And It Came to Pass

by Laura Stone

  But this act was something he couldn’t imagine sharing with anyone else. This was something to be saved for the person he loved. He clutched at Brandon’s arms encircling his waist, and held on tight, filled with amazement that they’d found each other, that they were in each other’s lives, that they loved each other.

  They were meant to be together, at this time, in this place, and suddenly it was more than he could stand, not kissing Brandon, not breathing Brandon’s air, so he turned and caught Brandon’s mouth with his, whispering all he could find words enough to say as they moved together, the center of the universe beginning and ending where their bodies joined so perfectly.

  Adam’s body was racing toward completion. He dropped to his forearms and in his mind flashed memories of the two of them sharing meals they’d cooked for each other, sitting side-by-side as they read scriptures and pondered the deep mysteries of faith and of themselves, kneeling together as they held hands and prayed. “Please,” Adam cried out as his heart filled to bursting. “Brandon, it’s so much…”

  “I know, I know, me, too.” Brandon gasped, burying his face in the crook of Adam’s neck once more.

  The wind drove the rain against their one window, but Adam couldn’t be bothered to pay attention as Brandon began dropping open-mouthed kisses along his shoulder, couldn’t care about the crack of lightning when Brandon’s palm was white hot against Adam’s chest, covering Adam’s racing heart, wasn’t focused on anything but the way his body felt alive and whole, full and happy and finally like himself, like he wasn’t alone, like he was finally, blissfully right.

  Brandon’s body gave a spasm as he clutched at Adam’s chest, holding him tightly, and it was overwhelming, so overwhelming that Adam’s toes curled. Pressure and pleasure were building inside him until he thought he might start to cry. He wanted this sensation to go on forever, but it needed to quickly come to an end before it grew into something too huge, almost terrifying in its intensity.

  His breathing ragged, Brandon pressed his cheek into the back of Adam’s head. His body shook as he stammered, “Oh, G-God… oh, my God. I love you so, so much, Adam!”

  Adam’s vision narrowed, and his ears rang as he climaxed. His body sagged happily into Brandon’s strong hold as he tried to catch his breath, tried to find air enough to say the words back.

  Cold air swirled against Adam’s legs and broke through the fog of lust and love and pleasure that was drowning his brain, but he didn’t register it as anything important, certainly not as important as how it felt when Brandon wrapped his arms tightly around Adam, shaking and trembling as he murmured, “I love you, Adam. I love you.” Nothing was as important as that.

  Adam clutched at Brandon’s hand as he tried to find a way to speak past the lump in his throat. His eyes stung and his heart almost burst from his rib cage. No one had ever said they loved him. He brought Brandon’s hand to his mouth and dropped kiss after grateful kiss to his palm, his wrist, his knuckles. It was perfect.

  A door slammed shut.

  “What in God’s name are you doing to my son?!”

  The cold air. The hastily shut door. Every muscle in his body froze. Brandon tensed, then there was horrible emptiness. Adam’s back was suddenly cold, as if Brandon had been pulled off him. Adam turned around, his hands in front of himself to hide his nakedness. Brandon was scrambling to his feet from the living room floor. His father had pulled him off, then, thrown him.

  “What did he do to you, son? Are you all right? What in the hell is going on here?”

  The Mission President was in his house. His father. He’d seen…

  “Go get some clothes on, you despicable…” President Young was shaking, glaring at Brandon and pointing at him. “I should punch you right in the mouth, you filthy perverted… degenerate. How someone like you could have been made a Leader— Disgusting!”

  Adam’s vision swam; his ears roared as if he was underwater. He could see Brandon stammering, trying to pick his clothes off the ground, and his father, oh, his father! President Young’s hair stood on end, his jowls were shaking, his eyes were rolling wild in their sockets as he took in the scene.

