Covet Thy Neighbor

by L. A. Witt

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I brought the needle up again. “Just finished his fourth piece last month.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep. All right, we’re doing this for real now.”

  “Ready.”

  I leaned a little closer, held his skin tight with my left hand, and pressed the needle to the uppermost corner of the cross. He gasped again, tensed, and I thought he might’ve come as close to cursing as he was capable of, but he didn’t tell me to stop.

  So I kept going.

  I’d put on my share of religious designs. Everything from tiny pentagrams to graphic depictions of the Crucifixion to quotes from the Bhagavad Gita. Just three weeks ago, I’d done a back piece of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Tattoo artists didn’t last long if they refused designs of religious significance.

  But this was different. Surreal. Like I was literally writing in blood the reasons I couldn’t put my hands on him except like this, wrapped in latex and in the name of art and spirituality. The Scripture the tattoo referenced—and damn if I could remember what those verses were—might as well have been Seth Wheeler, thou shalt not.

  I continued down the left side of the cross, nearing the first corner. My eyes flicked toward the names and numbers on either side of it, and I told myself it was just to make sure I wasn’t smearing it with my other hand. Not because I was racking my brain trying to remember what they really meant. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  Darren jumped, grunting quietly.

  “Doing okay?”

  He nodded.

  I put my left hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “Still breathing?”

  He released a long breath, then pulled in another. “Yeah. Still breathing.”

  “Keep doing that,” I said. “Helps with that whole not passing out thing.”

  He laughed. “You don’t say.”

  “Handling the pain all right?”

  “It’s, um, taking some getting used to, but I think I can handle it.”

  “You’re doing fine so far. If you couldn’t handle it, I think we’d have stopped already.” I dipped the needle again. “So, out of curiosity, what made you become a minister?”

  “What made you become a tattoo artist?”

  I furrowed my brow at the back of his head. “I… it just seemed like what I was good at.”

  He looked over his shoulder as much as he could without moving. “Like you’d found your calling?”

  “Yeah, I… I guess.” I continued with the left branch of the cross.

  “Same deal,” he said. “I did some missionary work when I was younger, and by the time I came back I—” He gasped.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Wow.” He slowly relaxed. “Must’ve hit a nerve or something.”

  “Yeah, there’s a few of those back here.”

  He laughed. “Very funny.”

  “So by the time you came back…?”

  “Right,” he said as I continued working on the tattoo. “I guess I just knew what I was put here to do.”

  After I’d dabbed away some excess ink with a paper towel, I continued working my way down the underside of the cross’s left branch, inching toward the vertical piece. Leaning in close, I watched carefully to be sure I made the corner clean and sharp. Once I was satisfied with that and had begun the vertical line, I said, “You ever question what you’re doing? Or rather, what you believe in?”

  Darren was silent. I thought I might’ve struck a nerve, and not with the tattoo needle this time. I kept working, and he didn’t flinch as the needle touched his skin.

  “Yes.” It had been so long since I’d asked, the answer seemed to come out of the blue. Darren turned his head a little so I could see his face in profile. “I do question what I’m doing and what I believe in.”

  I dipped the needle again. “But you still believe.”

  “I do.”

  Silence fell again. I made it all the way down to the bottom corner of the cross’s vertical branch before either of us broke that silence.

  When he spoke again, his voice didn’t startle me as much as the words.

  “You don’t talk about your family much.”

  I winced. “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Touchy subject?”

  “Just a bit.”

  “Do you mind if I ask?” His voice was softer. “If you don’t want to discuss it, that’s fine. I’m just curious.”

  Seemed only fair, I supposed. Especially if I ever expected him to understand why things like this cross I was tracing kept me at bay. Well, aside from those times when lust got the best of both of us. And if it got his mind off the pain, then….

  I focused on the edge of the cross, keeping the line straight and sharp. “I haven’t spoken to my family in years. Not since right before I dropped out of college.”

  “What happened?”

  I moistened my lips. “My family has never been accepting of people being gay. I’ve known that since I was a kid, but I’ve also known since I was a teenager that I was gay.” I paused to dab away some more excess ink. “Kept dating girls just to keep up appearances, but I knew.”

  “Did anyone else know?”

  “Michael. My best friend. His family went to the same church I did, so he knew how scared I was of the secret getting out. Actually, he’s here in Tucker Springs now.” I dipped the needle in the ink cup again. “Runs the acupuncture clinic across the street.”

  “Must be nice, having an old friend nearby.”

  “When you can’t go back to your hometown? You’d better believe it.” I lifted the gun away, and tilted my neck and rolled my shoulders to pull some stiffness loose, pretending that stiffness was just from working, not the subject matter. “Anyway, so he knew, but no one else did. And he was also the only one who knew that by my senior year, I was a closeted atheist too. I just… I didn’t believe anymore. I couldn’t. No matter how much I wanted to.”

  I dreaded the barrage of you need to pray more and you have to have faith that always came from believers. But it didn’t come.

  “So what happened?” he asked softly.

