by Moriah Jovan
“No idea, but I didn’t care. I will say this: He was terribly pedestrian. Easiest money I ever made.”
Mitch threw back his head and laughed, a warm, rich sound that seemed to fill me up with gladness.
“I don’t know why they bothered,” I continued. “I’m a woman and an adult, so relatively speaking, I wouldn’t be any kind of a scandal at all.”
“Money.”
“I don’t think so. What he spent on me— Not even close to what all those lawsuits cost.” I paused. “You know,” I mused. “All he really needed was an intelligent woman’s company. To talk, laugh.”
Mitch made a vague noise of sympathy. “So you have a thing for clergy.”
“I had a client who happened to be clergy; I’ve only ever had a thing for one man of God—and in eight weeks I haven’t gotten so much as a kiss from him.”
“Gripe, gripe, gripe,” he murmured, coming to a slow stop in one corner of the rink, my hand in his. He gave me that heavy-lidded look, took my glove off and raised my hand to press his mouth softly into my palm. I bit my lip when his tongue just touched my skin, daring me to ask for more.
I couldn’t, not when he had just made one otherwise innocent little gesture the equivalent of an evening of foreplay. My pulse thundered in my ears and I couldn’t breathe.
“Stop,” I whispered, wanting the exact opposite. I was panicking. I knew that. How easily he could arouse me—with nothing!
I hadn’t felt this powerless in years, and certainly had never found powerlessness to feel so delicious.
He smirked and slowly drew away, but apparently only to lace his warm, calloused fingers in mine—when had he taken his glove off?—then wrapped his other arm around my waist, pulled me up against him and we began to sway to the stupid muzak as if we hadn’t spent all night dancing to real music, full of fire and passion. His mouth brushed my temple and then down to my ear.
“Patience.”
I gulped. “Mitch, I—” I what? He already knew. Had known from the moment he first asked me to dinner. “What are you doing to me?”
“Just playin’ the game you wanted to play, Cassandra,” he murmured as he touched my neck with his lips, barely, light, butterfly. “Notice you’re not winning.”
God, no, and I had never been so happy to be on the losing end of anything in my life. I swallowed. “Is this the Mormon version of Tantric sex?”
He stilled, and I could feel his wide grin against the underside of my jaw. “I guess you could say that.”
* * * * *
Every Member a Missionary
February 13, 2011
Quite frankly, I didn’t know how Mitch would react when he saw me on his turf uninvited. After the research I had done, I was confused about why he hadn’t simply invited me, though I could think of about three or four plausible explanations. Asking him to bring me would have muddied the waters in a different, though no less turbulent, direction; thus, I took the decision out of his hands.
It had taken me a bit of maneuvering around his church’s website to find out where he’d be on Sunday and at what time, but I needed more information. Thus I had, with surprising nervousness, called Morgan Ashworth. I was unwilling to expose that much of myself to Sebastian, whose first loyalty was to Mitch.
“Why, it’s Cassandra St. James, as I live and breathe. What can I do for you today?”
“What do you think? You know how much I love fucking gay men.”
His booming laugh set me at ease, as it had every time I had spoken with him. “And you are the only woman who’s ever tempted me.”
“I do seem to have that effect on you all.”
“So, m’dear...” he drawled slyly, and I heard the creak of an office chair being relaxed into. “I’ve been hearing some very interesting tidbits and piecing together a sweet little story about your current love life or lack thereof, depending on your definition.”
I should’ve known. “You’re the only one, apparently. I had to spell it out for Nigel.”
“Ah, but my network is diverse, complex, and intersects in the most interesting ways, which is to say, almost never.”
“Okay, well, don’t ask me to explain it because I can’t. What I want you to do is get me to the church on time.” Shocked silence. “That was a joke. Tell me all the gory details of your super secret rituals so I don’t make an ass of myself.”
More silence. Then, “Freud would adore you.”
“Bite me. Just give me the information I need, since it appears I have to have a decoder ring to figure out what the Romans do.”
He grunted and his chair creaked again. I heard papers shuffling in the background, books being tossed on a desk. “You have the whens and the wheres?”
“Yes. Bishop Mitchell Grant Hollander, Bethlehem Second Ward, Nazareth Stake. Nine a.m.”
“Okay then. Protocol. Do you want the short course or the long explanation?”
“Whatever I need.”
“All right. First, Sunday is a twelve-hour day for a bishop. He won’t have much time, if any, to spend with you. He’ll be swamped with meetings and paperwork and fires to put out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t even see you at all unless you let him know you’re there and he won’t be able to see you after church. Sit back and observe, soak up the atmosphere. The more you understand about our culture, the better you’ll understand Mitch.”
Sounded reasonable to me.
“Are you sure you want to do this without him to help you?”
“I can see it’d be problematic for him, but I don’t really understand why.”
“Fair enough.” Damn. I’d hoped he’d take the hint and tell me. “The meeting is three hours long—”
“Three hours!” I barked and he laughed.
“I forgot how abnormal that is. Here’s the basics. A little over an hour is the main service, called sacrament meeting. Another hour is for your regulation Protestant Sunday school. The other hour you’ll spend in a class with the women of the ward. It’s called Relief Society. The order in which those three things happen is up for grabs.”