  Brandon, his face panicked, tried to explain, to say something. Adam couldn’t move, couldn’t make out Brandon’s stammering. His worst fear had come to pass, and he was awestruck by the horror of it all. His face was hot as Brandon tried to plead, reaching out to President Young only to be slapped away.

  “And Goddammit, Adam, cover yourself! Absolutely obscene! What is wrong with you, not defending yourself against…. against a pantywaist! How could you let him do this to you?” Brandon tried to say something, but President Young whirled, his fist raised. He shouted, “I’m not speaking to you!”

  Brandon quickly jumped into his pants and threw his shirt over his head. Adam’s father grabbed him by the elbow and dragged him out into the storm. He didn’t bother to shut the door. The wind blew rain into the open doorway. Adam, naked and terrified, stood shivering far enough away that he wasn’t affected, not by the cold or wet. Nothing seemed to be able to reach him, he was so deeply locked inside himself, unable to face the enormity of the situation. He blinked as he noticed a pair of dress loafers knocked askew against the wall and realized that Brandon didn’t have on shoes.

  He heard a car door slam before thunder boomed in the distance. His father came raging back in the doorway, shouting, “What have you done? I always knew there was something wrong about you…” He snorted and shook his head. “This will kill your mother.” He jammed a finger into Adam’s face; Adam cringed from it as far as he could as he father spat, “In my mission? You do this in my mission?”

  His father slammed the door with such force the frame cracked along the top. Adam began heaving in air. His vision was beginning to narrow; stars danced at its edge. His hands shook uncontrollably. Ruined. Everything was ruined. Something that had seemed so wonderful, so perfect, something and someone he’d waited for his whole life had been ripped away and made into something ugly, forever tainted by his father’s presence.

  He looked down at his nakedness and was ashamed.

  Chapter Ten

  “What a precious thing is a good [missionary] companion. He becomes your protector in times of trouble or temptation.” (President Gordon B. Hinckley, LDS Church News, July 4, 1998)

  “Four of the sweetest words that every mission president likes to hear are: ‘I love my companion.’” (Rulon G. Craven, The Effective Missionary, p. 56)

  “Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” (2 Sam 1:26)

  “Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.” (Jer 31:3)

  Adam knew he’d showered because he was holding a damp towel in his hands. He knew that his father had come back to grab Brandon’s things, because the closet was open and there was a hanger on the floor and Brandon’s duffel bag was gone from its usual place. He knew he wasn’t alone because he heard whispered voices coming from the living room.

  His mind was foggy with terror; his stomach roiled with acid. The muffled voices from the other room were unclear. He wasn’t ready to face his father, to face what had happened to Brandon, to face what this meant for himself: Eternal damnation, cast into Outer Darkness, left behind for all time and eternity without his family, but more importantly, without God.

  “Yes,” a voice was saying, “Elder Christensen. Brandon Christensen. I know, I know, I guess you just can’t tell sometimes, can you? I never in a million years would have thought…”

  At the sound of Brandon’s name Adam snapped out of his stupor. They were talking about Brandon, and Adam had to know where Brandon was, had to get to him, had to try to explain why he’d just stood there, motionless. He’d let Brandon be dragged out and hadn’t said a single word to help. Brandon must hate him. His face crumpled. He hated himself.

  Adam peered into the f
ront room to see his father standing in his shirtsleeves, his tie loosened and his hair astray, listening to another church member who was sitting on their small sofa making travel plans. Brandon, it appeared, was being sent home immediately.

  The man on the phone looked at Adam; his face barely hid his distaste for whatever he believed Adam to be, for whatever his father had explained he’d walked in on. But Adam didn’t care about that or the angry red blotches on his father’s face. He only cared about Brandon. If he could fix that problem, he wouldn’t care about his own fate so much.

  He walked up to his father, detached enough not to be offended when Gerald Young took a step back, and asked, “Where’s Brandon?”

  “Elder Christensen, Adam, although he won’t be that for much longer. Why didn’t you tell anyone that your companion was a… a you know?”

