Between Amen & Sin {MM Romance}

Finike Inga woke up at 5:30 every morning not because God called him but because the seminary bell did, and the difference between those two things was something he'd stopped examining because examining it led to conclusions he wasn't ready to have.

He dressed in dark attires, the way he always did, dark trousers, dark shirt, clerical collar that he fastened with the automatic efficiency of three years of practice, and he looked at himself in the small mirror above the dormitory sink and saw exactly what he was supposed to look like, which was a young man on his way to God, and felt exactly what he always felt when he looked at that reflection, which was the exhaustion of wearing a costume that fit perfectly and belonged to someone else entirely.

Morning prayer was at 5:45 in the seminary chapel, and Finike was always on time, third pew from the front, hands clasped, eyes forward, lips moving through the responses with the accuracy of a man who'd memorized every word and meant approximately none of them.

Brother Aldous led the service with the enthusiasm of someone who'd never once in his life wanted something he wasn't supposed to want, and the 20 other students around Finike participated with varying degrees of conviction, and outside the chapel windows Tow City was doing its slow September thing, the city waking up around the seminary with the indifferent aliveness of a place that didn't know or care what happened inside these walls.

After morning prayer came breakfast, and after breakfast came the first lecture of the day, and after the first lecture came independent study, and after independent study came afternoon lectures, and after afternoon lectures came evening prayer, and after evening prayer came dinner, and after dinner came the kind of silence that passed for rest in a place where even the quiet had a prescribed shape, and then it started again, and it had been starting again every day for three years and it would keep starting again for however many years it took for Finike Inga to become whatever his father had decided he was supposed to become.

This was his life. This was the container it had been poured into, carefully and deliberately and without his meaningful input, and he lived inside it with the neatness of someone who'd learned that fighting the shape of a container was considerably more exhausting than simply occupying it.

He was 23 years old and he was tired in a way that sleep didn't fix.

Brother Fenn caught up with him after breakfast on a Thursday morning in the 3rd week of September, falling into step beside him in the corridor with the ease of someone who'd been doing exactly that for three years and had earned the right to it.

"You were somewhere else during prayer again," Brother Fenn said.

"I said all the responses," Finike said.

"You said them in the right places," Brother Fenn said. "That's not the same thing and you know it." He looked sideways at Finike with the expression he used when he was going to say something true and wanted to make sure Finike was ready for it. "What's going on?"

"Nothing's going on," Finike said, which was true in the sense that nothing had happened and false in the sense that something had been building for three years and was becoming increasingly difficult to contain in a body that was getting tired of containing it.

"Your father called Brother Aldous yesterday," Brother Fenn said.

Finike's stride didn't change. "About what?"

"About you and your progress. About whether you're demonstrating sufficient commitment to the vocation." Brother Fenn paused. "Brother Aldous told him you were exemplary."

"Then there's no problem," Finike said.

"Finike." Brother Fenn stopped walking, and Finike stopped too because 3 years of friendship had trained him to respond to that specific tone. They were in the corridor outside the theology library, stone walls and high windows and the smell of old books bleeding under the door, and Brother Fenn was looking at him with the direct kindness that was his most consistent quality. "You can talk to me. You know that."

"I know," Finike said, and meant it, and said nothing else, because the things that needed saying were things he hadn't found words for yet, and finding words for them felt like the first step toward a door he wasn't sure he was ready to open.

Brother Fenn looked at him for a moment and then nodded, accepting the silence the way he always did, without pressure and without withdrawal, and they walked to the theology library and sat across from each other at the study table they'd shared for 3 years and opened books they both needed to read, and the morning did its slow institutional thing around them.

Finike stared at the page in front of him and thought about his father's phone call and about exemplary and about the loneliness of being praised for something you weren't actually doing.

He'd been ten years old the first time he understood that his father's house had two faces.

The public face was the one Tow City knew, the one that appeared on television and at council meetings and at the front of St. Aldric's church every Sunday morning, Dr. Melody Inga in his good suit with his sincere eyes and his carefully measured words about faith and community and the responsibilities of a righteous life. That face was warm and entirely convincing, and Tow City believed it completely because Tow City had no reason not to and because Dr. Melody Inga was very good at being believed.

The private face was the one that came home. It wasn't dramatic, that was the thing. It wasn't the kind of thing that left visible evidence or made enough noise to travel beyond the walls of the house on Creston Avenue. It was quieter than that and in some ways worse for its quietness, the way his father's voice dropped half a register when the front door closed, the way his mother's shoulders changed shape the moment he entered a room, the way Becca had learned before Finike had to read the weather of their father's mood from the sound of his footsteps in the hallway and adjust accordingly.