Segregation by gender? Interesting. “What do the men do that one hour?”
“They have the same lesson the women do, talk about ward business, who in the ward needs what service performed for them.”
“Tell me something. Why wouldn’t Mitch have invited me to go? I thought you all were about conversion.”
“How long have you been seeing him?”
“Eight weeks.” Very long ones.
“Has he said much about it?”
“Bare bones. I’ve had to research most of what I know myself.”
Ashworth said nothing for a long moment. “I don’t know Mitch that well,” he finally said. “Or at least, not as well as Sebastian does. He does a lot of things I don’t understand when he does them, but then are perfectly rational in hindsight, so I wouldn’t second-guess him, either as a businessman or a bishop.”
And that was, in a nutshell, what intrigued me about the man.
“I—” I drew a deep breath. “Should I say I’m with him if it comes up?”
“That’s up to you.”
“They won’t think I’m... Um...” Shit. I hardly ever stumbled for words. “I don’t want to embarrass him or discredit him in front of his parishioners.”
“It won’t occur to anybody to think you’re sleeping with him. The default assumption will be that you’re engaged in a chaste courtship.”
I blinked. “That’s the default?”
He paused. “Has he given you any reason to think it wouldn’t be?”
Well, no, he hadn’t.
But Greg Sitkaris sure had.
“Okay. He’s an ecclesiastical leader. But all of them?”
“Cassie,” he said with some irritation, “this is the way we live our lives. I understand that it’s foreign to you and most everyone else, but in our world, chastity for unmarried people is the expectation. It’s normal. It’s not easy, but it is normal
.
“Now, you know how much I love you, but I’m serious about this. If all you’re trying to do is get a celibate Mormon bishop into bed, don’t delude yourself into thinking you can do it with Mitch. If you want to get him in bed, you’ll have to marry him to do it—and he can out-wait Lucifer himself.”
Stung, I blurted, “That’s not all—” I bit my tongue.
“However,” he said right over the top of my unfortunate slip, “if I get a hint of a whiff that you’re going to try to wear him down, I’ll make you regret it.”
Though Ashworth was the only man in the world who could make me back down, it wasn’t his threat that bugged me.
But he continued to deliver rapid-fire instructions, a map to help a non-Mormon navigate her first visit to a Mormon church alone. I relaxed.
No, this wasn’t a man attempting to save John Lennon from Yoko Ono.
Yet.
“You won’t be able to pass for a member of the Church, so don’t bother to lie and say you’re visiting from somewhere else. If you don’t tell them who you’re with, they’ll assume you’re there as an investigator. They’ll wonder why you don’t have missionaries with you and then you’ll get assigned a pair; I don’t know if that interests you, so you’ll have to deal with that as you see fit. If you’re not interested but you still don’t want to use Mitch to dodge the missionaries, tell them you just walked in or you’re from out of town and wanted to go to a church and it was the most convenient. Something.
“If you do say you’re with Mitch, try to make yourself known to him first thing so he doesn’t get ambushed. I don’t know the politics of his ward, but every ward has some.”
...politically delicate.
“It’d be like...walking into a small town diner where everybody knows your business before you do. People won’t assume you’re sleeping with him, no, but they will assume that he’s vetted you as appropriate bishop’s wife material—”
Bishop’s wife. God.
“—and that, because you have shown up, a wedding is imminent.”
I gulped.
“That’ll make things iffy for one or both of you. You’re dating a bishop. That never happens because there is no such thing as a single Mormon bishop. The real complication is you’re not a member. They should’ve released him when Mina required round-the-clock care, especially considering how long he’d been bishop. But now he’s got an almost-empty nest, time, and money, so I can see why they haven’t.”
“What’s money got to do with it?”
“It means he has the luxury of spending work hours conducting ward business.”
“He told me he spends thirty hours a week.”
Morgan said nothing for a second or two. “Well, I’m only a second counselor and I spend fifteen or twenty by myself, but, you know, I’m single and I have money, too. I take a lot of the burden off my bishop’s shoulders so he can spend some time with his family.”
I paused because I wanted to ask, but it was terribly gauche. My curiosity won out. “Um, I was wondering about that... You’re in a leadership position, but you’re gay? How does that work?”
“Doesn’t matter as long as I’m celibate. If I had sex with a man, I’d receive the same disciplinary action as if I had sex with a woman out of wedlock.”
“You just can’t marry a man.”
“Right. So I can’t have repentance and keep the relationship.”
“And so...?”
“I resent it,” he said flatly.
“Now, wait a minute. I know your politics. I can’t imagine you approve of your church’s stance.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
“And yet you stay. Why?”
He said nothing for a couple of seconds. “I am...needed...here.”
I knew better than to ask him about the extent of his unwillingness to have a relationship with a woman, but he seemed to want to go there anyway.
“I have my pick of LDS women. Older. Gorgeous. Educated. Even willing to marry a gay man just to be married. But I haven’t been able to do it. I’m just not attracted to women. I don’t think it’s fair to any woman, especially if, somewhere in the back of her mind, she’s thinking she can change me. She’d end up bitter and I’d end up angry.”
