“No. I saw their faces. They were horrified. I’m sure they regretted sharing their house with me. With the devil’s spawn. That was Jimmy. But I ran away again because I didn’t want Jimmy to find me again. I kept their name because it was legal and I had plenty of identification to prove it. It was the only decent name I ever had.”
Kayla had trouble accepting his story. On so many levels.
Sighing, her heart aching for the younger Jim, she asked, “What happened next? Where did you go? What did you do? How old were you?”
“Seventeen. I kept moving around. After I turned eighteen, I moved to a mid-sized town and got a job as a cook in a fast food joint. That helped. I rented a cheap room in a boarding house.”
“And then?”
He suddenly took her hand in his. Startled at the firm pressure after how limp and sad it was in her hand, she jumped at the sudden surge of energy. “You have to understand one thing: his blood flows through me. I witnessed his wickedness. I am his son.”
“You didn’t abuse boys. Is this the reason for your bizarre reaction to sex with me?”
“No.”
“Then, why?”
He pushed her away. He needed some space to think. She gave it to him. Moving to the sofa, she curled her legs under her like a lamb. Eventually, Jim nodded as if he thought of something. “I left the Zavarians and lived several places during that year. I did things I’m not proud of to survive… things that weren’t right or decent. Things that Jimmy would have approved of, being the worm of depravity that he was. I passed my high school equivalency test. I have a smart brain and I tend to retain anything I read. Thank goodness, all my reading and memorization came easy for me so I enrolled in community college. I took all kinds of classes because I liked to constantly challenge myself. I learned that I loved school and having a strict schedule. I didn’t have one before. It’ll take me years to pay off all the student loans I received. I’ll probably still be paying for them when I retire, but I don’t care. My education probably saved me.”
He deliberately glossed over some significant years. Kayla was quiet as he continued weaving a path through his past and deciding what to say to her.
“You always wanted to become a pastor?”
“No. Not really, no. When I transferred to a four-year university, I wrangled a decent scholarship to a private school. I knew very little about it, but I accepted their offer of free money and residence. It turned out to be a Christian college. I had to take mandatory classes in religion in order to graduate. That’s when my decision to pursue religion as a major really started to percolate. It scared me at first. My heart was smitten on pursuing theology. My past clashed with my strong desire to become more chaste. The magnetic pull I felt about divinity, however, won out in the end. I taught myself to see Jimmy as the distorted and perverted maggot he truly was. A man whose only purpose in life was seeking his own gains and indulging his perversions. In God, I found the peace and light I sought. I started to feel good things I never felt before. I still worry that my introduction was so skewed, and my path to becoming a pastor so crooked, that I could go down the wrong path again someday.”
“Hence why you strive so hard for perfection.”
“Striving,” he said as he shrugged his shoulders, “is not succeeding.”
“You have succeeded, Jim. Once you started your religious studies, I bet your mind devoured all the information you could find.”
“Yes. I did. All the stuff that Jimmy preached was distorted and wrong, but in a context that was truthful and right, I could not get enough of it. I wanted to learn everything about God to banish everything Jimmy told me. Does that make sense?”
“Of course. Yes.”
“I had one professor who took me under her wing. She valued my crazy intensity and she mentored me. She gave me a reading list and I read them all. We connected in our discussions. That was new for me. She was my primary inspiration to get my Master’s in divinity. I was stunned when she first suggested it. Me? A pastor? The son of a cult leader/grifter/pedophile? But of course, I never told her my secret. My discomfort in that secret was only accompanied by a sick perversion in keeping it a secret. The knowledge of it was tempting at times, and I thought about being the best version of that.”
“What you’ve done is nothing less than admirable. You shouldn’t be ashamed of what Jimmy did. He’s nothing like you.”
He sucked in a sharp breath. “But there’s more.”
“Okay.” She tried to remain soft and gentle as she squirmed and asked, “What more?”
“During the time between when I left the Zavarians, and started divinity school, I did some bad things…”
“Okay. What things?” Fear rippled through her spine for the first time. Weariness tinged her voice. Then she shook it off. She wasn’t wrong about Jim. He was no creep or pervert. He wasn’t Jimmy.
“I made a vow, once I chose my path, that I would never do those things again. I would be good and decent like the Zavarians and my professor. Like a pastor should be. Not what I was in the past. I failed once, but I knew I could be better than that. I invested myself into becoming the best version I could be. I studied hard and earned the best grades and nearly perfect scores. I took a vow of chastity until