The adjustments were small and constant and exhausting, and Finike had grown up making them so automatically that for a long time he hadn't understood they were adjustments at all, had thought that was simply what family felt like, until he'd spent a weekend at a school friend's house at 12 years old and sat at their dinner table and watched a family talk to each other without reading the room first, and understood with a clarity that had taken years to fully process that what happened in his house wasn't normal. It was managed with survival.

His mother survived it with silence and with a grace that Finike had spent years confusing with contentment until he was old enough to understand the difference between a woman at peace and a woman who'd made peace with something that should never have required making peace with.

His sister Becca survived it with a practicality that Finike had always admired and occasionally found heartbreaking, the ability to assess a situation and respond to its reality rather than its surface, which was a skill their father had inadvertently taught them both and which served Becca considerably better than it served Finike, who had the same skill and none of Becca's capacity to use it without feeling everything it revealed.

Finike survived it by being exactly what his father needed him to be, which was quiet, obedient, undemanding, and by keeping the parts of himself that didn't fit that description in a room with the door closed, and by praying every night from the age of 16 that God would either change what was in that room or tell him what to do with it, and by receiving no answer to that prayer for 7 years and counting.

The seminary had been his father's solution to a problem his father didn't fully understand, and Finike had gone to it because going was easier than the alternative, and because part of him had believed, at 20, that maybe structure and discipline and the daily rhythm of religious life would do what 7 years of prayer hadn't, would quiet the thing in the closed room or give it somewhere acceptable to go.

It hadn't. It had given it three more years of silence to grow in, and the room was considerably louder now than it had been at twenty, and Finike was tired in the way of someone who'd been holding a door closed for a very long time and whose arms were giving out.

The empty shopfront across the street from the seminary had been vacant for 2 years, and Finike had looked at it from his dormitory window enough times that its emptiness had become part of the landscape of his daily life, one of those unremarkable constants that you stopped seeing because seeing required noticing and noticing required attention and attention was a resource he conserved carefully.

He noticed it on a Monday morning in the 3rd week of September because it wasn't empty anymore. A van was parked outside and two men were carrying equipment through the door.

There was a sign in the window that hadn't been there on Friday, clean black lettering on white card that said Blonc Ink - Opening Soon and that Finike read three times before he understood what it meant and once more after he understood, because understanding it and accepting its implications were two different things.

A tattoo parlor, opening across the street from St. Aldric's Seminary. He thought about Brother Aldous finding out, which was going to happen before the day was over because Brother Aldous found out everything that happened within a two street radius of the seminary and had opinions about all of it, and he thought about his father finding out, which was going to happen shortly after Brother Aldous because Brother Aldous and Dr. Melody Inga had the kind of relationship that involved regular phone calls, and he thought about what his father's face would do when he heard the words tattoo parlor and next door in the same sentence.

He thought about all of that and then he thought about the sign in the window and the clean black lettering and the name on it, which was Blonc Ink and which belonged to someone, and he looked at the van and the men carrying equipment and tried to identify which one might be the person the sign belonged to, and couldn't, and went to his first lecture of the day with the sign still in his mind in a way that he told himself was just curiosity and that he was already beginning to suspect was something else.

He was right to suspect it. He just didn't know yet how right.

Brother Aldous raised the subject at dinner that evening with the energy of a man who'd been waiting all day for an appropriate audience.

"A tattoo establishment," he said, passing the bread with the expression of someone passing a verdict. "On St. Aldric's Street, directly across from this seminary."

"I saw the sign," Brother Fenn said neutrally.

"The proximity alone is a statement," Brother Aldous said. "Whether intentional or not."

"A statement about what?" Brother Fenn asked, with the pleasant tone he used when he intended to make Brother Aldous work for his conclusions.

"About the direction this city is moving," Brother Aldous said. "About the values being normalized in direct sight of a house of religious education."

"Tattoos have been practiced across human cultures for thousands of years," Brother Fenn said. "Several of them have deeply religious cultures."

Brother Aldous looked at him. "This is Tow City, Brother Fenn, not a deeply religious culture of several thousand years ago."

Finike ate his dinner and said nothing and listened to the conversation move around him and thought about clean black lettering and a name he hadn't attached to a person yet, and felt something he couldn't immediately identify sitting in his chest where the familiar exhaustion usually lived, something that was different from the exhaustion, lighter and less certain and considerably more unsettling.

