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AS I watched, his expression softened, the fear and the shock replaced by a different emotion. He kept his eyes on mine and leaned forward ever so slightly and then hesitated. If I hadn’t been watching him so intently, I wouldn’t have noticed he had moved at all. When I didn’t punch, scream, or even back away, he leaned in a little closer—an unspoken question in his eyes.
Do you feel it too?
I felt his warm breath on my face; he was so damn close. My heart rate accelerated wildly, and I could hear the blood pounding in my ears. He whispered, almost too softly for me to hear.
“Please… please don’t hate me.”
Then, in the lightest of touches, soft but unyielding, his lips pressed against mine. My eyes closed, and I felt a rush of emotion, sexual tension, something, building within me. His mouth molded over the contours of my lips. The kiss was delicate, sweet, and lingered just long enough to make me want more. I had waited my whole life for my first kiss, and while it wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured it in my youth, it was perfect. His lips were warm and smooth as they moved against mine, causing a swelling tension in my stomach. The rain continued to pound the tree house roof as my arms nearly ached to go around him. I was scared to break the spell that had enveloped us. It was everything a boy’s first kiss should be.
Only it wasn’t with a girl.
He pulled back slowly, almost reluctantly, probably waiting for me to bolt or call him names. When I did neither, his face broke into a hesitant, shy smile and he ran one hand through his unruly, damp hair. The other was still to the side of my legs, using it to prop himself up with a forced casual air. We were so close that his body heat radiated against my skin. Still trembling slightly, from fear or excitement, I was too shocked to move. This was absolutely surreal, like my fantasies had all come true in an instant. I really thought humans would land on Mars before Jamie and I would be kissing. I was thrilled but terrified. Where the hell do we go from here?
It was also the best and the worst thing that could have happened.
He can’t feel the same way about me that I feel about him, can he?
“I’ve wanted to do that for such a long time,” he whispered, leaning back on his palms, his legs remaining crossed in front of him as he sat facing me. I continued to lean back against the wall of our sanctuary. His body heat against my cool, damp skin made me shiver, or maybe it was his proximity. I just sat watching him. Somehow, incredibly, I knew he was the same person he had been that morning, but it seemed like the whole dynamic of our relationship had shifted with that one kiss. I suddenly felt shy, almost awkward, with him.
“I had no idea,” I said, looking down at my hands, and then added, “I thought it was just me.” His sharp intake of breath caused me to look up, and I watched as his face brightened briefly into a radiant smile. My heart swelled, and in that moment the only thing that existed was him. He doesn’t hate me. He doesn’t think I’m some sick, perverted freak. He feels the same way I do. The question now becomes, what will we do? “I thought I was the abomination,” I murmured under my breath.
“Is that why you’ve been so upset? Because of what the preacher said in church last Sunday?” As I nodded, he ran his hand through his damp hair again. It was a nervous gesture, something he did when he had a lot on his mind. “If I’d known, I would have told Mama that you were sick so you wouldn’t have had to go. I hate that his sermon upset you.”
Taking a deep breath, I tried searching his face for answers. I had no other choice but to talk about how I felt about him, and I didn’t know where the conversation might lead. For the first time since I’d known him, a whole different set of possibilities opened for us. The conversation was going to be harder because I didn’t know how to frame the question I wanted to ask him. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to hear his answer. I wasn’t a very religious person, and the Schreibers weren’t church people. I didn’t have the frame of reference I needed to interpret the sermon. Mrs. Mayfield thought everyone should go every Sunday, and by dragging me along when I stayed over, she felt like she was helping to save my soul. Jamie, however, had been attending his entire life. Pastor Moore had even baptized him in that church. Surely, Jamie was more of an expert on religion and God than I was.
“Do you think he’s right?” I asked Jamie in almost a whisper, averting my gaze to focus on a knot in the old floorboard, suddenly unable to look him in the eye. “Are we…. Is it… is it wrong, the way I feel about you?”