“So does that happen a lot? Women willing to marry an out gay man?”
He sighed. “Enough that people know what’s going on if they run across a family like that. See, the goal is to marry and have children. Some guys can do that. I don’t think I can, and I certainly don’t want children. Never have. And for the women I’ve known who’d be willing to marry me, no kids is the dealbreaker. What’s upsetting is if the wife doesn’t know her husband’s gay. He usually ends up leaving her and the kids because he can’t maintain the act anymore.”
I let out a totally unamused laugh.
“I’m sorry, Cassie. I guess that’s not unique to us.”
Indeed, it wasn’t. I’d met many long-married women whose lives had been turned upside down by husbands who’d tired of the façade—and none of them were Mormon.
We were covers for our spouses’ homosexuality, no more, no less.
“So you can’t marry a man, and you won’t marry a woman.”
He paused. “Well...” he said as if it had never occurred to him, but apparently he really had thought about it. Loneliness is a powerful motivator. “She’d have to look an awful lot like a man, and even then, the lack of the right equipment could be the dealbreaker for me if I don’t like her enough to overlook it.”
“That can be approximated.”
He grunted. “I know. My freak cousin Giselle won’t stop reminding me.”
“Don’t knock it till you try it. Prosthetics are amazing these days.”
“Cassie, you find me a single, intelligent, androgynous Mormon woman with that level of kink, I’ll buy you a diamond mine.”
That made me laugh. “So how do you cope?”
“Some days I don’t very well. Mostly I pray a lot. I do things for people. I manage my authorial brand and keep tabs on the political intrigues going on inside the Beltway. I can go weeks, months without thinking about it and then I’ll get slapped with something out of the blue. Some days are a real crap shoot. I think about leaving the Church and finding what I want, but then—”
Abrupt silence.
“But then?”
I heard the sound of a finger tapping wood. “But then,” he said slowly, “I’ll be at church, in my office. Some woman comes by, wants to talk. She’s any one of half a dozen single women who have no hope of getting married or having sex for various reasons—looks, health, disability, not all that smart, some combination, whatever—and worse, they’re competing with half a dozen gorgeous, intelligent, educated, single women for the same limited number of men.
“She pours out her heart to me, crying that no one wants her and the kicker is—it’s true. She—all of them—have to live with the knowledge that they will never have love because no one wants them.”
Oh.
I’d very rarely not been wanted.
“I don’t know what that feels like,” he said, echoing my thoughts. “What am I supposed to say when I play the gay card to commiserate and she comes over the desk at me, sticks her finger in my face, and says,
“‘Don’t you act like you know, Brother Ashworth. You have a choice. You can stay or you can go, but wherever you go, you will never not be wanted—by women or men, so your odds are automatically doubled—because you’re handsome and rich and smart. You choose to be alone and celibate. I don’t and you have no right to tell me you know how I feel because you don’t.’”
His voice had gone hoarse, and suddenly, I knew that while he hurt for himself, he hurt for these people more.
“And don’t think that’s confined to the women,” he said low. “Everybody has their trials in life. Staying in the Church, being gay but celibate, serving—that’s my choice. I know I can leave any time and have every confidence that I can f
ind someone to love because I’m attractive in all the ways society values most. I know my family wouldn’t blame me, and they’d support my decision. But those people...can’t. Whether they stay or go makes no difference at all. They’re still not going to get what they want.”
I gulped.
“And then...there are the kids who start to question their sexuality. They get hazed at school. Turn into the token gay kid at church. Maybe they’re afraid of their parents’ reaction. They need advice, help. Guidance. From someone who’s been there and turned out to be a strong, successful—politically powerful—adult. Puberty’s hard enough without adding homosexuality-plus-religion to the mix, wouldn’t you say?”
“You stay for them,” I whispered. “The ones with no choice and no voice.”
“Yes. Because I was raised this way, and I know the culture, and I can work within its boundaries to serve people who need it in this context.”
At that moment, I realized what an extraordinary man Morgan really was. No matter how misguided—okay, fucked up—I considered his philosophies to be, he was true to his people, people he loved and served, for whom he sacrificed his own desires.
Like Mitch.
“I’m done with this topic of conversation, Cass.”
Oh, so was I.
But he cleared his throat, and, after a tense moment, picked up as if we’d never digressed.
“When the ward members find out you’re not a member, they won’t know how to process your relationship with him and assumptions about your baptism and wedding dates will start flying right and left.”
Baptism. Wedding.
My stomach started to churn in spite of my brave words to Nigel. Just how badly did I want to get Mitch naked and in bed, anyway?
“What does a bishop’s wife do, then?”
“Why, Cassie,” he drawled after a slight pause. “I’m getting the impression you might actually want the job.”
Ahh, hmmm... “Absolutely not,” I said. Then, to throw his threat back in his face, I added, “I just want one thing from him, and I’m conceited enough to think I can get it on my terms. And fuck you if you come after me for it, too.”
I must have waited a fraction of a second too long before decrying, though, because Morgan began to chuckle, then laugh.