He recognized it, eventually, walking back to his dormitory after dinner with the Tow City evening coming through the seminary's narrow windows in strips of fading gold.

It was anticipation. He hadn't felt it in three years, and its return was so unexpected that he stood in the corridor outside his dormitory room for a moment just to make sure he was identifying it correctly, and he was, and he went into his room and sat on his bed and looked at the wall across from him and thought about what he was anticipating and whether he was ready for it and concluded that ready wasn't the point, because ready was a luxury that the next chapter of his life apparently wasn't offering.

He'd find out who Blonc Ink belonged to soon enough. He just didn't know yet that finding out was going to be the last ordinary thing he did for a very long time.

He met Zinc Blonc on a Friday afternoon, and it happened the way things happened that you hadn't planned and couldn't have prevented, which was simply and completely and without any of the ceremony the moment deserved.

Finike was coming back from the theology library with three books and his mind on the essay due Sunday, walking along the narrow street between the seminary and the row of shopfronts, and the door of Blonc Ink opened and a man came out and they nearly collided with a suddenness that sent Finike's books scattering across the cobblestones.

The man caught his arm before he lost his balance entirely, reflexively and firmly, and then crouched immediately to help gather the books, and Finike crouched too, and they reached for the same book at the same moment and their hands almost touched and both of them went still for a half second that was longer than a half second, and then the man picked up the book and handed it to Finike and they both stood up and looked at each other.

He was tall, broad shouldered, with dark hair, darker eyes and tattoos covering both arms from wrist to shoulder, continuing up his neck in patterns that Finike's eyes wanted to follow and couldn't in good conscience, and he was looking at Finike with a directness that was entirely without aggression, just a man paying full attention, and the full attention of those dark eyes at that proximity did something to Finike's ability to form sentences that he was going to need some time to recover from.

"Sorry," the man said, and his voice was low and even and completely unhurried. "I didn't see you coming."

"It was my fault," Finike said. "I wasn't watching where I was going."

The man looked at him for a moment, at the clerical collar and the theology books and probably at whatever his face was doing that he couldn't currently control, and said, "You're from next door."

"St. Aldric's," Finike said. "Yes."

"Zinc Blonc," the man said, and extended his hand.

Finike took it. "Finike Inga."

The handshake was brief, warm and Zinc's grip was certain in the way that all his movements seemed certain, and when they released Finike was aware of the absence of contact in a way that was completely disproportionate to a handshake that had lasted three seconds.

Zinc looked at him, and something moved in his expression when he heard the name, brief and unreadable and gone before Finike could identify it. "Inga," he said. "As in Dr. Melody Inga?"

"He's my father," Finike said, and felt the familiar closing of something in his chest when he said it, the door shutting on the room.

"Hmmm," Zinc said, and the sound was neutral and containing something Finike couldn't place, and then he looked at the books in Finike's arms and at the seminary building behind him and back at Finike's face and said, "Welcome to the street. Even if you've been here longer than I have."

"You grew up in Tow City?" Finike asked, because the observation had implied it and because asking meant the conversation continued and he wasn't ready for it not to.

"Born here," Zinc said. "I left and came back." He said it simply, without elaboration, and his eyes were steady on Finike's face in a way that made Finike feel simultaneously visible and safe, which was a combination he had no prior experience of and no framework for. "You should get back to your books."

"Yes," Finike said, and didn't move.

Zinc looked at him for a moment with something in his expression that was warm, almost amused and entirely too perceptive, and then he said, "I'll see you around, Finike Inga," and went back inside, and the door of Blonc Ink closed behind him with a soft finality that Finike stood in front of for three seconds too long before turning and walking back to the seminary with his books and his racing heart and the sensation of something beginning that he couldn't stop and wasn't sure he wanted to.

He went to evening prayer and said the responses in the right places and meant none of them, and afterward he sat in the chapel in the third pew from the front in the quiet that followed the service and looked at the altar and said the most honest prayer he'd managed in three years, which wasn't words exactly, more of an acknowledgment, a recognition that the door to the room had developed a crack and that the crack had a name and that the name was Zinc Blonc and that nothing, starting from this Friday afternoon in September, was going to be the same as it had been before.

He didn't know if that was an answer to the prayer he'd been saying since he was sixteen. He thought, sitting in the empty chapel with the candles doing their small faithful work around him, that it might be something better than an answer.

It might be the truth and the truth, whatever it cost, was the one thing three years of seminary life hadn't managed to pray out of him.