He rose up on his knees, crawled over, and turned to sit next to me against the rough wall; he tossed a broken action figure out of his way before leaning back against the wall. We were side by side, his arm brushing mine casually, my breath catching in my throat at the light contact. I leaned toward him, resting my head on his shoulder. It was strange that the gesture felt so natural to me. Just an hour before, the thought of showing this kind of affection for him had terrified me. As it was, my heart rate sped because again, he was so close.
“I don’t know, Brian,” he whispered again, so softly into my hair that it seemed that he was almost afraid to say it out loud. His breath caused an eruption of goose bumps on my cold, damp skin. “I can’t believe that how I feel about you is wrong. Just being with you like this, knowing that I’m not alone, it’s the happiest I’ve been in a long time. I don’t know how that can be wrong. But the Bible references that the preacher used seemed pretty clear. My question is, if God hates gay people and God made us, why would He make people He hated? I thought God was supposed to love everybody? Is this a test? Why me? Why you?” I sat there, contemplating his questions. My own questions were exactly the same. I wondered if maybe other boys had those same difficulties.
Then the feeling that had been churning inside me for weeks, the one that had intensified to a fever pitch in the last week, came screaming to the surface.
“I’m scared, Jamie,” I admitted quietly, finally voicing my fear for the first time. Turning his head slightly, he kissed my hair. He was only a few months older than me; he’d already turned seventeen while I was still sixteen. But in that moment, he made me feel safe. He made me feel like the rest of it, the preacher, the hatred, even the word “gay”—none of it mattered. Feeling safe wasn’t something I was used to, so I held on to that feeling for as long as I could.
“Me too,” he whispered back after a moment, wrapping his hand around mine, squeezing it tightly where it lay on my thigh. It was meant to be comforting, but that one gesture, so intimate, made our situation that much more real to me. For some reason, a kiss was one thing, but holding my hand, like we were a couple, was too much for me. No matter how much I wanted him, wanted to be comforted by him, I had never entertained the possibility that it could ever really happen. My attraction for him had just been a sick, dark fantasy I had been trying to push out of my head for a long time. Suddenly, it had all become real.
We were going to go to hell and would be exiled by God if our relationship progressed any further. I couldn’t let that happen—not to him. Jamie was a good and loving person. If anyone deserved to go to heaven when they died, it was him. Suddenly, I had to know if what the preacher said was true or if it was his own warped interpretation. If he were wrong, Jamie and I would be free to be together without fear of damnation. There had to be rules he had to follow; he must have gone to school. Wouldn’t someone know if he wasn’t being truthful?
“I should get home,” I said, standing abruptly, and Jamie’s face filled with hurt, and his eyes remained downcast briefly before he recovered. He thought I was pulling away from him; he had shared this epic moment with me, and he thought I was going to walk away from him. “Jamie, I just need time to think. I never dreamed that you—”
“I understand, Brian, really,” he cut me off midsentence as he stood. I tried not to watch the small bead of sweat rolling down his pale chest as he swiped the wet dust and dirt from the back of his gym shorts. He was going to have to wash those once he got inside, or his mama wa
s going to have a fit. “I know this is a lot to take in. I think we both have some things to think about.”
I couldn’t stand to see that look on his face, lost and defeated. Taking a few calming breaths, I closed my eyes. Then, summoning up every bit of courage that I had, I put my hand on his face and stroked his cheek with my thumb. He looked at me curiously, and on a sudden impulse, I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him to me. Tilting my head slightly, I pressed my lips to his once more. Even though the rain was pounding the roof of the tree house, I distinctly heard him moan into the kiss. I kept my hips away from him so he wouldn’t feel the growing erection in my gym shorts.
