Mercedes is sinking like a stone at the (reservoir) wrote in repose,
Re: Sunday Service: Mercy/Shiloh
Mercy could have argued until the sun went down, bleeding pinks and oranges through the swaying boughs of leaves, and then came back up again. See, Mercy just liked to argue. He was good at it. For the record, wolves didn’t care if you were smarter than them but they hated it when you could out-argue them. Mercy would have liked the pastor better if he got some sort of confirmation that neither of them fell into the illusive Good Boy category. Mercy hadn’t feared but he had found comfort in being a child of God. With as much staunch refusal to people-please as he lived with on the day-to-day, being able to preen under the hand of God laying Benedicts on one’s brow was a light in a tunnel of dark, dark irony.
“I like passion,” he said seriously, contemplating the cigarette and then glancing towards the parking lot. The last stragglers of the congregation had filed out one after another, even the reluctant lingerers who’d been hoping that the handsome young pastor would stop talking to the dark-skinned man with dirty hands. “They’ve got a lot of that. Do you have passion, Leo?”
Mercy punctuated the question by extending the cigarette pack towards the man, a carefully-inscrutable expression on his face that did not read one way or the other towards whether he was serious, or seriously expectant. He was used to being looked at like a problem, and found it a bonus that the other man seemed to find some amusement in it. It was a novel change.
“I’m interested to know what you think I have the build for, if not a pretty Catholic dress.”