  Adam ignored that line of questioning. “What’s going to happen to him?”

  The man on the phone covered the mouthpiece and said, “He invited darkness into his spirit. Same-sex attraction,” the man said, speaking as if it hurt his mouth to spit the words out, “cannot be acted upon; it’s a grave sin. You both knew that. He won’t remain a member of this Church. The revelation President Monson received was very clear. You can be SSA—” Adam knew the term the Church preferred to LGBT. “—but you cannot act on it. You must obey God’s commandment until he can fix you in the next life. As for me, I wish they still did electro-shock therapy up at BYU like they did back in the seventies…”

  Adam’s ears thrummed. His father moved as if to lay a hand on Adam’s shoulder, but pulled back at the last moment; he clearly didn’t want to touch his son. Adam thought he might scream if his father did touch him.

  “Did, did he overpower you, Adam? That’s what happened, isn’t it? You never were first string, didn’t seem to have it in you. Your mother was too soft on you.”

  Adam looked into his father’s face and saw nothing but hostility and revulsion. He’d never seen love there, not really. Now he knew what love looked like, how it felt, how it filled his heart with joy, how it made him feel whole and capable and ready to tackle the world.

  “No,” Adam replied. “That’s not what happened. He didn’t… attack me. Dad, he loves me.”

  “That’s not possible. Gays don’t love, they only want to give in to their selfish needs. You can’t make a family if you’re gay. That young man has rejected Christ’s teachings, rejected the prophet’s teachings. Selfishness never brought happiness.”

  Reality came screaming back, almost knocking Adam off his feet. He couldn’t help himself. He laughed. “You’re… you’re so stupid. Oh, my gosh. You don’t know anything! You don’t know anything about happiness.” He closed his eyes to get the awful picture of his father’s face out of his mind. He finally understood what happiness was, and it wasn’t to be found in anything in that room with him now.

  The hard slap across his face snapped him out of it. “Don’t you ever speak to me like that again,” Gerald hissed.

  His father’s shoulders heaved, and his nostrils flared with the force of his panting breaths. President Young looked over his shoulder and saw that the other man wasn’t paying attention, he’d moved into the kitchen to write down flight schedules.

  Gerald began to slap Adam about the head, shoved him back into the bedroom, then kicked the door shut with his heel. Adam threw his hands up to defend himself, as he’d always done.

  “I oughtta knock your head off your shoulders, you ungrateful, disobedient, disrespectful little fa—!”

  Adam shoved his father off before he could utter that one word. He put all of his anger and disappointment, all of his frustration with never having been accepted or loved by his parents into that push. His father careened into the door with a heavy bang and slid off his feet, breathing heavily. Adam stood, wild, furious, trapped, but still defiant. He scanned the room for a weapon, something he could use to defend himself. His father watched, eyes widening and hands going into a defensive pose, not unlike Adam’s had been just moments ago.

  It sobered Adam enough to keep his hands by his side. He didn’t want to be anything like his father.

  “Now, you listen to me,” Gerald said, clearly still trying to maintain a voice of stern authority as he got to his feet. He tried to loom over Adam, but they were finally the same height; Adam was younger and far more fit than his aging, paunchy father, and, though he never wanted to be the kind of man from whom people cowered, he relished the flash of fear in his father’s eye.

  “You know that was disrespectful to me.” Gerald smoothed his shirt front in what appeared to be an attempt to maintain self-restraint. “Let’s not let things get out of control any more than they already are. Get dressed; get your things for the night. You can’t be left alone; you know that. You’re going to stay with Brother Ramirez and his family where they can keep an eye on things.”

  Brother Ramirez must be the man on the phone.

  “Tomorrow we’ll get this sorted out. Dammit, we’ll have to hold another effing court. My own son!” Gerald punched the door behind him with a meaty fist. He opened it and looked over his shoulder. “Don’t you open your mouth until I tell you. Don’t you say one word about what happened here unless I tell you the word to say, is that understood?”