This kiss had a slight twinge of hunger, of desperation, to it. Our teeth knocked together a few times in our need to be closer. I cocked my head to the other side, pressing my upper body harder against him, deepening the kiss even further. My mouth opened, and our tongues touched lightly, hesitantly, almost as if we were both scared of it happening. The feeling of his warm, naked skin under my hands drove most of the reason from me, but eventually I did manage to pull away. When we broke apart, we were both panting. I heard his long, low sigh of the word “wow,” and I chuckled quietly before turning for the trapdoor.
I arrived home to an empty house about ten minutes later, and I was thankful. It wasn’t terribly unusual, since Richard kept regular hours at the hospital, and Carolyn had her various causes. She volunteered, reading to the kids at the local elementary school, and sometimes worked at the senior center. She also had errands she ran during the day, so I couldn’t even guess where she’d be right now. I went to my room, stripped out of my wet gym uniform, and tossed it into the nearby hamper. I would have to do a load of laundry; I usually did my own laundry anyway, so it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary, but I didn’t need Carolyn running across my wet gym uniform caked with dirt. Standing there, alone in the confines of my room, naked, letting the gentle breeze from the open window wash over me, I felt a flare of pure sexual need race through me. I started to get hard, my pulse quickening as I thought about the kiss Jamie and I had just shared. I had work to do, however, so I picked up the towel I had grabbed from the linen closet and dried myself off.
I dressed in boxers and a loose pair of shorts, forgoing socks or even a shirt because of the heat. The rain had cooled things off some, but not nearly enough; it was still sweltering and humid in the house. As I headed down the hall to Richard’s office, I wondered if I would find any answers, if anyone had insight into my confusion. Surely people would put that kind of information on the Internet? Could I find anything to justify the attraction Jamie and I feel for each other? What if all I find is the hellfire and damnation the preacher warned us of? Could I give Jamie up? Could I force myself into the life God apparently wants me to lead? Could I live that kind of lie?
Richard’s office wasn’t the opulent space you would expect a doctor to have in his home. He wasn’t pretentious like that, but it was clean, comfortable, and functional. I looked around at the simply decorated office, with its farmland prints and fake silk flowers, and decided this was better. It was more inviting than the magazine-layout-like offices most doctors would have. Richard had never discouraged me from coming into his office, but he’d never exactly encouraged it either, so I felt nervous just being in there. However, it wasn’t the kind of research I would be able to do in the school library. I was sure the school’s computers had something that tracked where we went on the Internet, and I couldn’t guarantee I would ever be alone to search.
Richard, on the other hand, would never have to know.
My palms were sweaty when I sat down in his worn leather chair, jumping slightly when I bumped the desk with my knee and the computer’s desktop appeared. I grabbed the mouse and moved it around the desktop, looking for the Internet browser. I wasn’t a computer whiz, but I was hoping a quick Internet search would give me what I needed. Maybe other people had the same questions Jamie and I had. Better yet, maybe someone had answers to those questions.
After peeking out the window to make sure Carolyn’s car wasn’t in the drive, I brought up the Internet browser. I felt like a criminal as I clicked in the address bar, looked over my shoulder, and typed in the address for a search engine. But what to search for? What did the preacher hate the most? I typed in “gay men” and hit enter. The screen nearly exploded with responses—over fifty-two million of them. I clicked on the first one, absently checking over my shoulder again. I knew there was no one there, but my guilty conscience made me feel like someone was watching. When I turned back to the screen, I couldn’t find the close button fast enough. From every corner of the screen, naked boys and naked men smiled at me from various positions and assorted stages of sex. I clicked the minimize button, paranoid that it could be seen from the second-story window.
I opened another window and went back to the search engine to try something else. That time I typed in “+gay +God,” and got considerably fewer results. Well, thirty-eight million was considerably fewer, but it was still a large number. I scrolled through the results this time and found a whole lot of information. From the kid whose parents sent him to a homosexual rehabilitation center in California and no one ever heard from him again, to the hellfire and damnation I expected, to the fight against allowing gay people to get married. It wasn’t until the third page that I found a site asking why God made people gay. Intrigued, I clicked on it. It was a letter a pastor had written to one of his congregants about the boy being gay. At first, the reverend believed the boy would indeed go to hell, but after he researched the matter using his Bible and other religious and secular resources, he came to a much different conclusion.