  I started the tattoo again, turning the bottom left corner and working on the lowest horizontal line. “After I left for college—after I came to Tucker Springs—my parents…. God. Every time I talked to them, they kept asking if I’d met a nice girl yet. You know, dropping hints about wanting me to settle down and get married as soon as possible.”

  “Ugh, that’s aggravating.”

  “Seriously. Anyway, I was just starting my junior year in college, and decided I couldn’t keep lying anymore. So I called my mom.” That familiar prickle down my spine raced some equally familiar nausea upward. “And I told her.”

  “And how did that go?”

  “Badly.” The word came out as a hollow whisper because I just couldn’t put any more energy into it than that. The whole thing had happened years ago, and it still felt fresh and raw every time I talked about it.

  “Have you spoken to any of them? Since then, I mean?”

  “My older brother and I tried to get back in touch a few years ago.” I swallowed. “Exchanged a few emails, talked on the phone once. But….” I dabbed at some more ink on his skin. “We just couldn’t reconnect.”

  “That’s a shame,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah. But what can you do?”

  He turned his head a little, probably just enough to bring me into his peripheral vision. “You must miss them.”

  “After what they put me through? No. I can’t say I do.”

  He was quiet but kept his head turned, and I focused as intently as I could on continuing his tattoo, hoping he’d let the subject drop. I’d heard enough They’re your family and You have to try to resolve things with them or you’ll regret it someday to last me until the day I died.

  I cringed when he started to speak, but all he said was, “So, um, how does it look?”

  My shoulders dropped as I rel
eased my breath. “It’s, um, good. It looks good. It’ll be better once it’s healed, but….”

  Silence. Again.

  Darren faced forward again and cleared his throat. “So what’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever tattooed on someone?”

  “The weirdest?” I laughed, hoping my relief wasn’t obvious, and pressed the needle to his skin again. “Oh, there’ve been some strange ones.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, I had a guy ask me to tattoo his new girlfriend’s name over his ex-wife’s. One elaborate design right over the top of the old one.”

  “That’s the weirdest one?”

  “No.” I carefully added a little sharpness to one of the cross’s corners. “The weirdest was when he came back two years later and wanted me to ink over that one with another woman’s name.”

  “Wow.” Darren chuckled. “I can’t decide if he’s indecisive or too quick to commit.”

  “Little from column A, little from column B….” Satisfied the corner was as sharp as it was going to get, I started on the horizontal line of the right branch. “And then there was the girl who wanted a tramp stamp that said Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.”

  “You’re serious.” He turned his head again, glancing at me. “Someone got that tattooed on. Permanently.”

  “I swear on my life, it’s true.”

  “Wow.” Darren laughed. “There are some strange people in this world.”

  “Agreed.”

  We kept the conversation on light, comfortable subjects. As long as we talked, the pain didn’t seem to bother him all that much—though I did hit a sensitive spot now and then—and as long as we didn’t go back to the topic of religion, I didn’t have to think too much about the design and the text I was drawing.

  About an hour and a half later, I was finished. I cleaned off the tattoo and had him take a look at it. As I bandaged it, I carefully smoothed the tape, making sure there were no wrinkles or puckering that might get uncomfortable, which was in no way an excuse to run my fingers, gloved or otherwise, across his skin.

  “Okay, you’re done.” I got up and peeled off my gloves. “How does it feel?”

  “Burns a bit.” He stood. As he put on his shirt, he said, “You were right, it wasn’t that bad. Just really”—he locked eyes with mine—“intense.”

  “Yeah. They sometimes are.” I broke eye contact and fumbled for one of the preprinted instruction cards. “Take the bandages off in a few hours. Don’t let it dry out.” I handed him the card. “Just follow the instructions on here and it’ll heal in about a week.”

  “Will do.” He scanned the card and then slipped it into his back pocket. “Do you need a hand with anything in here?”

  “No, no, I’ve got it.” I nodded toward my workstation. “Just need to clean that up. Won’t take but ten minutes.” I smiled. “I’ve got it.”

  “Okay. Well.” He extended his hand. “Thanks again.”

  “Anytime.” I shook his hand, shivering when our palms met without the latex in between. “If you want another one, you know where to find me.”

  He laughed. “We’ll see about that.”

  We both glanced down, and I realized we hadn’t let go of each other’s hands yet. We quickly released our grasps and pulled our hands back.

  “Anyway.” He cleared his throat, a little bit of color blooming in his cheeks. “I should call it a night. Are you sure you don’t need any help here?”

  “No, no, I’m fine.” I nodded toward the door. “You go ahead.”

  “All right. Have a good one.”

  “You too.”

  He paused in the doorway. “Hey, you mentioned a while back that you’d be willing to show me around some of the trails. Up in the mountains. Is that offer still on the table?”

  “Um, well….” It was tempting, of course, but every time we breathed the same air, I was less and less sure where I stood with him, or if there were signals I should’ve been reading, or signals I was unintentionally giving off.

  Darren smiled. “Just friends, Seth. I’m not asking you out.”

  “No, of course not.” I gave a quiet laugh to hide the mixture of relief and disappointment. “I was just trying to think which trails are worth checking out this time of year. What’s your schedule like this weekend?”

