Enlightened (4 page)

A
S
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 that 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. As his mouth molded over the contours of my lips, we reveled in the untamed surge of passion that flowed between us. 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 that 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 that humans would land on Mars before Jamie and I would be kissing. I was thrilled but terrified.
Where the hell did we go from there?

It was also the best and the worst thing that could have happened.

He couldn’t feel the same way about me that I felt about him, could he?

“I have 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 that 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 didn’t hate me. He didn’t think I was some sick, perverted freak. He felt the same way that I did.
The question now became, what would we do?
“I thought I was an 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 to him 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 as a baby. 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, crawling and turning 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 that 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 had 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 that 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 his 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 mid-sentence 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 was 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, stroking 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 that 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 that she ran during the day, so I couldn’t even guess where she’d be right now. I went to my room and stripped out of my wet gym uniform, tossing 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 that 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 that Jamie and I felt for each other? What if all I found was the hellfire and damnation that the preacher warned us of? Could I give Jamie up? Could I force myself into the life that God apparently wanted me to lead? Could I live that kind of lie?

Richard’s office wasn’t the opulent space that 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 that this was better. It was more inviting than the magazine layout-like offices that 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 that the school’s computers had something that tracked where we went on the Internet, and I couldn’t guarantee that 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 desktop appeared. Grabbing the mouse, I moved it around the desktop looking for the Internet browser. I wasn’t a computer whiz, but I was hoping that a quick Internet search would give me what I needed. Maybe other people had the same questions that Jamie and I had. Better yet, maybe someone had answers to those questions.

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 that 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 that a pastor had written to one of his congregants about the boy being gay. At first, the reverend believed that 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.