He felt that how people understand the Bible stemmed from their background. For example, if your father believed homosexuality was wrong and taught that to you your entire life, you would interpret the Bible in a similar way, because it was what was taught to you. To me, this meant ten different people could read those same passages that Preacher Moore had and come up with ten different meanings from them. Some would agree with how he understood it, and some wouldn’t. The site went on to talk about how this man of God interpreted the Bible on the topic of homosexuality. The story of creation, the story of Sodom, and even the same passages from Romans Pastor Moore had used took on a whole different meaning for him.
So, another religious source believed we weren’t going to hell. That gave me hope. If scholars and religious men can’t agree on the subject, it must not be set in stone. That one small detail made me feel better. Again, I checked out the window to make sure I was still alone before clicking the print button and printing the long explanation for Jamie, because I wasn’t sure if I would be able to relay all the information accurately enough or answer questions he might have on it. I wanted him to see the article for himself. Watching the paper come slowly out of the printer, I had to admit, even just to myself, a sense of relief. After the dozen sheets printed, I grabbed them from the tray and clicked the close button on the browser. It was only then that I remembered the other window that was open. First sneaking yet another glance around and out the window, I reopened the browser, allowing myself to look at it again. I felt embarrassed and guilty about looking at it, but I was curious.
That one flash of the screen I had seen before I minimized it made me really excited. I looked over each of the couples until my eyes focused on one pair. One boy was lying on his back, his head thrown back in obvious pleasure, while the other boy, a blond, performed oral sex on him. It wasn’t the act that caught my attention: it was the blond. He was beautiful.
Just then the wind rustled through the leaves of the huge maple tree next to the window. I checked guiltily over my shoulder again before turning my attention back to the blond on the screen. He was beautiful because he reminded me of Jamie. It was like watching Jamie give head. It made me hard just to think about it.
I shut down the computer quickly and, chancing another glance out the window, walked to my room. My shorts were
tented when I closed the door behind me; those wild, decadent images had been burned into my mind. Only in my head, it was me on my back, and Jamie was on his knees over me. I hid the printed papers under a shoebox on my closet shelf, even though no one ever went into my closet since I did my own laundry. I didn’t want anyone coming across them by accident. After grabbing the towel I had used to dry off earlier, I walked over to my bed. Then I checked the window next to my bed, which also overlooked the drive, and saw it was still empty. I pulled the covers back and, after doubling the towel, spread it on the bed.
I had masturbated countless times over the last few years, and I had always forced myself to think about girls to try to pigeonhole myself into the mold I thought I belonged in. This time I wanted to think about Jamie. Though I couldn’t imagine why he would be attracted to a scrawny, mousy-haired boy like me, average in every way, right down to a mild case of acne. The only thing about my own appearance I really liked was my curly hair. Having let it grow out over the last few years, I noticed the resemblance to my mother much more clearly now. That single piece of paper I had carried with me from place to place and house to house was the only picture I had of my parents. When I was about eight, one of my older foster siblings, one of the few nice ones, had helped me find the news article on the computer, the one that described my parents’ deaths. We had printed it quietly, in the dead of night after everyone had gone to bed.
I pulled off my shorts and boxers, feeling more naked than I ever had, and lay down on the towel. Every time I had done this before, I had always just pulled my sleep pants down over my hips and pulled them right up afterward because I felt ashamed. However, this time I didn’t feel ashamed as I thought about Jamie’s kiss from earlier that afternoon, sweet and full of promise. I ran my fingers over my lips, remembering the perfect feeling of his lips on mine.
Choices(Waiting for Forever BK 1) Page 3