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Show 114 There were one or two wrinkles he s t i l l needed to work out in his own t e s t i mony. He suspected you needed to be f i rm in your own convictions before you could do a halfway decent job converting other people. He realized that truth wasn't subjective, but the way you looked at truth was, and he wouldn't feel i n t e l l e c t u a l l y honest i f he went right now, actually. The bishop looked at him with sad eyes and asked him i f he had had sexual intercourse. Well, that was the other thing, Lorin explained, feeling his body suddenly hollow out. He had, but only once or twice, and not recently. Once was with a g i r l last f a l l after they'd gone to a movie in Hollywood and afterward gone for a drive in the mountains in her car and gotten lost and run out of gas and f i n a l l y ended up at her apartment at dawn because a police car had picked them up on a private canyon road they had t r i e d to walk down and she had thought he was mad at her. She wasn't a member of the church. The other time was with a g i r l he'd met at a party for some foreign students-actually he'd met her before, but they hadn't come to the party together-and there was some folk singing and things had gotten a l i t t l e rowdy and after everyone had gone they found themselves alone in the house and didn't want to leave i t unguarded before the owner came back because there were some valuable carpets and things in i t and they didn't know whose house i t was. They hadn't been drinking, even though there had been liquor at the party. There was actually a t h i r d time, i f you wanted to count that one, but i t was equivocal, since they'd heard someone coming up the stairs and stopped before he was finished. The long t a l k that had followed s t i l l burned in Lorin's stomach at night sometimes. It ended with the bishop saying i t wouldn't be necessary to explain a l l this to his parents. They would just say that after talking about i t they had decided Lorin didn't feel ready for a mission yet. They |