  Adam didn’t nod. He stood there, defiant and unyielding, staring at the open door until he heard his father leave. Then he dressed and threw his things into his suitcase and bag. Brother Ramirez, the driver from his first day in the mission field, waited at the door with a wary look on his face.

  “Let’s not talk about what happened, shall we?” Brother Ramirez said, avoiding eye contact. “My wife is very sensitive; she doesn’t need to be exposed to all this sordidness.”

  Adam followed behind him. The wind caught the door to the apartment and swung it shut with a loud bang. There were tree limbs and debris in the street from the storm; the sky was yellow and green, the distant clouds were dark as the storm moved farther along the coastline, but the damage was done.

  * * *

  Two weeks. It took two weeks for everything to be sorted out, leaving Adam trapped in the basement spare room of a house he’d never been to. Sister Ramirez brought him his food on a tray in his room with a regretful, but kind and motherly, smile. Adam didn’t mind not sitting at the table with the rest of their family. He wanted to be alone.

  No one would tell him what was going on. No one dared mention his former companion’s name within earshot. He had no idea what his father was saying about Brandon, how the mission’s “best and brightest” just up and left without anyone knowing what happened, or where Adam was and for what reason. Adam figured his dad was claiming he was sick, based on the snatched bits of conversation he heard from the hall outside his room. It would be one of the few ways his father could avoid immediately reporting about Adam’s indiscretions.

  He wished he knew how Brandon was doing and whether Brandon’s family had allowed him back home. Brandon’s family was so close; Adam would be devastated to learn he’d ruined that for his companion. Adam had built up a fantasy about Brandon’s mother welcoming him into the family, too. She’d seemed so loving and open in her care packages and letters: She’d send treats for the other guys, candy bars and notes for Adam. He remembered how Brandon always went soft whenever he read anything she’d written him and her thoughtful consideration for their questions. Adam hoped she hadn’t let her love for her son be affected, if only for Brandon’s sake. He couldn’t imagine a mother who was so warm, so tender with kids who weren’t even her own turning from her son, but then, he also couldn’t have imagined himself or Brandon being in the situation they now faced.

  He started writing Brandon at least ten different letters before realizing that no one would mail it for him, nor did he know where Brandon was. He didn’t have access to his organizer where all of his addresses were kept. Was Brandon at his
house in California? Had he been sent somewhere? Kicked out? That seemed unlikely, it really did. Brandon’s family so clearly loved him.

  “And he loved me. Loves,” Adam said, correcting himself. He was on his fourth round of pushups, stuck in the basement with nothing to do but focus on himself. At least he had moved past his inability to look at who he was, at how he thought and felt and what he truly believed, both in spirit and in himself. “I love him. Love comes from our Heavenly Father, and love can never be wrong.”

  He hummed “God Is Love” through the last five reps, powering through them as if they were nothing.

  Finally, his father came to retrieve him. He refused to make eye contact with Adam.

  “Your court is in an hour. Get dressed appropriately.”

  A thrill of terror raced through him. He would have to stand before his leaders in the priesthood and explain in detail what had happened so they could determine the severity of the sin and act as mouthpieces of Heavenly Father with regard to Adam’s punishment. To tell those people anything about the life-changing experiences he and Brandon shared would cheapen them. The thought of saying anything to those strangers so they could dissect every touch, every whispered word of love, to find and assign wrongdoing was horrible. That would be the sin.

  “You’ll come back to your mother’s and my home in the north part of the city. It’ll be held there. Now, listen,” he said, chancing a quick glance at his son, “I don’t want you going into too much detail. No one wants to hear that sick stuff, you got it? Let’s just have you explain how Christensen hypnotized you, and you were overpowered and can’t remember anything but that. Everyone talked about the boy’s charisma, so that’ll help. Elder May even said something about it, that he felt it, too.”