tug and an almost dismissive shove, she pushed him off the step of the stage with an oomph. As he tripped along the tile, she took a sweeping seat on the stage’s edge, smoothing the rough material of her pants.
Giving an arching look up at him, she patted her lap. “‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love,’” she said, her voice now low with warning and promise.
Nicholas wheezed out a breath when the man took a step closer to her. He watched the man suck in a deep, steadying breath before leaning over to lie down on Solomon’s lap. “Your penance,” she announced to the crowd as she pulled back her opened hand, “three Hail Marys.”
The man gulped and the color drained from his face.
“This is what you need,” she said, her gaze penetrating and all-knowing, “isn’t it? It’s what you deserve. What you want.”
The man gave a small nod.
“Then, my fair one, come.”
He swallowed uneasily again before breathing deep. Once. And then again. And then one more time. Before he settled into a calmly resigned state. “‘Hail Mary, full of grace,’” the man started, his voice firm with resolve as he rested his cheek against the smooth, hard wood of the stage. He shook slightly when Solomon pulled the back of his pants down to reveal his pale, trembling flesh. “‘The Lord is with thee.’”
Nicholas’s eyes widened as Solomon’s red, glossy lips twitched before she swung her hand back to strike.
The man flinched with a gasp when her hand connected with his ass. “‘Blessed art thou amongst women.’” He sucked in a hiss of air, sticking his ass in the air, waiting for her next hit.
Nicholas scooted forward on his knees, his thighs tense and tight and his folded hands squeezed, his nails digging into his flesh.
“‘And blessed is the fruit of thy womb — ’”
Solomon’s hand smacked again, harder this time, making the man’s whole body jerk. “Jesus!”
Nicholas’s hands gripped the hard edge of the pew’s back, his fingertips falling into well-worn grooves in the wood from where other hands had gripped and held in anticipation.
“‘Holy Mary,’” Nicholas mouthed along with the other man as he spoke, his voice huffing as Solomon’s blows began in earnest, “‘Mother of God.’” Placing her free hand on his back between the vale of his shoulder blades, Solomon increased the speed and severity as she struck, leaving large, long-fingered marks streaking red across the man’s pale skin.
“‘Pray for us sinners!’” The man’s voice was now reedy and shrill as if wrenched from his taut, stretched throat. His eyes were squeezed shut, tears welling up and spilling out of the corners of his eyes to trail glistening and wet through the crevices in the man’s scrunched, pinched face. “‘Now and at the hour of our death!’”
Nicholas choked on a heated, agitated cry as Solomon’s hand connected again in a last crescendoing crack. The man’s body rose rigid against her lap — his head thrown back and his back arched — a look of such profound rapture radiating from his face. His eyes and mouth were impossibly wide as he stared sightlessly out at something beyond. Glassy and glossed, he gazed up as if he were seeing God.
For a moment, the room fell mute, marveled. Astounded and awed by the perfect ecstasy that had caught and held the man so sweetly. For a moment, Nicholas was sure he’d never felt so empty or so full, so sated yet still so yearning.
“Amen.” An exhalation. An exaltation.
Then the man collapsed, folded and draped over her legs, looking small and weak — even though Nicholas was sure his much heavier weight must be overwhelming her — as she shushed and cooed, rubbing her hand over his back.
She waited while he shook, slowly transforming the quivering mass back into a man with her touch.
When, at last, the man lifted his head to look gratefully into her gaze, she leaned in to kiss his lips sweetly, just a brief brush of lips. “‘And the priest shall make an atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned,’” Solomon murmured as she cupped his cheek gently, “‘and it shall be forgiven him.’”
The man sighed, relieved and unburdened.
Until she sat back and straightened. “Again,” was all she said before raising her hand.
A small smile pulled at Nicholas’s lips when the man — steadying his legs as he squirmed along her lap — prepared himself again, a sure and ready look steeling his features.
But then, as the third strike struck, Nicholas saw it.
A peering look. A pointed finger. A whisper shared between parishioners.
He turned his head, catching the curious eye of Fletcher Boswitt, a member of Father Nicholas’s church known for his gossipy wife who more than made up for Fletcher’s own quiet, reserved demeanor, as he mumbled something into his neighbor Jack Wright’s ear.
Nicholas, his heart racing, whipped his head back. But it was too late. He’d already seen the spark of recognition replace the sheen of suspicion in the men’s eyes.
Dear Lord.
Madly — half-blind — he saw the forty-ish man had now been replaced on the stage by a couple, a tall, lithe brunette with the bronzed features of a Grecian myth and a man like a visitor from Valhalla. The woman, sobbing as her stoic husband stared stricken, was saying something.
Nicholas tried to concentrate, but his ears were focused back — straining for the mumbled mutterings behind him like a buzzing hiss that filled his head.
For three years — three years — Nicholas had been secreting in to see Solomon. For three years, he’d used back alley doors and mazed through Platonian hallways. Three years of street clothes and shame. Of hiding in shadows and looking over his shoulder. Three years of wondering — worrying — why.
Why did he come here? Why did he feel he needed to?
Nicholas slumped in his seat, barely hearing the Venus squeal as Solomon and the lightning god held her on the altar.
Nicholas felt cold sweat collect on his brow. What would happen if his congregation found out? If his brothers found out? He’d be ruined. His life — his calling — would be taken from him. He felt his collar, curled and kept hidden in his pocket, poke against his thigh.
“‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come,’” Solomon said as she handed Thor a long twine of gilded rope twisted and barbed to look like a crown of thorns.
Nicholas rolled his eyes and internally groaned, just thinking what his brothers — what his followers — would think of that.
Filled with dread, he listened to the woman as she cried out the Lord’s words in orgiastic screams that, unlike the balding man, drowned out any reverence or repentance. It sounded raw as the blond god wrapped and roped the woman in his punishing clutch. Animalistic. Wrong. The holy text spoken in hedonistic, heathenistic tongues that twisted and thrashed like a common whore.
He looked around the room that had a moment ago been bathed in soft candlelight and a cloud of frankincense and redemption, that now seemed garish and plastic, like a child’s dioramic vision cloying with dime-store perfume.
Scanning the room surreptitiously, he saw wide-eyed, slack-jawed gawkers, staring as the hard, blond man wrestled and caught his wife, like a hunter trapped prey, with hunger and lust hot in their eyes. Nicholas averted his gaze only to catch sight of hands, fast and furtive, as they crawled and crept over shadowed spaces.
How had he come here? How had he fallen so low?
He should leave. Would have too, if it wouldn’t have caused more of a stir, made him feel more keenly watched to walk out of the room alone and ashamed.
So he sat, silently screaming, as he glared at the couple on the stage. The man’s nimble hands wielded the long length of rope while he contorted and controlled her body, pulling and stretching her into unnatural angles and painful positions. The woman’s rump raised, rooting around as she writhed, her arms and legs now bound and useless beside her. The candles’ light caught the glint of his grin with each loop and knot sealing her silken skin that pulled and pushed against its bonds.
With almost heartbreaking horror, Nicholas stared down at his hands, still folded in his lap as if in plaintive prayer, that pressed down hard against throbbing flesh.
He was hard.
In this room — with its fake altar and fake pews, with its fake prayers and practices, with its fake priest and parishioners — in the face of intoxication and drug addiction, of children facing disease and death, of abused mothers with unborn babes and no hope left — he was hard.
May God forgive him.
A small sound stopped him as a sob slipped from his throat.
An echo of a cry.
Nicholas, wet-eyed and weary, looked up at the woman laid like a sacrifice atop the altar. Her face, unlined and unashamed, looked peaceful, held in a nirvanic trance. Her eyes were closed, but two trails, wet and soft as they shone in the flame’s faint light, trickled down her face.
He gasped when her eyes opened.
That look.
Lord in heaven, he knew that look.
In her eyes, brown and deep and soulful, he saw yearning. He saw an honest and wanting emptiness that longed to be filled. A soul that was striving to be saved.
In her eyes, reflected back at him through candlelit tears, he saw himself.
“Amen!” he heard her shout, her voice raw and hoary as tears now fell in abandon down her cheeks. “Amen.”
Again, the room stilled. Only the sound of her tears — sodden and saved — filled the room as her lover wordlessly released her. He pulled at strings and ties until she fell, tumbled and abandoned, before him, before bundling her in his embrace. “I’m sorry.” She sobbed, her quaking arms wrapped around his neck. “I’m so sorry.”
Tucking her knees in the crook of his arm, he held her close and shushed her, cuddling her as he surrounded his massive form around hers. But still she stuttered, her trembling tears stealing her meaning.
Nicholas felt it like a squeeze deep in his chest as the man gazed at her, forgiveness and grace clear in his eyes before he leaned in to kiss her quiet.
This is why, Nicholas thought, unable to look away as mouths met sweetly. This was why he came here. Beneath the farce and performance, behind the costumes and curtains, there was a current of truth. For all the parroted words, he felt a part of something larger in this room. Felt a connection to — caught a glimpse of — something higher.
More than any ornate altar or stained glass window or holy writ, this — this place, this room, this moment — felt like magic. Held within it the vulnerability of faith, the strength of support, the spirit of love. I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.
This, Nicholas knew — felt — in his heart as the man kissed away his wife’s tears, is why. “I love you,” he heard the man murmur against still moist skin.
“‘Thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly,’” Nicholas heard Solomon say softly while the couple kissed, “‘causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.’”
He heard her, her stilettos a steady tapping as she moved over the stage toward the couple. A knowing — a divine knowledge — seemed to emanate ethereal from her as she took their hands and led them down to the edge of the stage.
Solomon gestured for the room to stand.
Nicholas, feeling connected within the ceremony and ritual of it all, pushed to his feet, his spine straight as he wiped the tears from his cheeks.
Bringing the couple’s hands together, Solomon clasped them within the careful cage of her own. Raising their entwined hands, she gazed up adoringly. “‘You place upon us the sweet demands of love,’” she said, her voice soft as it echoed through the space, “‘so that we may find happiness by responding to them.’”
“Amen,” the room replied as one.
“‘The kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours,’” she said as she leaned in to give both the man and the woman a light kiss, “‘now and forever.’”
“Amen.”
She smiled and stepped away from the couple with a slight bow. “Peace be with you.”
“And also with you.”
With a nervous, newlywed giggle, the couple kissed once more before returning to their seats.
Nicholas sat again as Solomon returned to stand behind the altar, the candlelight bathing her in a sweet, haloed glow. She breathed deep and stared with her knowing, soul-searching gaze at her flock, before seeming to stop and rest on him. “‘As the lily among thorns, so is my love,’” she said, a slight smile tugging at her red-painted lips. Holding out her arms as if to embrace, she called to him as if by name, “‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come.’”
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