  “Busy, as always.”

  “Yeah, same here.” I spun my key ring on my finger to give my hand something to do. “Monday?”

  “Monday works,” he said with a nod.

  “Cool. Meet me—well, I guess just come by my place Monday morning.”

  “Can you give me your address?” he deadpanned. “Not quite sure I remember how to get there.”

  “Smartass,” I muttered. “How does eight sound?”

  “I’ll be there.” He took another step and was outside the shop. “Have a good night, Seth.”

  “You too.”

  I dead-bolted the door behind him. For the next ten minutes or so, I focused on cleaning up my workstation. Once everything was put away, I flicked off the lights, locked the shop, and went upstairs. As I stopped in front of my apartment door, the knowledge that Darren was close by—just on the other side of that door a few feet away—prickled from the base of my spine all the way up to my scalp.

  I imagined myself walking across the hall, knocking on his door, and asking if he wanted a hand with putting some lotion on that tattoo. And as long as I was back there….

  No. I actually wasn’t in the mood for that. When the hell was I of all people not in the mood for sex? Tonight, apparently. And yet I was still tempted to go over there. Not to suggest we get into bed, though. I just… I just wanted to be in the same room with him.

  And I also wanted to be on the opposite side of the planet from him. I wanted Monday to get here so we could go hiking, and I hoped to hell a meteor landed in Tucker Springs on Sunday night so I wouldn’t have to face a trail and a full day alone with him.

  Fuck, I didn’t know what I wanted or why.

  Shaking my head, I let myself into my apartment. I closed the door and closed my eyes. Tonight had been weirder than any of the evenings we’d spent together, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. On what it was that had left me more unsettled than any other time with him.

  Every time I was anywhere near him, my world made a little less sense. I wasn’t sure what to make of a gay minister who smoked pot, had the occasional one-night stand, and now had a tattoo. He flew right in the goddamned face of everything that had fucked up my life a few years ago, and he contradicted every reason I’d kept Christians at arm’s length out of self-preservation. Every reason I kept him at arm’s length.

  And my mind kept wandering back to that tattoo. To the simple words and numbers above a not-so-simple filigreed cross: Matthew 5:44. Mark 12:31.

  I knew those verses, damn it. I knew them. But no matter how much I ran through all the Scripture I still had memorized—and probably would until the day I died—I couldn’t pull up those two.

  Finally I went to one of my bookcases in the living room and pulled the dusty black Bible out from between the Apocrypha and the Qur’an.

  I thumbed through it to the book of Matthew and quickly found the chapter and verse from Darren’s tattoo, 5:44. “But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’”

  Then I turned to Mark and found 12:31. “The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

  My heart dropped into my feet. I closed the book, set it on the coffee table, and pushed it as far from me as I could. Until my fingertips could barely touch it, never mind put enough pressure on it to gain any more distance. Then I sat back on the couch and just stared at it.

  Stanley hopped up on the couch beside me. I petted him as he kneaded the cushion and purred, but I still stared at that damned book.

  No wonder I remembered those chapters and verses. They’d clicked in my head, but some subconscious
barrier had kept me from joining them to the actual words because I knew them, I knew them well, and it wasn’t a memory I could face while I was inking Darren. Or even while I was in the same room with him.

  “It says ‘love thy neighbor,’ Mom. It doesn’t say ‘thy straight and approved neighbor.’”

  “Don’t you dare throw Scripture at me, Seth.”

  “Why the hell not? And isn’t there something in there about ‘judge not lest ye be judged’?”

  “It also says to love thy enemy. And I do. But I won’t welcome my enemy into my home.”

  “I’m not your enemy. I’m your son.”

  “Not anymore.”

  And then there was that click, and to this day, the empty silence on the other end of the phone line still rang in my ears.

  I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. Of all the Scripture he could have chosen, he’d picked those two. Of course there’d been dozens of verses thrown around during that long, hellish phone call, any one of which would have stung. But that last one in particular cut straight to the bone.

  A sick feeling settled over me, bringing cold sweat to surface above my collar. The venom and disgust from my parents and pastor—all in the name of love and salvation, they’d said—still burned under my skin like it had from the moment I’d whispered the words that had turned my life on its ass:

  “Mom, I’m gay.”

  And somewhere in the thick of things, in the heat of a shouting match over my soul and sexuality, I’d let it slip I was also an atheist.

  Apostate. Abomination. Enemy.

  What they called love… wasn’t. They hated too much about me to love me. And all because of their interpretation of the Bible and their beliefs about what God wanted.

  I slowly turned my head toward the shared wall between my apartment and Darren’s. He wasn’t like them. He wore his faith on his sleeve and now on his skin, but I’d never heard a judgmental word slip past his lips. He accepted his own imperfections. He’d smoked with the sinner like Jesus had hung out with the whores.

  He was the epitome of a Christian. And the Scripture I’d written on his back was the very foundation of the type of Christianity that wouldn’t have cast me out. Maybe that meant it wasn’t fair to put every Christian in the same column. I couldn’t really lump them all together when the ones who’d hurt me weren’t even playing by their own damned rules.